The Importance of No Child Left Behind: Part V (The Assertion That the Approach is Too Punitive)

Along with the litany of catch-phrases ("teaching to the test," "narrowing the curriculum," "one size fits all") that I have previously exposed as describing nothing substantive, there is also the assertion from opponents of No Chlid Left Behind that the approach is "too punitive." This criticism is as flimsy as the others.

There are three essential shapers of human behavior: positive reinforcement, which introduces a reward for desired behavior; negative reinforcement, the withdrawal of reward when behavior turns toward the undesirable; and punishment, the application of aversive measures for undesired behavior. Punishment is most effective when combined with positive reinforcement, such as higher teacher salaries for those who provide instruction that raises student achievement to grade level or better, or public recognition and enhanced funding for effective programs that do the same. But there is no doubt that punishment is an attention-getter that can motivate people to change behavior in ways that would lead to these rewards.

So punishment is a legitimate psychological strategy that quickly exposes an existing problem. Schools that have for years, decades, and in some cases for a half-century or more failed to educate all of their students deserve the punishing effect of the No Child Left Behind measures that lead to increasingly serious consequences for failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). And while many of the failing schools are those situated in inner city communities facing multiple societal challenges, some are schools that previously were considered good and even elite.

This latter matter has received a good deal of attention by critics of No Child Left Behind. How can good schools be branded as failures because they have not made AYP as defined under No Child Left Behind? The answer is that schools that fail to educate their poorest populations, their immigrant populations, and their populations of color should not be called "good schools." The key difference between these so-called "good schools," typically located in more affluent communities, and inner city schools is that the latter generally have as a majority of their student bodies students of the type that the "good schools" are failing. Such "good schools" are not any better at educating poor students, students of color, and immigrant students than are those institutions that we know obviously to be "bad schools" based on the aggregate performance of their student bodies.

This is the whole point of disaggregating the data, so as to see how schools are performing, not just in school-wide average test scores, but also among varous ethnic and economic groups. A major responsibility of public schools in a democracy is to be the great social leveler, giving everyone the knowledge and skill base to succeed in life. Schools that do not fulfill this reponsibility deserve to be punished. When schools do an about-face and start to fulfill the democratizing function of the public schools, they are then entitled to have punishment cease. And good public policy would then find ways to reward the teachers responsible for the turn-around.

Just because punishment is uncomfortable does not make it wrong. If a school wishes to escape the punishing effect of having its institutional image tarnished with public proclamation of failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress, the effort should be to articulate and implement the policies that would yield success in making Adequate Yearly Progress.