By Warner M. MontgomeryWarner@TheColumbiaStar.com

When President Bush sent legislation for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to Congress in 2002, it received overwhelming bi–partisan support. Little did Congress or the American public realize that it increased federalization of education, destroyed local control of education, and legitimized pseudo–science to blame students and teachers for problems beyond their control.

Now, four test–years later, there is a growing dissatisfaction with NCLB in the education community. The Educator Roundtable, an organization of professional educators based at the University of Alabama, is circulating a petition calling for the dismantling of the NCLB Act which is up for reauthorization in 2007.

The Roundtable petition proposes killing The No Child Left Behind Act because it:

1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

2. Assumes that competition is the primary motivator of human behavior and that market forces can cure all educational ills.

3. Mandates data–driven instruction based on gamesmanship to undermine public confidence in our schools.

4. Uses pseudo–science and media manipulation to justify pro–corporate policies and programs, including diverting taxes away from communities and into corporate coffers.

5. Ignores the proven inadequacies, inefficiencies, and problems associated with centralized, “top–down” control.

6. Places control of what is taught in corporate hands many times removed from students, teachers, parents, local school boards, and communities.

7. Requires the use of materials and procedures more likely to produce a passive, compliant workforce than creative, resilient, inquiring, critical, compassionate, engaged members of our democracy.

8. Reflects and perpetuates massive distrust of the skill and professionalism of educators.

9. Allows life–changing, institution–shaping decisions to hinge on single measures of performance.

10. Emphasizes minimum content standards rather than maximum development of human potential.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.

12. Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children, vibrant communities, and a healthy democracy.

13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.

14. Drives art, foreign language, physical education, music, geography, history, civics and other non–tested subjects out of the curriculum, especially in low–income neighborhoods.

15. Produces multiple, unintended consequences for students, teachers, and communities, including undermining neighborhood schools and blurring the line between church and state.

16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all “failures,” so when they fail to make “Adequate Yearly Progress,” as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.

They have prepared a petition (http://www.educatorroundtable.org/petition.html) to send to members of the US Senate and House of Representations expressing dissatisfaction with NCLB. They are hoping for a million signatures before the act comes up for reauthorization.

In place of NCLB, the Educator Roundtable proposes formal state–level dialogues led by working educators rather than politicians, think tanks, or industry activists. In SC, this would mean preparation of goals and standards by the State Department of Education with strategy and implementation under control of local school boards.