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I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of people about training my dog. I had to make sure I did it right. He was going to grow up to be big, and I wanted to make sure he wasn't one of those dogs that made noise all night or attacked the neighbor's cat. It took time. It took effort. I had to show him who was boss and couldn't let him get away with chewing my slippers or decorating the kitchen floor with works of dog art. It all had to do with basic training. When he did something wrong, I would punish him, and when he did something good, I would reward him with a doggie treat. It was the scientific way to train my dog and it worked. By the time he was 6 months old, I had a decent dog. He wasn't perfect, but he was well trained and good to have around. I was pretty proud of myself and my dog training. Other people's dogs dug holes in the yard and growled at the mailman. My dog didn't yank the chain and he obeyed what I told him. Everything was great in our house. And then my wife and I had a child. In time, we ended up with four, and they did all the bad things that the dog did, only we eventually learned that the things that worked with dogs don't work with kids. It didn't make sense, so I just kept on trying the "reward the good and extinguish the bad" method. It should have worked. It should have followed the same scientific pattern as the training with the dog, but with kids it just didn't work. There was something different about kids. But I don't feel so bad about my months and years of ignorant parenting, because the federal government has done the same thing with the No Child Left Behind act for eight years. NCLB every year makes the same mistake I did. They figure if they measure kids and find out what they don't have, then all we have to do is have schools improve how they teach the weak areas and the kids will do better. Like dog training, it is scientific and follows the laws of cause and effect. Reward the schools with high scores and punish the schools with low scores. Find out what the students are low in and teach that. If we have extra time, we re-teach what the tests say they were low in. If we don't have extra time, the feds tell us to extend the day. But, again, kids are not dogs. Some children and some schools improve, but others don't, so they test more, evaluate more, give consequences. The end of the line was supposed to be Level 5 -- five years of failure -- but they had to invent 5.1, 5.2. 5.3, and some schools and some kids are still failing. Sit, child, sit. Now beg for the biscuit. Perhaps NCLB has failed for eight years in not recognizing that schools and children do not follow scientific patterns. Schools need to be more than places of measurement and marching. Schools need to open the human mind to art and music and meaning. Teachers need to share bits of themselves as well as their textbooks and curriculum. We need to make room for community service and recess and expressing opinions and developing ideas -- developing persons. These are things that NCLB doesn't measure. These are things that NCLB stifles -- things that are crucial to kids staying in school and staying in life. I am all for scientific improvement of our schools, but we mustn't neglect the things that separate us from the animals in the process. Walter Betz is a school administrator in Kwigillingok, a village on Kuskokwim Bay in Western Alaska. |
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