By Daniel Pryzbyla
Columnist EdNews.org

Knowledge is far too complex to depend on short-cuts like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) high-stakes tests – merely penciling a circle or square of preconceived correctness – to hang a "pass" or "fail" tag around a student's neck for the year. Nor is only academic knowledge a broad enough spectrum to make exacting judgment on still-developing youth. Sorry, there's no time for student artistic or athletic talents to be "measured" for test inclusion either. What about other numerous student qualities that are creditable for classroom and school success? Sorry, too difficult to "measure." Restricted to minimal academic subject "test scores," are these reliable to develop our culture? Not likely. A "culture" briefly defined; "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought." NCLB high-stakes testing and the mantra for public high school graduation tests fail the culture litmus test.

However, high-stakes testing does fit the current "privatization" zealousness of corporate-style tactics trying to stake out more profiteering turf at the expense of taxpayer financed public services, similar to Social Security and Medicare. But don't expect Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to spill the beans – disclosing penciling in squares or circles are specifically "cost-effective" testing measures within limiting time constraints. They always have been, of course, but NCLB profiteers have taken this "cost-effective" testing strategy to even higher political and profitable levels, as they do in their private marketplace. Targeting only alleged "failing" Title 1 public schools already enmeshed in their respective community socioeconomic distress and low state testing scores, NCLB draconian rules and consequences paved the path for disruption and added student despair – dismantling public schools, principals, teachers and staff. Along the perilous path, school districts spend millions of dollars for additional private testing services and scoring, private tutoring, restructuring schools and numerous other NCLB related expenses – but not all fully-funded either, as required by federal law.

Bush said Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle School, a public charter opened in 1998 that serves 550 students, "meets the high academic standards that are demanded by the federal education law," reported Theola Labbé in her Washington Post October 6, 2006 article. She also pointed out that on the most recent D.C. Comprehensive Assessment test, Friendship-Woodridge was among just 4 of 37 charter schools under authority of the D.C. Public Charter School Board to make the grade. "Many parents place importance on the scores, but the D.C. school leaders say the results do not fully reflect how much a student may have improved." That's a salient point, but when the shoe was on the other foot in D.C. public schools, were these some of the same leaders ridiculing low test scores then as "excuses," bragging their charter schools would do better? Of course, Bush was also made aware beforehand Friendship-Woodridge was one of only 4 of 37 D.C. charters that made the grade. It was not exactly the "gateway to success" he had come to celebrate. A selective charter school instead would suffice.

"Against a backdrop of No Child Left Behind posters featuring smiling children waving American flags," reported Labbé, "Bush proposed that teachers who raise student scores or decide to teach in hard-to-serve urban or rural school districts be paid bonuses under a new incentive fund for teachers." Recommending "bonuses" for those who teach in "hard-to-serve" school districts? My, oh my! It appears Bush's privatization educrats at the helm of the NCLB flagship have tossed their "poverty is no excuse" sloganeering overboard. First term Secretary of Education Rod "Poverty is no excuse" Paige must be gasping with frustration. His claim to fame advocated privatization and religious inclusion into "failing" public schools. He pushed hard to include nearby D.C. public schools into alternative private and charter school programs. Of course, this too, might be nothing more than a "red herring" in NCLB debate now underway and scheduled for reauthorization in 2007.

Bush & Co., Inc. had also dodged an earlier charter school catastrophe. A July 2006 education report by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), contracted to Educational Testing Service, revealed public schools performing slightly better than private schools tested. There wasn't even an official department news conference. No comment from Secretary Spellings either. New York Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo noted Chad Colby from the department offered no praise of the findings, nor did he "expect the findings to influence policy." Instead, he emphasized, "An overall comparison on the two types of schools is of modest utility."

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association (NEA), disagreed. "The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning to advance its political agenda promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools," he said, according to Schemo's July 14, 2006 article. According to Weaver, it proved public schools were doing "an outstanding job." If the results had been favorable to private schools, "there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools." No doubt about that. Pro-voucher and privatization foundations would have been flooding the news media with their hired scribes' gleeful columns.

Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, but not always. For instance, mentioned earlier was a "brief" definition of "culture" taken from a dictionary. For most readers, it probably didn't make a fuss, but for some, it might. "Biology Crushes Lit Crit" in the autumn 2006 issue of Phi Beta Kappa's journal "The American Scholar" is an essay about – you guessed it – "culture." Who would imagine "culture" drawing battle lines among Humanities and Science departments?

"Not everything in human lives is culture," argues the essay's author Brian Boyd, a professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. "There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak."

"Yes, we were natural for eons before we were cultural," responded Robert Scholes, "the distinguished critic," in his response to another supporter of biology inclusion Harold Fromm. "…But so what? We are cultural now, and culture is the domain of the humanities." To that bravado, author Boyd responded cynically, "We were natural? Have we ceased to be so? Why do Scholes, (Louis) Menand, and the MLA (Modern Language Association of America) see culture as ousting nature rather than as enriching it? Don't they know that over the last couple of decades biology has discovered culture – knowledge transmitted nongenetically and subject to innovation and fashion – in birds, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas? Do they not see that without our own species' special biology, culture could not be as important to us as it is?"

His real argument begins with Menand, Harvard English professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New Yorker magazine essayist writing that university departments "could use some younger people who think that the grownups got it all wrong." Menand, the essay's protagonist, believes that "what humanities departments should definitely not seek, is consilience, which is a bargain with the devil." Boyd found this to be curious. A book by biologist E.O. Wilson is titled "Consilience." It is the idea that "the sciences, humanities, and the arts should be connected with each other, so that science (most immediately, the life sciences) can inform the humanities and the arts, and vice versa."

"Human minds are as they are because they evolved from earlier forms," according to Boyd. "Being ultimately biological, knowledge is likely to be imperfect, affording no firm foundation…The best we can do is generate new hunches, test them, and reject those found wanting in the clearest, most decisive tests we can concoct. Of course we may not be predisposed to devise severe tests for ideas we have become attached to through the long cumulative processes of evolutionary, cultural, or individual trial and error. And it is not easy to discern what can be tested, let alone how it can be tested, especially in the case of 'truths' we have long accepted.

This debate would prove to be a "bad hair day" for Spellings and the NCLB high-stakes testing fan club's limiting "Measuring is the gateway to success."