Lake Woebegone as National Educational Policy

Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone is an ideal town.  In it, all children are above average.

Of course, since "average" is the condition that stands as the norm between excellence and failure, a mediocre point between extremes, the world of Lake Woebegone is statistically impossible.  So Lake Woebegone is a fictional town.

Still, just such a Lake Woebegone impossibility has become our national educational policy, represented as the central goal of the No Child Left Behind Act:  "all students are expected to meet or exceed State standards in reading and in math within 12 years."[1]

It's not obvious why this noble goal is irrational until we understand what the phrase "State standards" means.  The "Pennsylvania Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities," parallel to other states' subject standards, says what the standards represent:  "They describe the expectations for students' achievement and performance throughout their education in Pennsylvania schools."[2]  Those expectations, in short, are what define the average achievement expected of students.

NCLB, then, presupposes that all children will have at least average academic achievement.  The standards documents dodge that statistical impossibility by saying that the schools will "challenge and support every student to realize his or her maximum potential."[3]  But we cannot assume that if a particular student has a relatively low potential, he or she would be excused from the standard.  That would mean that the child is left behind, something that the mere name of the law makes impossible.

The Commonwealth conceives of and presents the standards as the average achievement of students who graduate from Pennsylvania schools.  Federal law then insists that all students must meet that average.

Lake Woebegone here we come!

From a common sense point of view, it gets even worse.

We proud inhabitants of Lake Woebegone expect that our students will "Know and use the elements and principles of each art form to create works in the arts and humanities."[4]

I have three degrees, from good schools, in the humanities.  I have also had some success in my academic career.  But I would fail this noble goal that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania presents as the "average" that all our students should master.  I couldn't write a decent poem if you guaranteed I'd win the Noble Prize in literature were I to do so.

But there's the standard:  I will "use the elements and principles of each art form to create works in the arts and humanities."  I suppose I'd better return my degrees, along with my high school diploma, earned these many years ago from a Pennsylvania secondary school.

The illogic of the standards leads to humorous results.  For instance, President Bush's last Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, recognized that students with "special needs" may not meet the standards.  But in Lake Woebegone we cannot say that such students form the "below" condition that establishes the in-betweenness of an average.  Oh no.  Instead, Ms. Spellings redefined what "average" means by promulgating a "policy [that] allows states to develop modified achievement standards and use assessments aligned with those modified standards for a group of students with disabilities who can make progress toward, but may not reach, grade-level achievement standards in the same time frame as other students."[5]

The double-talk obfuscates what's taking place, which is the redefinition of what "average" means so as to accommodate reality.  But notice that Ms. Spellings assumes that eventually all students, "special needs" or not, will achieve the standard.  There is not a teacher in the world who will fail to recognize the absurdity of that proposition.  That different children will achieve at different levels is the reason we give grades from A to F, after all.  I could spend the rest of my life studying the elements and principles of art, and I still would never be able to write a decent sonnet or draw more than a stick figure.  It's just not in me to do it, and no force on earth—certainly not the august majesty of the "Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities"—will make me able to do so.

Hard though it is for us, as a nation and as parents, to acknowledge it, the truth is that "average" does mean that while some students will achieve the mediocre in between condition that "average means," at the same time some students will achieve superlatively, and some will fail.

The less humorous side of the No Child Left Behind madness is when its insane premise gets applied locally, in the classroom, as the child meets the test.  My wife, who teaches fourth grade, describes what happens.  The poor, challenged kid looks at the test, knows immediately that he or she cannot do well, and dissolves in tears at the desk as the teacher, legally bound not to "help," looks on.

Here, No Child Left Behind is not simply absurd.  It is child abuse.

Illogical as No Child Left Behind is, how in the name of good sense was it passed into law?  It's not a pretty story.  It begins with a lie, and ends with another sort of lie, the logical nonsense of Lake Woebegone as national educational policy.

The lie involves the "Texas Miracle," as it was called when President Bush named Rod Paige to be his first Secretary of Education.  Before then, Paige was superintendent of the Houston school system, and under his authority students in the school district made incredible academic progress.  As with No Child Left Behind, progress was determined by data-driven "facts" based on "standards" developed under Mr. Paige's guidance.  Most impressively, the drop out rate in the Houston schools had been lowered to 1.5%, and the achievement gap between white and minority children had been lowered significantly.[6]

The No Child Left Behind Act was justified by the success Mr. Paige had produced via the rigorous application of "standards" in the Houston schools.  Mr. Paige impregnated Washington with the Houston Miracle, and Congress gave birth to the irrationality of No Child Left Behind.

As one might expect, the sleep of reason bred a monster.

The monstrosity begins with the fact that the incredibly low drop out rate in the Houston schools was completely illusory—a lie based on "cooking the books."  The teachers on the front lines and the local school administrators who had to contend with real live students "put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent."[7]  The narrowing of the educational gap between white and minority students was also illusory.  And the illusion was abetted, at least, by Mr. Paige himself.[8]

So now here we are, living with a chimera, an illusion engendered by an irrationality fathered by a lie—but with dire and painful consequences for all of our children.  It's not simply that the less capable student will become demoralized as she sits in front of her test, although on those grounds alone No Child Left Behind ought to be repealed immediately.  Just as bad is the destructive effect that the law has on education itself.

Children are being trained to take standardized tests in order to demonstrate that they achieve the average defined in the standards set by the states.  Perhaps our perspective has been so vitiated by the promulgation of No Child Left Behind that we cannot even hear what's wrong with that statement.

Training is appropriate for dogs who salivate on cue when the bell rings.  But training is not the same thing as education.  Teachers now will tell you that they are teaching to the test, that they are coaching students on how to take the test, that they are drilling students on questions that are like the ones that appear on the test.  What is really happening is not the statistical impossibility of making everyone above average.  Instead, we are lowering our expectations of education and what it should accomplish in order to incubate Mr. Paige's monster.

Across the board, what Spellings recommended as redefined standards for "special needs" students has become the norm of educational policy.  Education has become the stale and dead recitation of facts that would shame even Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind.

It is time we returned this monstrosity to the realm of fantasy so we can listen to stories from Lake Woebegone and laugh instead of shudder in fear.

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[1] Rod Paige, "Key Letter Signed by the Education Secretary or Deputy Secretary, July 24, 2002," US Department of Education, http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/secletter/020724.html.

[2] "Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities," Pennsylvania State Board of Education, http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/022/chapter4/s4.83.html, p. 2.

[3] Every specific standard in every standards document for every discipline begins with such language.

[4] "Academic Standards for the Arts and Humanities," Pennsylvania State Board of Education, http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/022/chapter4/s4.83.html, p. 3.

[5] Margaret Spellings, "Key Policy Letters Signed by the Education Secretary or Deputy Secretary, December 14, 2005," US Department of Education, http://www.ed.gov/policy/speced/guid/secletter/051214.html.

[6] "Rod Paiges's Houston Miracle,"  The Carpetbagger Report, September 4, 2003, http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/592.html.

[7] "The Texas Miracle," 60 Minutes II, August 25, 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60II/main591676.shtml

[8] Susan Ohanian, "Houston Recounting Paige's Record," Susan Ohanian.Org, http://www.susanohanian.org/atrocity_fetch.php?id=825.