Pedro Noguera

This year’s Celebration of Teaching & Learning comes at a time when it is becoming clearer than ever before that our nation is not making progress in education.  The most recent NAEP scores (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the nation’s report card), reveal that very little progress has been made in reading or math since the last time the tests were administered.  International comparisons demonstrate that American children are also falling further behind their peers in other countries, several of which were far behind us in the not too distant past.  Given that we have been steadfastly pursuing the mandates of No Child Left Behind since 2001, it seems sensible and pertinent to ask why.

I would argue that while NCLB took us a step forward by requiring schools to produce evidence that all students were learning—this includes students with learning disabilities, English language learners, poor and minority children, etc.—it provided very little guidance to schools on what should be done to meet their learning needs.   It was an important step because prior to NCLB we have clear evidence that many students were not learning much at all, and some students graduated from high school with very low skills and totally unprepared for college or work.  With its emphasis on standards-based accountability, NCLB shook up schools across the country and for the first time in our nation’s history, closing predictable gaps in achievement based on race and socio-economic status, became a national priority.

However, NCLB reduced evidence of learning to how well students performed on standardized tests.  As we’ve seen in several states across the country, this has resulted in a gross distortion of the educational process for many students, especially poor and minority students the law was designed to help.  Instead of providing enriched learning opportunities and high quality instruction, many schools adopted scripted, test-prep curriculum, which has contributed to student boredom and alienation and driven some of our best teachers out of disadvantaged schools.  We’ve also seen states lower academic standards to avoid exposing the failure of large numbers of students and schools.  The fact that we have drop-out rates of 50% and higher in most American cities is the clearest evidence that NCLB has not worked.

We need a change of course.  The change can come with greater clarity about how to provide high quality instruction to all students and how to create conditions in schools that are conducive to excellent teaching and learning.  This is the central point of the new book I have co-authored with my colleague Dr. Wade Boykin.  In Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap, we describe the steps schools, teachers and school districts can take to insure that all students have access to high quality instruction.  We also address the crucial issue of motivation and how to get students more invested in learning.  Our hope is that we can begin to change the focus of education: away from using assessment to rank students and schools, and on to create conditions that foster powerful teaching and learning.

It’s time to stop relying on threats and pressure to improve schools and to start really focusing on how to make sure that all students receive the education they need to participate fully in our democracy.  This is what I’ll be talking about at the next Celebration.  I hope you’ll join me.