No Child Left Alone

...Mandatory omelet-making, maybe...

...clumsy and crude, tests can never adequately measure student achievement...

...How to disentangle the Gordian knot tied by NCLB and its reformers...

...Abernathy's anti-testing bias is widely shared, even, as he shows, among supporters of NCLB...

...That would be the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, or NCLB as it has come to be known, the totem of national education reform and bipartisan bonhomie that for six years has stood as the signal domestic achievement of the Bush administration—and the exemplar of the Big Government Conservatism with which George W. Bush's reformers hoped to remake the way Republicans govern...

...Merit pay especially flutters the hearts of BGCs who don't consider how their ideas might work when they collide with the real world...

...no child who's loved by someone else ever is...

...Though no one thought of it in the long, sweaty hours while the bill was being written, or mentioned it in the self-congratulatory giddiness surrounding its final passage, NCLB's exclusive emphasis on reading and math has led a high percentage of schools (around 40 percent, according to one recent survey) to cut back on the teaching of history, civics, and government to the country's schoolchildren...

...Like Abernathy, Good defines education loosely...

...And because the base pensions of most teachers is computed on the salaries of the final three years of their careers, a large but incremental boost in pay would lead to fewer retirements, thus slowing the infusion of new talent that the reformers say is so desperately needed...

...Who, for example, will choose which teachers receive merit pay increases...

...What's interesting is that so many of his objections to modern schooling are made by right-wingers, too...

...It was there that new ideas in welfare policy, education, taxation, and environmental regulation could be put into practice and their results tested and measured, while keeping the (Democratic) busybod-ies of Washington at bay...

...He calls NCLB the "Leave No Child Untested Act...

...So two senators, Lamar Alexander and Edward Kennedy, have proposed expanding the bill to require testing in American history, too—just as it now requires testing in reading and math, which of course led some schools to cut back on teaching history...

...some school districts are overrun with Howard Goods...

...He dwells, instead, on the more conventional objections made by reformers who think NCLB doesn't go far enough in nationalizing local schools...

...His reference to tests is meant to be witheringly ironic...

...After a few years, the Education Department nationalizes the school, dictating budgets, personnel policies, and hiring decisions...

...At the same time, also of course, every BGC wants smaller class sizes, too...

...Among many other things, the . bill authorized the federal Department of Education to c _ ! Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, e is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in = Abe's America...

...The stuff she taught me— how to tie my shoes, cook an omelet, read for pleasure, speak my mind—has proved more useful and durable than most of what I learned in school...

...If we have to hire more teachers, we'll have to expand the pool from which new teachers are hired...

...About NCLB itself Good is ambivalent—like the BGCs, he doesn't object in principle to federal interference with local schools, as long as people like him are doing the interfering, and the more money spent, the better—but he's outraged at all this talk of tests...

...Now it is a threat to our educators' self-image—indeed, their way of life...

...The difference is that Bush tried to write his into law...

...Even better, or so it seemed, the passion for state and local activism allowed Republicans to overcome their reputation for being antagonistic to government...

...Indeed, he seems actively hostile to the Bush administration...

...But that doesn't mean that such culture war disputes will be any more tolerable, or resolvable, when they are nationalized, as NCLB aims to do...

...I have no idea whether Good would ever make the trek to Washington to serve as a political appointee in President Obama's Department of Education, but people who think just like him will, and his Mis-Education in Schools: Beyond the Slogans and Double-Talk (his fifth book on education) exquisitely displays the turn of mind that we can expect soon to see in the upper reaches of the federal educational establishment...

...What happens to well-performing students in those schools, who will see resources diverted or dry up altogether, is apparently a matter of indifference— another unintended consequence...

...Their premise, as Tanner puts it, is this: "If something is a good idea, it needs to be a federal program...

...In this Bismarckian approach to "getting things done," modern liberalism and BGC are essentially indistinguishable...

...But there are lots of ironies in Big Government Conservatism...

...Leave aside whether education can really be reformed by people who invent phrases like "the interface between a student's mind and the school's product...

...The step is already implicit in the logic of NCLB...

...A major finding from the research literature is that schools and school quality contribute little to the emergence of test score gaps among children...

