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Illinois School Board Journal
September/October 2005

Leave no community behind

by Alan C. Jones

Alan C. Jones is an assistant professor of education at Saint Xavier University, Chicago.

Since the passage of the legislative mandate to "leave no child behind," the media and educators have left behind the real causes of why young people, especially in our urban areas, are not doing well in schools. The heart of the mandate is the requirement that every school report on an annual basis the achievement of specified groups of students (i.e. Economically Disadvantaged; Low English Proficient; Students with Disabilities; White, Non-Hispanic; Black, Non-Hispanic; American Indians or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Hispanic).

The rationale for the legislation is that average test scores in a school do not truly reflect the academic progress of certain subgroups of students — thus, No Child Left Behind. The accountability component provides parents an option to transfer their child from a school that did not reach its Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) targets in reading and mathematics.

The media are myopic in their focus on the large number of schools that are not meeting AYP and the inability of parents in "failing" schools to transfer their children to "successful schools." That is the entire story line for education in America.

Variations on the story line do exist. Some stories report on the ineptitude of school bureaucracy to inform parents in a timely manner of the accountability measures in NCLB legislation. Other stories report the journey of "turn around" schools or principals who have "beat all the odds." Typically, the "beat all the odds" stories feature a visit by a prominent dignitary — mayor, governor or the President — to do something educational (i.e. read a story) or congratulate the student body and school leadership for demonstrating to the country how a school can leave no child behind.

The other variation on this story line is more subtle, but begins to get at the real issue of leaving no children behind. Some journalists conclude their stories on NCLB with the startling observation that in some communities there are no schools which meet state and federal AYP targets and, sadly, no options exist for parents in these communities to transfer their son or daughters to "successful" schools.

What is left unsaid, of course, is that the communities referenced in the story are large communities — in fact most schools in inner city urban areas are not meeting AYP targets.

Educators responding to this media story line have become mired in the arcane aspects of the legislation's testing requirements or some of the more bizarre requirements of reporting the data (sometimes THE cause of a school not meeting AYP targets). But no commentator — not a journalist, not an educator — is willing to speak the unspeakable: children do not live in schools. Children live in families, families live in communities, communities live in states and the states live in America.

The media and the educational community continue to ignore the elephant in the closet: the influence of the community, the neighborhood, the family and the peer group on how a child performs in a school. Instead, for more than a decade, the media and the educational community have locked the closet and put a microscope on every aspect of a school's curriculum, the performance of its teachers and the leadership acumen of the principal.

Of course such a focus takes the attention off leaders in the public and private sector who should be devoting all of their time and energy to creating jobs that pay living wages, to providing adequate healthcare for all citizens, to creating access to world class child care facilities, to pursuing policies that would bring diversity to all communities in our country, and to allocating monies to restore the dilapidated conditions of most schools in our urban areas. Such a concentration would leave little time for these same bodies to craft more rules and regulations for schools.

School leaders are no better than the media. Instead of assuming the role of "oppositional public intellectual" and denouncing the social and economic conditions in which students and teachers must work, they have not only accepted but have been active promoters of accountability measures that have been harmful to young people and have transformed teaching into a process that would make more sense to an accountant than a child.

Public education, at its best, has always held out as its mission that every child should be provided a quality educational experience. Some schools are able to achieve this mission. They are always found in communities that have the social capital to support quality educational experiences for all the children.

Unfortunately, many schools in our country are unable to achieve this mission. Not because they are not trying, but because the communities find they lack the social capital to support every child's right to a quality education.

The responsibility for leaving no child behind rests squarely with social and economic policies of our state and national legislative bodies. Only these bodies can address the lack of social capital of the many communities — urban and rural.

The realization of leaving no child behind will begin when policy makers make a genuine commitment to leaving no community behind and when school leaders read John Dewey's philosophy of the public good before they read his philosophy of education.