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11. Lying, Cheating, and Teaching to the Test: The Politics of Surveillance Under No Child Left Behind
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194 Chapter 11 Lying, Cheating, and Teaching to the Test The Politics of Surveillance Under No Child Left Behind John Gilliom Mrs. Hill is a middle school teacher in rural Ohio. She is a big fan of the War of 1812, which she uses to teach geography, state history, international relations, history, and social studies. Until a few years ago, she would typically devote several days to covering the war in great detail with student reports, art projects, and maps. Now, if it gets anything at all, it gets a quick forty-five minutes.Why? School surveillance. This chapter argues that one of the primary effects of the school surveillance mandated by the federal government in the 2002 law known as No Child Left Behind is to reshape the curricula of America’s classrooms. No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, did not set out to eliminate the War of 1812 from middle school education in Ohio.What brought about the elimination of the War of 1812, Mrs. Hill explains, is that the NCLB assessment test used in Ohio does not use the War of 1812 as an “indicator”; the war is not a specifically assessed and measured item on the required tests. Therefore, in the face of heavy pressure to prepare her students for the assessment test, she must cut short her teaching of the War of 1812 and other moments or issues that did not have the good luck or political esteem to become indicators. This small story of one teacher’s classroom can tell us much about ongoing battles over surveillance, power, and the law in America’s public school system. NCLB, I explain in more detail shortly, is a massive piece of legislation that has had an equally massive effect on the lives of millions of people. At the risk of overworking a small example, the demise of the War of 1812 is a great illustration of how the consequences of NCLB are playing out in classrooms and schools across the nation.We can see the reshaping of course content to Lying, Cheating, and Teaching to the Test 195 match the test.We can see a concomitant standardization of the curriculum around the topics that have been sanctioned by state officials.We can see that a teacher’s autonomy and control over her classroom and curriculum have been greatly reduced. We can also see that pressure runs against a type of teaching that would happily devote a week to the active and interdisciplinary exploration of a historical moment. None of these policy outcomes was directly and explicitly mandated by either the Congress or the state of Ohio, but they have nevertheless been accomplished through the impact of the assessment mechanisms put in place under NCLB.This is because the NCLB surveillance mechanisms implement a number of policy outcomes that are achieved through the installation of the surveillance mechanisms themselves or through the “choices” of thousands of teachers responding to a workplace reshaped by the presence of the tests. The exertion of power in NCLB is evident enough that Frederick M. Hess (2003) uses the term “coercive accountability” to describe the policy and Jones and colleagues (2003) use the term “measurement driven reform.” Each of these descriptions forces us to recognize that there are ways in which the purportedly neutral act of assessment actually implements political change. In several important ways NCLB achieves educational policy changes not by mandating them but by installing a system of surveillance and assessment that, as people are forced to meet its measures, pressures the educational system toward the desired (and sometimes unimagined) ends. This chapter explores some of the key curricular and political dynamics surrounding this new and powerful system of surveillance in America’s schools. It begins with a brief look at the central relevant aspects of NCLB, then explores the effects that NCLB-mandated testing has in classrooms. As teachers adjust their styles to help students (and, therefore, teachers and schools) succeed on the tests, the results are wholesale restructurings of the style, content and schedules of American schooling. Next, I turn to the political struggles over NCLB, with a particular focus on the ways teachers and administrators use practices of “everyday resistance” to lessen, delay, or evade the effect of the testing. As I have argued elsewhere (Gilliom 2001), these informal and often secretive means of combating a surveillance system emerge as one of the most important political fronts in the face of the continued failure of...