Dolores Umbridge and NCLB

Those of you not living with a kid or a 30-year old lesbian may have missed the fact that the 5th installment of the Harry Potter film epic, The Order of the Phoenix, premiered on Wednesday. We saw the late screening at the Moolah Theater here in Saint Louis. The Moolah is a converted temple with one of the widest non-IMAX screens I have ever seen, couches, beer and cocktails, and a bowling alley in the basement. Awesome.

I had a great time; and was immediately reminded that Order of the Phoenix is somewhat of a biting commentary on the American educational system, specifically No Child Left Behind, by J.K. Rowling. Harry's main foil in the book, in addition to the usual Lord Voldemort (who my money is on to be the next Republican named in the DC Madam scandal...), is Dolores Umbridge, an educational lackey from the Ministry of Magic who becomes the new Defense of the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts.

One of the most telling scenes in both the book and the film begins with Professor Umbridge welcoming her students on their first day of class. She describes to the 5th years how they will be learning to defend themselves from evil not by, well, learning how to defend themselves, but by studying the dark arts in a nice, safe theorhetical bubble. Oh, and then taking a test on it. There is no practice, no hands-on learning to develop students' ability to think for themselves. They become little sponges that must simply soak up the information with no need to understand or apply it. Umbridge's rise to power becomes the arc of the story and her transformation of Hogwarts School into a veritable police state has some very interesting implications for us Americans.

The bills for the reauthorization and improvement of 2001's No Child Left Behind Act are making their way through Congress this session. Since the enactment of this large, unwieldy, and underfunded piece of legislation, there has been much debate about whether high stakes testing and "adequate yearly progress" are valuable additions and measures of education reform. I believe that accountability is key, having taught in a struggling school system with teachers and administrators that sometimes care more about their pay check and having summers off than their students' learning. However, there must be a better way to get physical and human resources to the schools that need them the most. Why are science classes in low-income schools still being taught by individuals without a bachelor's degree in the subject?! Why do administrators have to spend their time doctoring attendance records in order to ensure that their school receives funding?! Obviously, if schools are having attendance problems it is a symptom of a larger epidemic in the quality of our educational system, and the disparity in quality based on socio-economic situation. This is a problem NCLB has yet to address... let alone, how we will prepare high school graduates competent enough to enter college and careers when they spend all their time memorizing and testing instead of applying high order thinking skills.

We have to wait and see if any real change will be made to NCLB. The law has had some positive consequences, but I'm not sure if it has led to any real progress in our most struggling schools, like those in Saint Louis and Baltimore. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, seems to think so. And of course if we said otherwise, you can imagine her with an Umbridge-esque twitter demanding us to write, "I will not tell lies."