ARTicles vol. 6 i.2a: No Child…and No Child Left Behind

Public education is one of the signatures of an effective democracy. It represents a commitment to the possibility that all citizens, starting from early childhood, will be prepared to participate fully in the civic life of their communities and nation, while they also have equal access to the pursuit of a rewarding life for themselves and their families. Public education is an acknowledgement of the society’s responsibility for children as well as to continuation of the democracy itself.

Yet one of the paradoxes of public education in this country is that it has long been seen as failing the youth — and therefore the very purposes — it is meant to serve. When a major public enterprise is perceived as failing, countless causes are cited, blame is assigned to myriad people, and an industry of experts emerges with solutions. Though young people, like teachers, are often blamed, they are rarely consulted about how to improve schools. Occasionally, though, educators, sociologists, anthropologists, artists, or others will talk to children about their perceptions of their schools and even more rarely, these conversations will deeply inform the work of those adults. Nilaja Sun’s No Child…is one such example. It is one of the few attempts to represent the experiences of young people in school during these years (2002-2007) of school reform defined by the Federal legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), from which Ms. Sun has taken the name of her play.

Looking backward to gain some perspective on this current effort, we can see that the last fifty years have been an unprecedented era of anxiety about the effectiveness of America’s public schools. With the launch of the Soviet space capsule, Sputnik, in 1957, there have been nearly constant waves of outrage, confusion, calls for reform, and reforms aimed at curriculum, teacher preparation, school structure, assessment, and issues of access and equity. Whether this is a half-century history of progress or swirling in circles is open to debate, but that calls for reform go unabated can hardly be questioned. NCLB,the Federal legislation that has been hailed as a cornerstone of the Bush (43) administration, first passed in 2001, is the most recent milestone (some might say millstone) in the school reform story.

To understand the significance of NCLB,it is useful to recall some of the major moments in both school reform and the Federal role in public schooling since the late 1950s. Immediately following the launch of Sputnik and the anxiety it caused Americans over a perceived loss of global superiority in scientific and technological sophistication, significant reforms were called for in science education in all U.S. public schools. (The budget for the fledgling National Science Foundation was increased from 34 million to 134 million dollars following the launch of Sputnik!)

In 1965, the federal government, during the Johnson administration, passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the first federal legislation to focus specifically on public education. Prior to the passage of the first ESEA law, education was seen as the responsibility and province of states and districts and the debates over a federal role in education continues today. To be sure, the Federal courts had previously played a role in education from a civil rights perspective, enforcing the desegregation of public schools and protecting black students, first in Little Rock, Arkansas, and then elsewhere, as they attended desegregated schools. (The civil rights dimension of a federal role in education remains a critical issue today in the support from many quarters for NCLB.) The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was historic, too, for its focus on the needs of “disadvantaged” youth, publicly acknowledging the need for additional resources to schools for poor children all across the nation.

In 1983, the publication of A Nation at Riskonce more focused Americans’ attention on the failures of our public education systems. This call for school reform catalyzed the next 20 years of efforts to improve our schools. Early phases of this period, responding to cries that expectations were too low and teachers and administrators were not being held accountable for their performance, focused on the establishment of “new standards” and accountability measures. In some quarters, significant efforts were made on innovative approaches to curriculum and assessment. But while states passed legislation calling for multi-dimensional approaches to testing and accountability in the early 1990s (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System –– MCAS –– was a cornerstone of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act), it was clear by the late 1990s that standardized multiple-choice tests would be the nearly exclusive form of accountability in Massachusetts and most other states.

The passage of NCLB, the 2001 version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ratcheted up calls for improved student performance and for closing “the achievement gap.” The act calls for significantly increased testing, disaggregated reporting that reveals how students are doing across racial and economic subgroups, and accountability provisions that penalize schools failing to make “adequate yearly progress.” Once again the Federal role in education legislation was seen by many as having a civil rights agenda. Yet there is little consensus on the impact and effectiveness of this legislation, with some considering it landmark and a great step forward and others decrying it as punitive, narrowing to the curriculum and the purposes of education, and detrimental to exactly those students it was most intended to help. Few dispute, however, that financial resources remain insufficient from both federal and state sources for the enormous work of creating a fully effective and equitable public school system in the United States.

Effectiveness of No Child Left Behind

Most debates on the effectiveness of NCLB suffer from trying to assess the impact of the legislation from various and often-conflicting perspectives simultaneously. Has the civil rights agenda of NCLB been advanced? Are poor children and children of color, historically under- and ill-served by our public schools, better served now? Are we more effective in increasing literacy and numeracy rates? Has our curriculum become more focused or has it been narrowed to a mind-numbing fine point, with the arts, humanities, even the sciences suffering significantly? Are our teachers getting better? Are schools safer? Have we increased our graduation rates? And on and on… It is easy to see that, whether from a civil rights, school improvement, teachers’, or parents’ perspective, the problems that NCLB was meant to address are profound and the effectiveness of the legislation — even how to measure its effectiveness — is legitimately questionable.What does seem certain is that the perspective of children has been essentially ignored throughout the entire process of developing, implementing, and assessing the effectiveness of NCLB. This is no surprise. The concerns of children expressed in their own voice have rarely been taken seriously in the entire history of public education and school reform. Of course, children don’t vote. If they did, it is hard to imagine that our most basic conceptions of standards and accountability in education would be as they currently are in practice. Indeed, if children voted, one might easily expect that the arts and athletics would be considered an essential part of everyday experience in schools — core components of the curriculum. Further, it is interesting to remember that no age group with voting rights has ever mandated compulsory education for themselves. They reserve this requirement for those too young to vote. (One could easily imagine that if the voting age were forty, mandatory education would be law for everyone until their thirty-eighth birthday.)

We don’t ask young people how to improve their schools because they are too young and, ironically, uneducated. Yet, they are not stupid and might actually be able to provide insight into what we, as adults, seem not to have figured out yet about how best to improve their education.

The Perspectives of Young People

In this context, the work of Nilaja Sun and only a few others exists as important exceptions to what must be seen as a systematic denial to children of a right to participate in planning, designing, and setting priorities for their own education. Ironically, in preparing our young people for participation in our democracy through their experiences in public schools, we deny them any role in that aspect of civic life in which they most directly participate and have substantive opinions and great investment — their schooling.

Nilaja Sun, as an actress, teacher, and teaching artist, has used her skills as a listener, her own experiences as a learner, and her trained imagination to enter into the experience of her students. As a performer, she offers a representation of what it means to be a student in the era of NCLB, providing insight into what this legislation and its effects look like to students and teachers who spend their days in the hallways and classrooms of urban schools. The beautiful provocation of her work is to consider what we might learn if we were to listen directly to those young people at length, both as they struggle to articulate their experiences and perspectives and as they, over time, become the articulate spokespeople of their communities. Indeed, this may be an essential step toward an education for the preservation of truly democratic communities and society, as well as toward a profound and fundamental improvement of education itself on every level.

Steve Seidel is Director of Project Zero and the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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