94 pages
ISBN 1-890429-05-8
List price: $9 from VSSE, Box 26, Charlotte, VT 05445

Susan Ohanian is one of the many voices urging a more activist defense of public schools and teachers, a rejection of privatization strategies, and a return of humanity, common sense and sane pedagogical strategies to schools. Certainly there is an army of others who have been working toward the same goals. Researchers have built mountains of research demonstrating the flawed theories and not-so-hidden profiteering agendas underpinning NCLB. Websites like FairTest (www.fairtest.org), Educator Roundtable (www.educatorroundtable.org), and Ohanian’s own (www.susanohanian.org) have published copious amounts of information and led assorted efforts to inform and organize the public. The Educational Policy Research Unit at Arizona State and the Education and the Public Interest Center at University of Colorado at Boulder have also joined forces to issue scholarly reviews critiquing purported “research” reports from the conservative think tanks that continue to support the disastrous “reform” efforts of recent years. And yet: the choice and privatization train not only has left the station but is also progressing full speed ahead despite the concerted efforts of educators, researchers and other public school advocates. What’s left to try? Susan Ohanian has had an idea.

Ohanian’s newest book, When Childhood Collides with NCLB, surely “breaks new ground in the literature of educational criticism,” as promised in the introduction. Unlike all of the research and reports and critiques, this book doesn’t try to add to a reader’s informational stockpile: instead, it tries to get the reader to feel the mixture of indignation, outrage and sadness that so many feel about what is happening to children and teachers in schools, using an innovative format resembling a double-entry journal. The right column of each page contains snippets of news, opinion and quotes from the world of media, with sources ranging from NPR, the New York Times and the Children’s Defense Fund to luminaries like President Dwight Eisenhower (“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield,” p. 39) and Rick of Casablanca (“Suppose you run your business and let me run mine,” p. 69). On the left side of each page is original poetry by Ohanian, which serves as a kind of reflection and commentary on the media material that focuses now and then on bits of relevant wisdom like that from Eisenhower and Rick, but more often on idiocies in news reports: a fourth-grader suspended for refusing to answer a question on a statewide exam (p. 61), some elementary school students with improved test scores having 15-seconds of grabbing at one- and five- dollar bills fluttering around an inflated box (p. 63).

The power of the book is in the juxtaposition among and between Ohanian’s insightful selections from wide-ranging resources and her sensitive and evocative poetry—which can be experienced appropriately only by reading the work. The following excerpt may, however (and let’s hope not at the cost of doing violence to the text’s overall intended impact), at least offer a sense of the format:

Readers as well-versed as Ohanian (and there may be few) will revel in the depth she has provided through her many allusions to other works. In just these few lines, for example, her words evoke an experiential contrast between the carefree “mud-luscious” child’s world of an e. e. cummings poem and the oppressive “test-vicious” educational world of today. The teacher’s plight is rendered in an allusion to the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus. While such erudite connections deepen the reader’s experience, Ohanian’s words are strong enough on their own to convey what she intends, and so it is not necessary to stop every few lines and research a likely allusion, as if the author thought she were reprising Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” The verse is strong and accessible as it stands—although the insatiably curious, or the reader who hates to be nagged by the question “Now where did I hear that before?” will no doubt be grateful that the author provides citations.

This is far less a book to talk about, or even to read, than to experience. I’m hopeful that, as I feel sure Ohanian intends, it will evoke sufficient emotional response in readers to engage them as active allies in the struggle to reclaim childhood, rich learning, and good public schools. May its readers number multitudes.

Recommended Further Reading and Viewing

Aronowitz, S. (2008). Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Educator Roundtable. http://www.educatorroundtable.org

Meiers, D. and Wood, G. (2004). Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and our Schools. Boston: Beacon Press.

Nichols, Sharon and Berliner, David C. (2007). Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.