Review by Gerald Bracey

When you hear over and over that all students will be proficient in reading and math by 2014, it’s hard not to start thinking of children as abstractions, as “raw material” to be shaped by the lathes of school into uniform finished products. Humanity disappears behind the impersonal machinations of the factory. While advocates of No Child Left Behind claim to be on a humanitarian mission to overcome the soft bigotry of low expectations, their obsessive focus on grade level and 100% proficiency obliterates children’s individualities and teachers become merely dispensers of knowledge and skills.

Students as individuals and teachers as inspirers, psychologists, and ring masters take center stage in Linda Perlstein’s Tested: One American School’s Struggle to Make the Grade. Former Washington Post education reporter Perlstein spent over a year in Tyler Heights elementary school, a poor school in a rich county (Anne Arundel, Maryland) struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress. While she does tell you what the school’s scores are, she presents them in the context of the students who answer questions without reading the stems and who beam because they’ve finished the test early—by not completing some sections.

In perhaps the most telling chapter, Perlstein compares Tyler Heights to Crofton Elementary, an affluent school nearby. The Crofton fourth graders write essays about the sports of the Olympic Games (some had attended the winter games in Turin). In a unit on money, they create business plans and budgets. In one Open Court story that the two schools both used, Tyler Heights children had great difficulty with the vocabulary-- not even the brightest of the kids knew what “dome” or “boast” meant, but the pacing of the curriculum denied the teachers the time to really explain the meaning. Tyler Heights teachers spend enormous amounts of time and energy soothing disruptive children. Crofton teachers spend virtually none.

Crofton likely does not contain children like the boy who farts all day and says “I smell like salad.” Or the boy who asks, “Is Mars a lifetime?” Or the girl who, asked to define “stray,” says, “Like a homeless person?” Or the boy who, complimented on his new sneakers, replies “Thanks! My Mom stole them!” Or the girl who tells of talking to her father over a phone through glass? Or the girl who crawls around the classroom during math telling the other kids they’re ugly.

Telling is Tyler Heights’ transformation after the tests are given. Petri dishes appear in science classes; children write Haikus; they create art and adorn the classroom walls with it; they visit the Smithsonian Museums in D.C. and the National Aquarium in Baltimore; they go to the Naval Academy to see the Blue Angels. “It feels like a different school,” says one third-grader.

Tyler Heights makes AYP. It’s a relief to the principal and teachers, but a near disaster in terms of student discipline. And, one wonders, given the inexorable creep of the score needed to maintain this status, how many more years can they do it and at what additional human costs. The principal is already working most nights and some teachers are extremely frustrated by the scripted curriculum. Perlstein does not flinch from showing us the day-in, day-out human face of NCLB and nothing augurs well for the future.

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, (2006), Three Rivers Press.

Nel Noddings, When School Reform Goes Wrong, (2007), Teachers College Press.

Evans Clinchy, Rescuing the Public Schools, (2007), Teachers College Press.

James Herndon, How to Survive in Your Native Land, (1971), Simon & Schuster.