What’s happening in Houston Independent School District (HISD) is a sobering, cautionary tale about the dismantling of public education in America.
I know because I’ve seen it before.
I worked at the U.S. Department of Education beginning in 2002 – the year No Child Left Behind (NCLB) started being implemented.
NCLB was the legacy of President GW Bush, of Houston. I visited HISD in the early 2000s, and heard from teachers how already it was draining the soul from education – teaching to tests, cutting out social studies and the arts.
The goal: standardize education, remove resources from schools that “fail”, and make funding available to families for vouchers for “public school choice”.
Indeed, 20 years after NCLB, education has been standardized. This brought challenges we are now trying to overcome. We know standardized tests are often biased against students with certain demographics, and that all loathe time spent on test prep. Schools are trying to claw their way back from this abyss, yet the national teacher shortage is testament to the toll taken.
The work now is to educate each student to their own maximum potential, fortify social and emotional strengths, and instill collaboration and problem-solving skills needed in the workforce. This can be done while offering content rich and meaningful instruction.
There is one pot of money: either the finite money goes to public schools that by-law serve every child – or they go elsewhere.
That pot of money remains small, only funding 7% of local education budgets nationwide, decade after decade. In Virginia, the state doesn’t even provide the average national per pupil cost.
Yes, it’s fair and right to increase expectations for students and staff; however, this must be accompanied by increased resources. The very motivation of NCLB was to remove resources, punitively, until public schools fail. That legacy continues – Virginia’s Governor is doing it right now (more on that soon).
I will credit NCLB for shining a bright light on all students’ success by decoupling aggregated data – especially for marginalized and underserved students. Also as a positive, NCLB brought forward phonics, in what’s an ironic twist for me now as the science of reading sweeps the nation with the same literacy building blocks.
Do we want schools where students pass standardized tests while teachers depart at rates of 25% or 80%, as in Houston? Schools where teachers are stressed – lest we forget that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions?
Like anything worth doing well, delivery of education takes resources of time and money. Yes, it costs more today than the past, for a host of reasons similar to why just about everything in our economy costs more today.
Keep your eyes on Houston, yes: for lessons about what we don’t want for our students and educators.
