Learning About Learning: An Overview of the Issue

What’s your family like? Do you have siblings, two parents, any pets? Did you grow up in the suburbs, the city, or the country? It’s kind of frightening to think that these factors are 1.) completely out of our control, and 2.) determine our position in this country’s social hierarchy. Upon birth, we don’t really get to decide where we grow up, who we grow up with, or the resources that our community makes accessible to us. However, these factors form others’ opinions of us, and more often than not, our opinions of ourselves. Holding these factors constant, however, has one arriving at the conclusion that, upon birth, there is really nothing making human beings inherently unequal; it’s just these factors beyond our control.

For the sake of this blog, let’s speculate that you’re born into an unfavorable situation. Perhaps a broken home, with limited financial resources and an absence of hope compared to the rest of your peers. How do you pull yourself out? The answer from the United States Government — at the federal, state, and local levels — is to excel in the classroom, get to a good college, and get yourself a good job. But to you, the kid coming from a broken home in a low income area with a mom or dad working a couple of jobs to try and keep you happy: how tough is that going to be for you? 

Really damn tough, I would imagine. And it’s even worse when people that appear to have everything tell you to do it their way. But they’ve never had to worry about their school district, walking to school, participating in a plethora of extracurricular activities, getting a textbook, having a teacher showing up to class most days, or having ready assistance with testing and college applications. 

Every student, school district, and set of curriculum is different. However, the way we treat our nation’s students should be the same everywhere. For decades, our education policy has left those like the hypothetical student just discussed hang to dry while the rest of society calls him/her a “failure.” 

So long as we permit this, we’re wasting human capital. It’s really that simple. Because I’m unsatisfied settling for this, I will provide commentary regarding some of the hurdles that low income students have to jump over. I’ll also analyze the solutions that both major political parties put forth to resolve this dilemma. For the rest of this entry, though, I’ll examine past fixes that have gone horribly wrong, particularly the No Child Left Behind Act, which you can read about here.

Essentially, the Bush Administration saw low income schools suffering, and inundated them with government funds. However, this program proved to have little to no effect on what it sought to improve upon, as student achievement barely changed. When held alongside the “100% proficiency rating” that lawmakers sought to achieve, the legislation looks even worse. Math scores changed a tad, but reading scores on test remained almost exactly the same.

Even worse for students, the scope of NCLB focused very heavily on test taking, particularly multiple-choice questions. Reexamining a small piece of the pie that is educating the whole person, schools and legislators around the country eventually were forced to admit that a student really is more than a test score – even if that’s how the federal government chooses to regard them.

Perhaps even more unfortunately for conservatives, dishing this policy issue to the states proved catastrophic. Because proficiency standards in schools are an issue reserved to individual states, the federal government was forced to shift the burden of accountability to them as well. This meant that if a state chose to raise their proficiency standards they were more than welcome too. As states quickly figured out, if they raised the standard without providing the accommodating resources and support to schools, those schools would fail.

Thus, we can learn from the mistakes of No Child Left Behind. A focus exclusive to more funding and better test scores doesn’t help students in low income areas. For the sake of this nation’s students, legislation similar to this will hopefully not be pursued anytime in the near future. What legislation we choose to fill its place, though, is the place we are now forced to put our efforts. This pie chart shows the current portion of the federal discretionary budget set aside for education. I’m not saying we give it directly to schools (see last three paragraphs), but I am saying this: there are students out there who would benefit from better days at schools. A couple billion dollars is a great start, and we’ll talk about where to put that next week.