THE SCHOOLING GAME

As the principal of a small K-12 school in rural Alaska, I can identify with Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The No Child Left Behind Act gets “curiouser and curiouser.” I live and work in the middle of the Arctic, yet lately the tentacles of Washington have reached out and grasped my school in a stranglehold of absurdity. We have been thrust headlong down a rabbit hole and met the Queen of Hearts, only to find that she looks suspiciously like George W. Bush.

All across the country, educators are scrambling to comply with the requirements of this federal legislation. They attend conferences on it, only to be confronted with ambiguity and uncertainty. The definition of “highly qualified teacher” changes weekly, for example, and what the criteria for “proficiency” are on a given day is anyone’s guess. It’s a bit like playing croquet with a flamingo.

Beauty is a nebulous idea -- impossible to confine. Beauty is like quality of which it has been said: "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it." Beauty is the cousin of quality.

Beauty is easily found in nature, and frequently in the endless variety of human creativity. However, not nearly all of man's creation can be considered beautiful. Man has designed all manner of devices intended solely for destruction -- the various nuclear weapons, for example, being the most recent and most destructive. Man has also created systems for the enslavement, exploitation, and control of other men, i.e., the totalitarian state.
 

The federal government messing about in the field of education is much like a chicken scratching in a plate of caviar. The chicken has no concept of the complexity of the stuff and no appreciation of the miracle of nature that created it. All three hundred and eighty four members of the House of Representatives and ninety one Senators who voted for passage of The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 appear to have had the sensibility of a chicken.

No Child Left Behind is the latest of a long series of federal legislative failures that began with the National Defense Education Act of 1958. This act was inspired by the launch of the Russian Sputnik which caused legislators to jump to the not so obvious conclusion that Americans no longer had the sense to control their own education. Next came The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), which was a stroke of political genius. It contained something called Title I, which provided money for schools with few strings attached. It was very friendly and voluntary, but Title I would rise to become a massive club held over public education.