...As for the achievement gap, the principal target of NCLB: No research has ever established that the quality of individual schools is a cause of the gap in test scores among groups of students—especially compared with the other facts in a student's life, such as the safety of his neighborhood, the income of his family, the presence of books in his home, the amount of television he's allowed to watch, or whether he's being raised by a mother and a father: facts, every one of them, beyond the manipulation of any education reformer...

...Can we ever really know if a child's education is good...

...Good seems not to understand how deeply this egalitarianism is built into NCLB...

...The principle of colorblindness is another nicety that Big Government Conservatives have no patience for...

...Every good Big Government Conservative, of course, wants schools to hire better teachers, for example—and bravely, unflinchingly, the BGC will acknowledge that this will require paying the teachers more...

...I don't envy the traditionalist parent who has to face him at the PTO meeting...

...The Teaching Commission, yet another blue-ribbon panel led by businessmen dedicated to improving public education, has proposed a salary increase for teachers nationwide of 10 percent—as much as 30 percent for teachers who are identified (in some unnamed fashion) as the most effective in the classroom...

...Testing can only make the inequality worse...

...In their indispensable primer on NCLB, Frederick Hess and Michael Petrilli make the same point, quoting the education adviser to John Kerry: "At its heart, this is the sort of law liberals once dreamed about...

...Subsidiarity—the idea, if not the word—had long been considered essential to the American scheme of dispersed power: There are spheres of action appropriate to state governments, and to local governments, that are not appropriate to the federal government...

...Leave aside the fact that, in many countries whose students outperform the United States, merit pay for teachers is not only discouraged but outlawed...

...For Big Government Conservatives, as Tanner shows, subsidiarity is an indulgence that people serious about governing can't afford...

...The motive behind the 1965 act was, as reformers' motives always are, beyond criticism: A desire to improve schools in poor neighborhoods...

...But that was before the onset of BGC...

...To close the achievement gap, NCLB requires that every teacher in America will be "highly qualified" and that every student will be "proficient" in reading and math by the 2013-14 school year—a 100 percent success rate that no government program has ever reached...

...The cost, Lieberman reckons, would be $33.6 billion annually...

...States, Republicans said (borrowing a phrase from the socialist Louis Brandeis), were "the laboratories of democracy," hothouses of the hinterland...

...If students in any one of these categories fail to perform to the Department of Education's demands, the entire school faces sanction...

...Reformers are busy people, tireless people, whose displeasure with the world as it is inspires them to improve the lives of their fellow human beings no matter what, and they get cranky when you bring up the law of unintended consequences...

...His fixes, however, are another matter...

...The museum is housed in the homestead of one of the conspirators who was hanged for the murder of Abraham Lincoln...

...Schools whose principals and teachers have set high expectations and standards will face a federal funding formula that requires much less of them...

...Their teachers would haul them in by the busload—more than a thousand a year...

...Johnson's overwrought rhetoric might sound familiar, too: The same extravagance and grandiosity would reappear in Bush's education speeches 40 years later...

...Students in every school are zippered-up into eight different categories, five having to do with race and ethnicity, three with income and the ability to speak English...

...It requires, on the part of the governing class, a restraint and humility unique to self-government—a willingness not to exert power over others, no matter how tempting the thought might be or how admirable the cause...

...And if the quandary is to be resolved, it will be done according to that hoary idea of subsidiarity: at the local level, where reforms can be enacted, monitored, and overseen— and rejected, too, if that's the wish of the parents and teachers themselves...

...Earlier reforms, such as mandated busing or the Americans with Disabilities Act, were "about equality of opportunity...

...And sure enough, some BGCs have begun calling for the Education Department to impose national standardized tests fitted to a national curriculum in reading and math...

...It wasn't just Democrats who embraced, as the phrase went, "proactive solutions to today's problems...

...NCLB ropes all schools together, entangling successful schools in the same bureaucratic regime designed for schools where most students aren't succeeding...

...In putting together NCLB, all the BGCs of the Bush administration had to ask themselves was: Will this work...

...it is, in fact, the bill's premise and object...

...Good is correct that social studies curriculums are often timid and wandering...

...At a fundamental level," he writes, "Big Government Conservatives are much more concerned with ends than means...

...Every school district has a kibitzing parent like Howard Good...

...Laurie is a former history teacher herself...

