The Semantic Offenses of No Child Left Behind
In a previous posting, I outlined the basic premise at the heart of what psychologist Wendell Johnson called the IFD Disease. According to Johnson, when people do not use precise language in goal-setting, they risk “idealizing” goals to the point that they become unreachable. When goals cannot be reached (or progress toward them cannot be measured), people become “frustrated,” and, over time, this leads to total “demoralization.” The IFD Disease is, thus, a process – Idealization to Frustration to Demoralization.
While Johnson found the IFD Disease at the root of many of his patients’ dilemmas, individuals are not the only victims of its afflictions. Indeed, institutions are equally (if not more) guilty of misusing language in such a way as to undermine potential for growth and progress. Within the field of education, these abuses are innumerable. From the curriculum supervisor who wants assessment to be more “authentic,” to the classroom teacher who is concerned with teaching “critical thinking,” those involved in education are no strangers to abstract, immeasurable goals.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this in recent history is the legislation that, for the last decade, has governed most decisions made within public education: No Child Left Behind. Over the years, the bill has become an easy target for those who wish to draw attention to the failures of American public education. Levitt and Dubner devote a chapter of their book Freakonomics to the ways that NCLB creates incentives for educators to teach to the test. Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System traces the history of the law and criticizes it for, among other things, ignoring the conflict of interest that emerges when states create their own standards and standardized tests in isolation from the work being done in other states. Teachers in struggling schools complain when states mandate teacher-proof, scripted curricula in the interest of raising test scores. Teachers in thriving schools question the efficacy of devoting millions of dollars to testing when that money could be used to support classroom learning. The list goes on and on.
Yet, even though there is no shortage of complaints that can be (and have been) raised against No Child Left Behind, most of the objections focus on political and financial abuses. But politics and economics are symptoms of a far greater abuse inherent within the legislation: the abuse of language. No Child Left Behind is a law that is built entirely on a foundation of idealized terminology, and as such, the outcry that has come from educators, students, and parents in the last decade has been the “Frustration” that inevitably follows such acts of Idealization. Though the bill was intended to create accountability within education, it has ultimately committed a generation of students and teachers to the task of striving tirelessly toward an unreachable goal.
As originally proposed, the goal of No Child Left Behind was for every student in America to be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The language of this goal contains two significant semantic flaws. The first is the broad abstraction of “every student in America;” the second is the idealization of “proficiency” in regards to reading and math. One could make the argument that there is a third flaw in assigning a specific date to a wildly abstract and unreachable goal; however, I prefer to categorize this as less of a “semantic flaw” and more an exercise in unequivocal lunacy.
On the subject of abstraction, few writers have written as lucidly as language theorist and former U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa. In his book Language in Thought and Action, he illustrates the concept of abstraction by describing a cow named “Bessie.” Hayakawa suggests that when we refer to “Bessie” by her name, the name itself symbolizes the object and becomes a reference for the specific characteristics of that object. In other words, when we say “Bessie,” we speak of a specific cow with specific characteristics – some of which may not be common to cows in general. However, when we take a macroscopic view and group “Bessie” under the umbrella of “livestock,” the general nature of this label obfuscates the personal characteristics of Bessie and emphasizes the impersonal characteristics that Bessie shares with pigs, chickens, and goats. Hayakawa insists that we can abstract even further, grouping “livestock” as a subset of “assets,” which is itself a subset of “wealth.” Abstracting in this way omits all unique characteristics of the object or person in question. It allows us to see the personal (Bessie) in an impersonal way (a commodity).
In the same way, when No Child Left Behind sets a goal for “every student in America,” the language of the law is operating at a high level of abstraction that emphasizes those traits common to all “students,” not those of unique individuals. If we were to zoom in at a lower level of abstraction, we would see that each of those “students” has a name and exists within a distinct context. Many of those individual students have learning disabilities, come from print-poor environments, are exposed to high rates of teacher turnover, and face socio-economic factors that can impede academic success.
These factors that are omitted by the high level of abstraction in the language of NCLB undermine the attainability of the goal. Students do not enter schools in a vacuum. They carry their intellectual, emotional, physical, psychological, and social baggage into the classroom with them. And this baggage will necessarily impact their success in an academic environment. No amount of scripting, testing, or teacher accountability can solve learning disabilities or poverty or abuse. And until these problems are solved, any goal that states “all students in America” will be able to do anything will be doomed to fail.
The second problem with the language of No Child Left Behind rests in the idealization of the term “proficiency” in regard to math and reading. “Proficiency” is a word that has extensional meaning but no clear intensional meaning, as such, it is impossible to gauge or measure it until we have pursued inquiry into exactly what it is that we mean by “proficient.”
The federal government is certainly aware of the nebulous nature of the word – after all, each state has traditionally be asked to create its own standards, tests, and definitions of proficiency under the rule of NCLB. It is hard to hold teachers and students accountable to proficiency standards when what is “proficient” in one state is completely different just a few miles away in another state. Because of this, some critics have suggested that the solution is common standards and tests across states – this would ostensibly allow for more exact measurement of national proficiency. However, one caveat remains: such solutions presuppose that proficiency is something that can be measured. In actuality, it is a wholly relative term.
When we say that a student is “proficient,” in reading and math, this proficiency is not “of the student,” it is projected onto him or her by an outside evaluator. For example, if I say, “John is proficient in reading,” this proficiency is not entirely of John, but rather, it is the joint product of both the observer and the observed. Thus, any declaration we make about a student’s level of proficiency says more about ourselves as evaluators than about the student as a learner. In this sense, “proficiency” is not a quality, but a report of personal evaluation. Nothing more.
Furthermore, by reifying John as being “proficient,” it is easy to forget that such an evaluation also exists in a transient reality. The law of identity, which states, “A is A,” would suggest that when we say, “John is proficient in reading,” we mean that he is always proficient in reading. But Johntoday is not the same as Johnyesterday , and both of these are different than Johntomorrow . What is meant by “John” depends largely on the context in which we encounter him – time, place, circumstance. As such, when a standardized test reveals that “John is proficient in reading,” “John” is not a person, but rather, an event in time. And as such, the proficient score says very little about John’s actual level of ability in reading.
This is the IFD Disease at work in No Child Left Behind. If we were to use more precise language to outline exactly what the law does, we might say, “the bill requires all students – regardless of physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual, social, or financial history – to demonstrate, for an isolated moment in time, some semblance of ability to meet a state-determined goal of arbitrary proficiency in the areas of reading and mathematics by an arbitrary point in time.” Spelling out the goal as such shines light on just how little such tests actually have to do with monitoring student progress and increasing accountability within schools and districts. And the fact that the legislation attaches financial incentives to such a capricious system makes the entire structure seem all the more farcical.
What began in 2002 as idealization has long since passed the stage of frustration. The recent surge of education-centered documentaries entering public discourse is evidence of this. Administrators, teachers, parents, students, filmmakers, and taxpayers are looking for someone to blame, but the culprit is not an abuse of power or political position. Rather, it is an abuse of language. And until the terms of educational goals are revised, all that remains is the steady decline from frustration into total demoralization.
