By Jan Resseger
I was climbing the stairs in the midsummer Atlanta heat on the way into a convention center for our biennial church denomination conference, when a school teacher of nearly thirty years stopped me and asked me to listen to her story. A high school department chairperson, she told me she is alarmed because, pressured by test prep and required to compromise what they know to be good teaching, too many of her best young teachers contemplate leaving the profession. “I am able to cope,” she told me, tears streaming down her face, “but I worry about the future. Who will want to become a teacher?”
I work as a staff member committed to public-education justice advocacy for the Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ. I don’t work in a public school, which means that I look at No Child Left Behind from the point of view of the need for civic engagement. My primary interest in this law has to do with its impact on the issues we in the church have long sought to address. Why is it, for example, that our society has set up a school funding system that rewards the children of the rich with the greatest public investment in their education? And how is it that the hidden curriculum in most schools replicates the bias of the dominant culture and continues to marginalize the children who have always been left behind? How can we speak about these truths in a way that will motivate change?
Recently I have felt called to figure out how No Child Left Behind affects these long injustices. Back in the summer of 2002, I purchased a huge three-ring binder and eighteen colored tabs. I thought I would categorize a clipping file that would help me better understand how the law works and begin to follow its impact from place to place. My three-ring binder has multiplied to a long shelf of 24 binders today, binders filled with news clippings and the more recent wave of academic research that documents how No Child Left Behind actually operates and what have been its direct and collateral consequences. My seven-year struggle began with trying to learn about the law’s mechanics, but the real challenge has been to consider its implications through the values of the church. Here is some of what I have learned.
The rest of us have been slow to recognize and name what has always been so clear, and deeply painful to public school teachers: that No Child Left Behind blames public school educators for the persistence of generational urban poverty by mandating higher test scores without equalizing resources like facilities and program offerings and class size, without ameliorating poverty and homelessness, and without improving childcare,dental care and health care. No Child Left Behind passes the buck from the legislature to the school and demands that teachers work harder and thereby close achievement gaps. Michael Petrilli, an assistant in the U.S. Department of Education at the time No Child Left Behind was drafted, told the New York Times: “Its primary mechanisms are sunshine and shame.”1 It has taken a long time for most of us to sort through the complex mechanisms of the mammoth law to be able to discern the sad consequences of this simple truth. Do we really intend to devalue the work of school teachers and principals? Do we really intend to dumb down the curriculum and substitute high-pressure drudgery for real education among the children who live in hyper-segregated neighborhoods insulated from opportunity systems? Do we intend to discredit public education as a civic institution?
Many religions and faith traditions value and honor the worth of each individual as part of the community. To lift up ten specific ways the No Child Left Behind Act has violated right relations among the people who work in and study in America’s public schools, in the fall of 2005, the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and literacy, meeting in Memphis at the headquarters of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, finalized a statement, “Ten Moral Concerns in the No Child Left Behind Act.” The statement identifies problems posed by the law for children who struggle due to poverty and disabilities and the need to learn the English language and for the teachers and principals who serve these children. It also identifies the systemic problems for poor communities when their schools are labeled failures without the investment of resources that would create conditions by which these schools can improve. We have been distributing this ecumenical resource across our congregations to help the folks in our pews explore the ethical implications of the federal education law.
Organizing is another way to help people lift their voices. Back in November of 2004, communities of faith began to join two dozen other national organizations to sign a Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind. By the beginning of 2008, the number of signing organizations had grown to 150, including more than twenty-five faith-based organizations including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Disciples, UCCs, Episcopalians, Sikhs, the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Council of Churches.
No Child Left Behind’s standards-accountability-assessments philosophy is difficult to reconcile with religious values that honor the worth of each person. We would be more comfortable with what has traditionally been an educator’s emphasis: forming the whole child. When I think of the creation story in the Bible’s first book, Genesis, I see it as celebrating each child, created in the image of God, each child a special and sacred person. While most of us would agree that there should surely be basic educational standards, we would feel more comfortable with a philosophy of education that eschews standardization, that honors the unique expression of God in each child, and that supports the fullest development of each child’s gifts, physical, intellectual, social and spiritual.
I believe education will always be a qualitative, relational process: the establishment of trust between teacher and child, and the development of community within and beyond the school. The standards movement and No Child Left Behind, however, come from a different development in our twenty-first century technocratic society: our relatively recent computerized capacity to collect, measure, and process data on a large scale. Surely we, who believe that justice will be achieved only when our laws and institutions reflect the Great Commandment that we would love our neighbors as ourselves, must speak for educational reform that fulfills our obligation in the wealthiest nation in the world to provide public schools that nurture the human spirit in every one of our children.
Read part 2 of this article: "Ten Moral Concerns in the No Child Left Behind Act: A Statement of the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy"
1 Michael J. Petrilli, “School Reform Moves to the Suburbs,” New York Times, July 11, 2005.
Jan Resseger serves as the lay Minister for Public Education and Witness in the United Church of Christ’s Justice and Witness Ministries. She chairs the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy, which addresses injustices in federal public education policy.
