Back to School Day

NRO's Campaign Spot has taken notice of K Street Mole and acknowledged that a workplace smoking ban is consistently pro-life, but then suggests that Huckabee's priorities are misplaced, citing a litany of challenges our nation faces right now. Hold it right there. Huckabee was asked whether he would sign nationwide ban on workplace smoking into law if Congress sent one across his desk. This is hardly a pillar of his platform. You will search in vain for any mention of smoking policy in Huckabee's priorities for health care reform.

So let's move on to one of the serious issues Geraghty mentioned: "few feel like our schools are preparing our young people to work in an era of globalization." Perfect issue to address on the first day of school for many students and teachers, including my husband.

Mike Huckabee has more to say about education than any of the other leading candidates.

• Kudos to Giuliani for supporting school choice, but knowing the nation isn't ready for that yet, what can the President do in the near term? (And note to Giuliani and Romney - please put your policies in writing, not just video. I can't even access the longer explanation of Giuliani's education platform because the video feed isn't working.)
  
• Fred Thompson only says the federal government intervenes in state education policymaking too much. Fine, Huckabee agrees. But Thompson says "it is appropriate for the federal government to provide funding and set goals for the state to meet in exchange for that funding" but says nothing about what those goals should be. A key point that needs to be addressed.
  
• Mitt Romney also gets kudos for mentioning school choice and English-only classrooms, but a big jeer for saying anyone in the top quarter of their high school class should get a free ride for state university - a massive tax dollar giveaway. He also supports the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind without addressing any of the problems.
  
• John McCain doesn't even mention education on his issues list. (Honestly, why am I even mentioning this guy?)

Let's talk about what's wrong with No Child Left Behind. Not just the funding issues that Democrats harp on. The testing regime itself is terribly flawed because (1) it is myopically focused on certain subjects, causing education in other important subjects to be neglected, and (2) it sets up the impossible target that 100% of students will be proficient in these subjects by 2014.

Working backwards: 100% proficient? Anyone who has ever taught at the pre-college level knows this is impossible. You can lead students to water but you can't make them drink. There will always be some students who simply don't care and won't do any work, no matter how easy the teacher makes the subject or how much he or she tries to motivate them. The only way you get these students to pass a standardized exam is to take it for them. (The extreme focus on passage rates for end-of-year exams also strips teachers of time for creativity, part of the reason it is so hard to motivate the students.) And while teachers do cartwheels to try to prod and push recalcitrant learners into minimal proficiency, all the kids who really do want to learn get - you guessed it - left behind (in the sense that they get little attention and don't reach their potential).

Moreover, NCLB labels a school system as "failing" even if test scores are increasing overall, if some demographic groups do not improve as much as others. You end up with ridiculous results, like high schools listed among Newsweek's 100 best schools in the nation (on the basis of proportion of students taking AP and IB courses) that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB. Talk about an incentive to hold back the bright students!

As for the myopic focus on reading and math: yes, reading is fundamental to everything else. But with so much pressure on grade schools to achieve universal proficiency in just these two subjects, other subjects are being jettisoned. My husband, who went to public school not so terribly long ago in the same system where he now teaches science, finds that students are now less prepared for high school science, and concern over passage rates for statewide tests (implemented after he graduated) has led some area high schools to drop their science fairs so they have more time to drill the standardized curriculum. In the NCLB era students are also spending less time learning about our government, an essential element of becoming a good citizen. And as Huckabee points out, many students are losing education in the creative subjects altogether.

Our students are learning how to take tests, but that is not a fundamental skill for competing in the global economy. Too many students are coming out of high school and college now with no ability to think, to communicate clearly, or to be creative. Huckabee understands the real reason we're falling behind other first world countries (where, incidentally, secondary students score higher on standardized tests because the students with less academic aptitude have already been culled out of the testing pool and placed in vocational education that can actually interest and benefit them, not because these countries are better at creating Lake Woebegone): "Our future economy depends on a creative generation," he says. NCLB needs a radical overhaul. "While there is value in the 'No Child Left Behind' law's effort to set high national standards, states must be allowed to develop their own benchmarks," Huckabee notes, unlike the other Republican front-runners who don't seem to see any problem with the current federal benchmarks.