...Confusingly—in a mistake common among education reformers—Abernathy calls the former "advantaged" students and the latter "disad-vantaged" students, though of course many students from wealthy families do horribly in school while many poor students excel...

...it is, indeed, the most explicitly racialist piece of legislation since the fall of Jim Crow...

...Ever since No Child Left Behind...

...It's certainly a sound idea—which is not, of course, the same thing as saying it's an idea that should be imposed nationwide by the employees of the Department of Education...

...In the last couple years, though, attendance has dried up—cut by more than half, according to Laurie Verge, the museum's director...

...His passion for federalism, however, was less ardent, and it terminated with his governorship...

...You'd think they'd just let people down here decide for themselves," she said...

...Abernathy worries that the lack of a single standard makes cross-state comparisons, and even school-to-school comparisons, difficult and sometimes impossible...

...This idea of an "unresolved quandary" may be the most radical notion in all the current crop of education books...

...It's found in a generation's worth of falling test scores and in the poor performance of American schoolchildren in international rankings (21st in math, 16th in science...

...Government schools," by the way, is Libertarian for "public schools...

...At the same time that education is becoming increasingly crucial, government schools are doing an increasingly poor job of educating children...

...As you read his thoughts about schools teaching "what truly counts in life," in contrast to those Neanderthals who insist on teaching facts and conveying information, you can easily imagine his manuscript as it arrived at his publisher's office, with the little doodles of unicorns and rainbows up and down the margins in purple ink...

...It sure beats learning how some boring old bill becomes some stupid law...

...More to the point, the creators of the nation's wealth have expressed their displeasure with America's primary and secondary schools...

...Administrators are often petty and overweening...

...It's merely an acknowledgment that the reforms are endlessly complicated, and that the vast majority of their consequences are likely to be unintended...

...True to the spirit of Big Government, whether embodied by liberals or conservatives, the senators will solve the problems created by NCLB's intrusive-ness by making NCLB more intrusive...

...In the past, of course, this eagerness to nationalize good intentions has been more commonly associated with Democrats than Republicans...

...The majority of principals," he says, in a voice heavy with experience, "will not want the assignment...

...He worries that the dissatisfaction with mushy social studies might lead to a return of "teachers who emphasize rote memorization of facts and textbooks that contain dry outlines of procedures (how a bill becomes law and so forth...

...I care about results," he said often during the 2000 campaign...

...Over time the sanctions grow increasingly severe...

...But he is a great booster of NCLB, which he sees more clearly than many Republicans do...

...Michael Tanner, of the libertarian Cato Institute, devotes only a single chapter to NCLB in his manifesto against BGC (as he doesn't call it but I will, to save my fingers the typing...

...Scott Franklin Abernathy, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, wonders the same thing, and arrives at the same conclusion, from the opposite direction...

...Education means pretty much whatever anybody wants it to mean—and who are you, or anybody else, to disagree...

...One of those can-do Republican governors of the 1990s was George W. Bush...

...he asks...

...The seeds were sown in the 1990s, when the most powerful and successful officeholders in the Republican party were governors...

...The sentiment is utterly alien to the spirit of Big Government Conservatism, where faith in the power of reformers to alter institutions however they desire, with the ultimate goal of altering human behavior in pleasing ways, is almost limitless...

...subject every student in every public school in the country to an elaborate regime of testing in reading and math...

...How well the students do on those tests determines how much money their schools and school districts receive from the federal government, and determines also, in remarkable detail, how the federal government will allow that money to be spent...

...Standardized tests are one-size-fits-all, say the critics...

...Many schools are overformalized and overregulated, requiring (for example) student athletes to sign "contracts" not to smoke or use drugs rather than just insisting they not smoke or use drugs...

...But in the 1990s, federalism and subsidiarity had political benefits, too, as the governors discovered...

...Lieberman asks the practical questions about how merit pay would work here...

...He writes: My mom was my first teacher...

...Nowhere is the impertinence better displayed than in the NCLB— so much so that Tanner, a rightward-leaning libertarian, wonders whether the act can even be considered "conservative" in any identifiable sense at all...

...With school districts funneling an additional $5,600 to $16,800 to individual teachers, the pay raise would have several effects...

