What follows is a section for a paper I am writing. The purpose of the paper is to deconstruct the policy narratives in No Child Left Behind (2001) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (2004) to reveal their foundations in a human capital agenda that drives schooling. In the human capital agenda, persons are valued for the contributions they make to economic productivity in a society (Postman, 1995; Tyack & Hansot, 1992; Smith & Scoll, 1995). Education then becomes a process of preparing children to take their places in the workforce. An alternative notion, a human capabilities agenda, should replace the current agenda for schooling so that society strengthens as each individual lives out possibilities that s/he values (Sen, 1992; Alkire & Deneukin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2006). Education becomes an opportunity to explore, nurture, and discover what those possibilities are. Through a human capabilities agenda, the social fabric is woven from the interests of those who value citizenship, economic productivity, personal freedom, individual growth, and community.
At least since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, and quite probably since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the United States has cultivated an educational system and a public impression that are rooted in a belief that the quality of a student's education is best indicated by the results of standardized tests. This may not be 100% of the way parents think about their schools when their children go to schools where students score pretty well on standardized tests. However, in schools where students do not score at acceptable levels on average, parents, students, educators, and the public are regularly reminded that these students are not learning because they do not score well on achievement tests.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that many of these failing schools serve students from racially and ethnically minority families who live below the poverty line. NCLB purports to address the inequities in American education. It has shined a light on the gaps in achievement that exist among groups of students. However, it has come up short in closing those gaps, and the strides that have been made have come at the price of a narrowed curriculum that hones in on back-to-basics reading and math skills and punishes schools where students do not achieve at required levels of proficiencies. In addition, the NCLB target of 100% proficiency by 2014 has resulted in many more schools coming close to being labeled failing, because the target represents a very simplistic view of what it takes to teach the children of the 21st Century.
As a result of the structures and pressures built into NCLB, schools have increasingly become institutions that are focused on standardization and testing. In all schools, the centrality of testing and proficient test scores has resulted in
- narrowing the curriculum,
- intensely focusing attention on remediating reading and math performance,
- creating special programs that allege to improve results,
- packing the school day with those special programs,
- adding after-school and Saturday school for students who are in danger of not performing well on tests,
- increasing the numbers of testing occasions so students get the testing routine and so teachers can predict which students are at risk of test failure,
- following pacing guides that assure teachers will at least minimally cover the content and skills that are included on the test,
- using celebrations, pep rallies, and other carnival-like occasions to motivate students to do well on tests, and
- generally ratcheting up the stress level of students, teachers, administrators, and parents.
The over-emphasis on standardized testing and test scores has come about because of concerns that we need a measurable means by which we can determine whether American students will be prepared to compete economically in a global society. Our students' educational performance is constantly compared to that of students in other countries. We as Americans take umbrage at the possibility that we might not be first in the world on a particular measure of student achievement. We extrapolate that concern into threats to our economic stability, leadership, and growth and then further to our prominence in a world that is increasingly more closely connected, more dangerous, and more interdependent.
In addition to the economic consequences and concerns about our once unassailable position as a world power, poorly performing schools also remind us that today's youth live in a different world than the rest of us. They are growing up with more social and cultural instability, less certainty about their economic future, waves and waves of consumerism, new technologies that have and will change how we conduct our lives and business, new norms and mores that create tensions between and among all sorts of social groups and generations, increasing sociological and interpersonal diversity, and the availability of vast funds of knowledge at a cost rapidly approaching zero. Children have before them tremendous opportunity, tremendous risk, chaotic uncertainty, and continuous rapid change.
As with past generations, we current adults wonder what will become of these children and young people. And they wonder what we expect of them. Many are confident they will work it out--that their educational preparation, good nature, and common sense will see them through. Increasingly however, many of today's children and youth do not have that confidence. They have experienced an educational system that has neither prepared them for thinking, adapting, and acting on information nor has it given them a solid sense of possibility. The impoverished school curriculum they have experienced has deprived them of their capacity to continue to learn, and the punitive, high stress, confidence-depleting system of test preparation as curriculum and test results as learning has stripped them of their capacity to be curious.
Burrello, Kleinhammer-Tramill, and Sailor (20xx, forthcoming) argue that the economically driven theories, policies, and practices that undergird NCLB and current educational thinking stem from an agenda of human capital development that gauges the merit and worth of a person by his/her capacity to contribute to economic productivity. Schools then become instruments of the economy. Since the 1980s when the human capital development/economic discourse began to dominate education, the selfsame theories that have driven the business sector have been adopted by those who are interested in school change, resulting in promoting high standards, continuous assessment, curriculum and assessment alignment, work teams, and the like. Ultimately, business's notion of "the bottom line" took over as a best practice to be used to determine whether schools were performing to standards. Hence, standards driven curriculum aligned with statewide assessments was hatched. In addition, business thinking resulted in ideas about what to do with schools that are low-performing, and from that logic came school transformation or reconstitution in which employees were fired, bosses were transferred, new employees were brought onboard, and in some cases, schools were "sold off" to charter school providers much like an underperforming division would be in industry.
Burrello, Kleinhammer-Tramill, and Sailor (20xx, forthcoming) suggest that we need a radical overhaul of educational policy and practice that rests on a foundation of human capabilities. There have always been narratives of schooling that competed with the economic productivity narrative. Schooling to create a citizenry, schooling for personal development, schooling as socialization, just to name a few. The current overwhelming dominance of the economic narrative puts the state of opur schools and our nation into sharp relief, and it quickly becomes apparent that we need to change our national narrative if we hope to survive into the next century. A human capabilities agenda help us to do so by emphasizing that our social institutions should support a person's interests as s/he pursue the possibilities of life that s/he values.
Our question then as stewards of education who hope to leave a legacy of hope for our children and those who arrive hereafter is to radically and dramatically turn public education on its proverbial ear by looking at its foundational assumptions and its core mission. In the essays and blog entries that follow, we will first look at No Child Left Behind (2002) and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (2004) to deconstruct the policy narratives that are embedded in them. From those analyses, we will proceed to offer policy alternatives that have a human capabilities agenda at their foundation.
