The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

School Daze

College kids, I would say, are pretty thrilled to have controversial speakers, like Summers, who get useful debates going (and Dahlia, as you say, little kids love daddy playmates, and ignore puttering mothers). But at the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm—hey, this is the XX Factor—I’d like to tsk tsk about school reform for a minute. I can’t help feeling sometimes when I read about NCLB that educational reformers should ask themselves now and then, What kind of message does our flailing send to students? Of course, the most important currency of school reform is concrete results: better schools for kids. But the Bush administration’s overhaul is also aimed at changing cultural attitudes toward education, specifically transforming an insidious, fatalistic ethos of low expectations. A dispiriting story in the New York Times on Tuesday about failing LA schools is a reminder that impossibly high expectations, and unrealistic consequences, can be, if anything, even more pernicious.

The No Child Left Behind legislation names 2014 as the deadline by which suddenly schools across the U.S. are supposed to boast universal proficiency in reading and math, and it stipulates a set of increasingly severe penalties for chronically failing schools, culminating in state takeover or radical restructuring. But the 2014 goal is surreal: Universal proficiency is an obvious pipedream. And there’s scant sign, as Diane Ravitch has pointed out, that state takeovers are effective and little evidence as to which massive overhauls work.

Hence California, which finds itself overwhelmed with chronically failing schools and at sea, unable simply to close schools and unsure who might fix them, or how. As one person put it, it “taxes the whole school change industry.” As a model for kids—who are supposed to be in the student change industry, right?--it’s exactly the wrong one, as any decent teacher would tell them. And it doesn’t seem merely rhetorical to point that out. Kids may blow off homework, but they tend to keep a sharp eye out for the hypocrisy and delinquency of their elders.