...Among federal officeholders, including some Republicans, feeble education has been a public concern for a long time...

...From talks with old colleagues, she's pretty sure how to account for the undesired quiet that has fallen over her museum most weekdays: "The schools just don't have as much room for history or social studies in their curriculums any more," she says...

...Meet, for instance, Howard Good, an education activist, former president of his local school board, journalism professor with the State University of New York, and a frequent contributor to American School Board Journal, Education Week, and Teacher Magazine...

...Scott Franklin Abernathy notes that among the act's secondary provisions are a host of desirables inserted by big-government Republicans during their season of triumph, back in 2001-02: With federal funds as a cudgel, NCLB forces local schools to ensure "constitutionally protected prayer," open their classrooms to Boy Scout meetings, and provide student data to military recruiters upon request...

...Some things are controlled by only one level of government, in other words, so that no one level of government controls everything...

...The emphasis on elite sports teams is, as he says, an expensive distraction from a school's primary purpose...

...And because the unions who represent teachers also represent support personnel, pressure would intensify for a 10 to 30 percent raise in their salaries as well, doubling or tripling the expense of an increase in teacher pay...

...So many factors," Abernathy writes, "contribute to and confound what ultimately happens at the interface between a student's mind and the school's products that policymakers should think very carefully about how to measure 'educational quality.'" Note the ironical quotation marks around those last two words, as though the idea of educational quality was some sort of fuddy-duddyism, like "motorcar," that no up-to-date person would use...

...The law requires a form of affirmative action: States must show that minority and poor students are achieving proficiency like every one else, or else provide remedies targeted to the schools those students attend...

...Our society is becoming increasingly divided between those with the skills and education needed to function in the increasingly competitive global economy and those without such skills and education...

...But Good wants to go a step further, toward the obliteration of any classroom distinctions at all...

...When he gained the White House, no one should have been surprised that he transferred his taste for "conservative activism" to the biggest laboratory of them all, the federal government...

...As I would not be a slave," said the founder of modern American conservatism, "so I would not be a master...

...Fair and accurate assessments of how well a teacher does his job would require considerable hours spent watching him in action, in the classroom—a distraction for principals and administrators, who oversee dozens and sometimes hundreds of teachers, that would be prohibitively expensive, both in time and money...

...As a philosophical proposition, the bias leads sooner or later to a kind of cul de sac of postmodern relativism: Who's to say, really, what a good education is...

...Then, too, the highest paid teachers would soon enough find themselves better compensated than low-level management— principals and department chairs—making it less likely that the most talented teachers will take these demanding jobs...

...I'm passionate about getting things done...

...And then, I told her, maybe the busloads of kids will come pouring back to the Surratt House...

...If we expand the pool, we're likely to see a drop in the quality of applicants and hires, which will defeat our goal of hiring better teachers...

...None of this is to say that such reforms are worthless or even necessarily unworkable: Lieberman himself endorses higher pay scales and school vouchers, as well as other ideas he's come up with himself...

...To their credit, some BGCs understand some of the practical difficulties in an across-the-board increase in teacher pay...

...And if we do enlarge the teacher workforce, we'll make any hoped-for increase in teacher pay much less affordable and, hence, less likely—especially when the pay is matched with an increase in benefits, which routinely account for 20 percent of a teacher's compensation...

...To satisfy these objections, federal policymakers would have to make NCLB even more intrusive than it is...

...The evidence that the formal school is not likely to compensate for negative nonschool factors is quite strong," Lieberman writes in his (unfortunately backwards) prose...

...This, he says, is an offense against the egalitarian impulse that should animate the public schools...

...Sixty percent of businessmen in a poll last year rated the reading and math abilities of their recent hires as "fair" or "poor...

...NCLB aims to provide equality of outcomes...

...Given the national calamity of failing schools, self-restraint seemed almost irresponsible...

...But Abernathy does give us a sense of how the vast new powers that NCLB has handed to functionaries in Washington will be used, and will not be used, when the Republican functionaries are replaced by Democratic functionaries—when supervision of the Department of Education is given over, as it will be inevitably, to those who dislike the BGC emphasis on standardized tests and "accountability...

...Teachers who are passed over will challenge the assessments, to put it mildly, subjecting whoever made the decisions to a degree of scrutiny that few professionals, in whatever field, would welcome...

