No Child Left Behind: Facts and Fallacies

Abstract

WE PUBLISHED an article titled 'All Children Can Learn' -- Facts and Fallacies in the May 2001 issue of the Kappan. received some 30 responses, and all but two were overwhelmingly positive. One of our critics simply stated, Creator is an idiot! Possibly this person was referring to one of us. The other negative respondent chose to misread the content and concluded with: We all know that there are many individuals that don't want schools to improve if improvement means successfully teaching all children. I sincerely hope that neither the authors nor the editors of this publication are among that group. That is precisely the point of our argument: many people are paying lip service to the idea of improving education, but few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to truly improve educational opportunities for every student in the U.S. Wishes don't wash dishes, Carl Sandburg and Well done is better than well said, according to Benjamin Franklin. Those who don't wish to educate all our children well simply substitute pleasant- sounding rhetoric for resources. Intoning a slogan like No child left never taught a child to read. Neither did children can learn. But the most preposterous of these empty rhetorical phrases is No child left The simplicity and stupidity of this statement prevent us from doing what we ought to do: provide sufficient resources to educate all our children successfully. The complexity of providing for an adequate education (as nearly 15 state supreme courts have said) requires much more than slogans. Let's look first at the facts regarding children who are, by public policy, left behind. * Some 10.5 million children have no health insurance. Most live in conditions of poverty that deny them the ability to develop their full cognitive potential. The child poverty rate in the U.S. is among the highest in the so-called developed nations. These children are left behind. * The majority of our schools are underfunded, especially those in low- wealth states and in low-wealth school districts. Children in these schools lack adequate instructional materials and access to technology, and they are often housed in buildings that fail to meet the safety codes of their states. They are usually taught by less-qualified personnel. These children are left behind. * Recent basic research clearly concludes that children who are disadvantaged have difficulty with cognitive development, acquiring adequate vocabulary, and learning the sounds required for learning to read. These children are left behind. * Millions of our children attend child-care centers that stifle creativity and hinder appropriate development. These children, too, are left behind. * Federal law requires special accommodations for children with disabilities. But the federal government provides only a fraction of the support needed for such adjustments. These children are left behind. And, once left behind, the empirical data are convincing: they remain behind for the rest of their school lives. * All recent state-level standards-referenced tests show the same pattern of results: schools in rich areas score higher than schools in poor locales. …