Brian Harvey

When I ask my students what they think has been the most profound effect of computers on education so far, they always guess things like the World Wide Web or arithmetic drill software, but when I tell them the true answer they always immediately understand: The biggest effect of computers on education has been the computer-scorable multiple choice test. The developers of these tests intended only to eliminate an onerous task for teachers, but the unintended consequence was to magnify the importance of factual knowledge, reducing the importance of thoughtful analysis, verbal expression, and creativity. This has been a profound change in the epistemology of schools.

But “No Child Left Behind” has vastly worsened this problem. Before, the multiple-choice standardized tests were just one part of a child’s school experience, and good schools could minimize their importance. Now the continued funding of a school depends on the tests, and so test preparation has squeezed out any other learning consideration.

“Teachers are more nervous about how students do on tests and spend more time on test related items and less on creative mind expanding activities… [The] staff has been less inclined to look at new and different things. I encourage their taking risks but not as many are willing or have the time to try new things at this point.”

– A Minnesota principal, quoted in No Child Left Behind and the Public Schools (Scott Abernathy, ed.: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

“Here are some of the things kids at Garfield/Franklin elementary in Muscatine, Iowa, no longer do: eagle watch on the Mississippi River, go on field trips to the University of Iowa’s Museum of Natural History, and have two daily recesses… creative writing, social studies and computer work have all become occasional indulgences. Now that the standardized fill-in-the-bubble test is the foundation upon which the public schools rest… there is little time for anything else.”

– The school’s response to the threat of NCLB sanctions, quoted in Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools (Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds.: Beacon Press, 2004).

Besides my “day job” teaching computer science at UCB, I’m a volunteer at a local elementary school, so I see this process at work firsthand. Berkeley is a relatively affluent community, and so our schools still make room for art, music, cooking, gardening, and recess. But in the teaching of the core (that is, NCLB-tested) subjects, everything revolves around the tests. In English, students are taught to write in a tightly constrained format: for example, a response to a written passage contains exactly three paragraphs, in which the first summarizes the plot (in a rigid format whose details I’m omitting for brevity), the second advances an opinion, backs it up with three specific illustrations from the test, and summarizes the conclusion, and so on. The kids are much more focused on the precise formal requirements than on whether what they’re writing captures anything interesting about the passage.

But the worst effects are in teaching math, the subject I know best and care most about in the elementary school curriculum. Answers must follow a rigid form. For example, if the question is “Round 5.603 to the nearest hundredth” then the answer must be “5.60″ and not “5.6″ even though the two answers are mathematically equivalent. Why? Because the latter will be marked wrong on the state test. (I heard a very good teacher give this explanation to a student who questioned the rule.) For a topic like fractions, which many (most?) adults don’t understand, what kids need is time to explore what a fraction means, at length, and in depth. Instead what they get is an emphasis on techniques: add fractions by finding a common denominator, for example. Even the kids who do succeed at memorizing the arbitrary-seeming algorithm long enough to pass the test may be unable to use it in real life, for lack of understanding.

NCLB supporters suggest that opponents of the law are opposed to maintaining quality standards in American education. On the contrary, it is precisely for the sake of educational quality that we urge the repeal of No Child Left Behind. “Educational quality” does not mean teaching our children to remember the facts they’ve been taught long enough to pass a test. It means developing children’s higher-order thinking skills: creativity, critical analysis, and the ability to solve problems of a type they haven’t seen before. American schools used to be famous for doing this. We need measures of quality that honor teachers’ own knowledge of their students, and support teachers’ creativity in nurturing children’s minds.

Many people see problems with NCLB, but talk about “reforming” it. This sounds like an easy way to please everyone. Indeed, in the details of NCLB are many stupidities that could be corrected straightforwardly. My own favorite is that immigrant children who don’t speak English are measured as a separate category, like the categorization by race built into the law, and must be tested in English, which they don’t understand; but if, because of a great effort by the school, the kid does learn English in time for next year’s test, that improvement isn’t measured by NCLB, because the kid is no longer eligible for the non-English-speaking category. You could fix half a dozen things like that, and I suppose that would improve things somewhat.

But the details aren’t the most important problem with NCLB, and fixing details doesn’t begin to address the harm NCLB has done to kids’ learning.

What’s important, again, is the epistemology of schools — what counts as learning. And under NCLB, only facts and techniques count. This really matters! If the law forces schools to devalue understanding and devalue creativity, our schools will produce a generation of young adults who are prepared only for the sort of routine jobs that are fast disappearing in our economy. Where will we find scientists, engineers, or leaders of any kind? We can’t bring them all in on H-1B visas.

The punitive stance of NCLB is also dead wrong. Its effect is to take money away from public schools and give it to charter schools, private schools, and after-school tutoring centers. To a first approximation, what’s wrong with our worst public schools is lack of money — leaky roofs, missing textbooks, and overcrowded classrooms. (See Jonathan Kozol’s book _The Shame of the Nation_ for details and documentation.) NCLB just makes this worse.

Don’t reform NCLB — repeal it, disavow it, discredit it, and start over in thinking about ways to improve bad schools that actually help.
Brian Harvey is a Lecturer in Computer Science

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