...At the very least," he writes, "let's abandon the notion that children who learn on a different schedule are 'Special' or 'Regular'—edspeak for 'inferior.' They aren't...

...In a nod to federalism that seems quaint in retrospect, NCLB allowed the states to define "proficiency" and "highly qualified...

...How, precisely, would each reform work...

...That's the intent, anyway, though how effective it will be is uncertain—and at the moment unknowable...

...It's small, but it offers an unexpectedly comprehensive review of the Civil War, with a special emphasis on the assassination, and for years grade-school teachers in southern Maryland have used a field trip there as a convenient way to keep their students awake long enough to introduce them to an important episode in their nation's history...

...On the evidence of his new book, No Child Left Behind and the Public Schools, Abernathy is no Republican...

...The decline in schools, from the conservative point of view, has had many causes: poorly trained teachers, undemanding curriculums suffused with political correctness and multiculturalism, the abandonment of drill and memorization and other traditional tools of learning, and a general refusal on the part of a new generation of administrators to impose, and live up to, high standards of achievement...

...Our society will not rest until every young mind is set free to scan the farther reaches of thought and imagination," said LBJ, and American schools have been declining ever since...

...Lieberman dares to run the numbers, and they are daunting...

...Unresolved quandaries aren't acknowledged because they slow the march of progress...

...The irony here is hard to avoid: Republicans, who used to lament the rising tide of "historical illiteracy," have now reformed the nation's schools in such a way that can only swell the tide...

...NCLB, for example, makes a fetish of racial classification...

...Something as process-oriented as federalism can't be allowed to get in the way of doing things that big-government conservatives believe need to be done...

...This is another way of saying that standardized tests, at least in theory, require teachers in the classroom to forgo therapeutic exercises in self-expression and to transmit concrete information that a child can absorb, entertain, manipulate, and repeat...

...He approvingly quotes a professional educator: "Let's put all our children in the same boat, then work together to raise the level of the river...

...Evidence for the failure of the schools, as Tanner says, is longstanding and everywhere...

...They advocate "merit pay" instead—rewarding teachers for how well they teach...

...Yet the decline in attendance at Laurie Verge's wonderful little museum is, indeed, an unintended consequence of NCLB—just one of many, and a small one at that...

...Well, says Lieberman, let's think this through...

...Imagine an education reformer admitting ignorance...

...Big government conservatives," writes Tanner, with his usual acerbity, "share a common arrogance with contemporary liberalism...

...Which assumes, of course, that their curriculum actually had breadth and quality...

...By Abernathy's reckoning, there are 36 possible ways in which an individual school or district can earn failing marks and thus find itself an object of special attention from Washington...

...The overriding goal of NCLB, as he notes, is to close the "achievement gap" between students who perform well in school and those who perform poorly...

...Abernathy's question represents a potentially fatal objection to NCLB, coming as it does from a vigorous supporter of the law...

...And so on and so on and so on...

...With the authors of the other books here, liberal and conservative alike, he shares the near-universal diagnosis of the country's education troubles: No one can deny the need to reform our education system...

...And one way to reverse these trends, it was thought, was to hold schools accountable for the education of their students: Test the kids, publish the scores, and let parents, armed with the results, decide whether the teachers and administrators were doing the job they were hired to do...

...Luckily for us, a handful of new books provides an opportunity to think about NCLB and its many consequences—and, by extension, to ask the question: So how's this Big Government Conservatism thing working out for us...

...Schools today wouldn't dare adopt this as their educational agenda, even if it meant happier kids and a better world...

...The worry, says Abernathy, is that teachers, hamstrung by NCLB, are smothering their marvelous creativity and resigning themselves to "teaching to the test...

...Subsidiarity acts as a stay...

...The statistics generated by the law are impenetrable to all but the bureaucrats themselves...

...The distinction is usually lost on the practitioners of BGC, however...

...The problem of leveling doesn't trouble Abernathy too much...

...Lieberman reminds us of truths that have been repeatedly demonstrated, statistically and otherwise, since 1965: There is no correlation between how much the government spends on schools and how much students learn...

...My friends, we can no longer afford to send this nation's most precious asset—our children— into the global economy ignorant of how to make a nice, fluffy, three-egg...

