Suburban Republicans Against NCLB: Proficient But Still Wrong

Congressional Republicans are close to meeting their Adequate Yearly Progress targets for Bush-bashing. The impetus for their latest mutiny? Objecting to reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act on the grounds that it endangers suburban students’ successes.

While more opposition to NCLB is always welcome, the “don’t tread on me” red staters’ reasoning is misguided. Worse, it underscores how NCLB obscures some major educational issues in our nation’s suburbs.

Weisman and Paley write in today’s Washington Post that conservative critics fear NCLB’s mandated high-stakes tests are “jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning programs from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity.”

Responding at the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal, Kevin Drum cringes at the thought of “pissed-off suburban voters” representing the “80% of our school systems [that] are basically okay” having the ability to sabotage NCLB’s reforms in low-achieving schools.

But Drum, the Republican critics, and the suburbanites they are trying to woo are all ignoring the real problems. The most serious danger with NCLB is that it’s already left too many suburban kids behind. And we don’t even know it.

Let’s be clear about one thing: the challenge for NCLB in the suburbs is not that it punishes successful white students. The problem is that it has artificially inflated suburban notions of success. The vast majority of students in the 80% of schools that Drum mentions are not achieving excellence, even if they are meeting proficiency on some state exam. Yet NCLB has made it easier to ignore the real deficiencies of suburban education by whitewashing the unique and significant problems in suburban schools and by rewarding the most mediocre of them for limping to the finish line.

By continuing to send the message to the majority of suburban students and parents that they are succeeding, NCLB fails to push them to greater heights and cheapens the meaning of educational excellence.

As a result, the Republicans think they can get suburban parents to worry that their kids’ successes are threatened when low-income students are expected to achieve at higher levels. That might win votes, but it misses the mark. What this country needs, what suburban parents deserve, and what will actually help all students is a more imaginative anti-NCLB groundswell reverberating throughout the suburbs.

We need soccer moms to say proficiency ain’t good enough. We need them to demand a new measurement of what excellence really should look like in their “successful” schools. We need to finally recognize that the forgotten middle in this country – measured economically, socially, politically, geographically, and educationally – is trapped behind the falsely comfortable smokescreen of NCLB accountability. And we need to add a footnote to the “success story” of suburban schools: getting by isn’t the same as getting ahead.

In short, we need a louder chorus expressing in a refined and powerful way the “self-absorbed suburban kvetching” that drives Kevin Drum crazy.

And when that happens, none of us can afford to just watch from the sidelines. When this new suburban voice for reform starts speaking, let’s listen when they say that they there’s not enough creativity in their “proficient” classrooms. Let’s applaud when they say high-stakes testing has taken innovation out of learning. Let’s cheer when they say that teachers are spending too much time preparing their students for tests and not enough time preparing them for life.

Agreeing with those statements doesn’t imply elitism or privilege. Nor does it require ignoring the serious problems facing low-achieving urban schools. But it will allow us all to finally recognize that proficiency doesn’t automatically mean excellence, and that suburban education doesn’t automatically mean success.