...A former public school teacher and for many years an official with the American Federation of Teachers, Lieberman has written the bravest, most bracing book about education in years...

...If properly implemented and sufficiently funded," writes Franklin, "NCLB holds the promise of being one of the great liberal reforms in the history of U.S...

...It would increase pressure to enlarge class size—even though the reformers who demand higher teacher pay also demand smaller classes...

...He strips NCLB and the accumulated daydreams of education reform down to their bare premises and, with discomfiting logic, tips them over, one by one...

...This was true even in the treatment of public schools, where the tradition of local control is as old as the institutions themselves...

...Laurie sounded skeptical...

...Perhaps, he says, schoolkids could learn about democracy by voting on which books to read during sto-rytime as a way of "modeling" the responsibilities of citizenship...

...With the executive branch in Washington in the hands of Democrats, Republicans were ardent believers in the principles of federalism and subsidiarity...

...Student tests might suffer...

...In the hands of Democrats, no less than in the hands of the BGCs, the tangle of restrictions on local schools will only grow thicker and tighter—at once more frivolous and more burdensome...

...They dislike the implication that the benefits they confer in one field might lead to a shrinking of benefits in another...

...This is a very radical and ambitious goal...

...Already, he writes, "the stratified society that exists outside schools has been replicated within our schools...

...The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the forerunner of NCLB...

...And better teachers are unlikely to materialize without an increase in pay...

...This, lucky for us, is the question that Myron Lieberman addresses in The Educational Morass: Overcoming the Stalemate in American Education...

...With such busybody precedents enshrined in the NCLB, Howard Good and his allies will be unstoppable when they at last regain power in Washington...

...Not long ago I mentioned to Laurie Verge, at the Sur-ratt House Museum in Maryland, that Congress had discovered that some schools had cut back on teaching history, as an unintended consequence of NCLB...

...In fact, this final sweeping-away of the vestiges of local control would probably be inevitable, except that some supporters of NCLB have come to dislike the very idea of standardized tests—the primary means of establishing the "accountability" that Big Government Conservatives say lies at the heart of the law...

...Instead, he longs for teachers who teach "tolerance for ambiguity and an aversion to either/or solutions...

...In their single-minded desire to improve test scores," Abernathy writes, "schools and teachers [may] damage the breadth and quality of their curriculum...

...Lieberman asks reformers in Washington, sometimes politely, to consider the practical consequences of the reforms they hope to impose on schools...

...It also opens statistical loopholes that allow individual schools, school districts, and entire states to create the impression that they're meeting NCLB goals when they're not...

...If we make classes smaller, we'll have to hire more teachers...

...In an earlier age, the word for this process was "teaching...

...His book will almost certainly be ignored...

...It strikes directly at the case that BGCs have made for their education reform, which, after all, aims over the next seven years to ensure that the education that every student receives is good—provably and objectively good, without ironical quote marks...

...One BGC-sponsored "sense of the Senate" resolution even mandated "intellectual diversity" among the teachers of any school receiving federal aid...

...His critique of both the education reform and the philosophy it grew from is unrelenting, absolute, and refreshingly dyspeptic...

...The desire to do good, joined to a plausible forecast of success, was enough to override such philosophical or procedural objections as subsidiarity, federalism, or the decentralization of power...

...Johnson's bill mostly left good schools alone, while showering poor schools with money in hopes they might become good schools...

...He thinks schools should more or less abandon efforts to discourage drug use...

...In the end, Lieberman says, how to close the "achievement gap" with merit pay, or charter schools, or smaller class size, or more testing, or any other reform encouraged by NCLB, remains an "unresolved quandary...

...In its practical application, as Aberna-thy notes, NCLB is a classic exercise in leveling—a way of slowing the caravan, so to speak, to keep the slowest wagons from falling further behind...

...This last sentence—so precious, so heartwarming, so thoroughly beside the point—gives you a sense of Good's command of logic...

...The goal of forcing equality in performance would have been beyond the wildest dreams of the most starry-eyed reformers back in 1965, when the federal bureaucracy made its first great lunge at local schools...

...meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration boasts that it has increased federal education spending by more than 40 percent and Democratic critics complain that NCLB hasn't been "fully funded...