If you’ve been following this column, it should come as no surprise that I’m no fan of George W. Bush. I was opposed to the Iraq War and the whole weapons-of-mass-destruction bamboozle. I didn’t like the massive tax cuts and the trickle-down economic strategies. I hated the anti-environment policies and pro-fossil fuels ethos. And, from the get, I was adamantly opposed to the so-called educational initiative No Child Left Behind.

First, I thought the law relied way too heavily on high-stakes standardized tests and I think they’re blunt instruments. They don’t accurately measure what a student’s capable of doing, nor what a teacher actually does in a classroom. Second, I saw the whole program as an Orwellian attempt by conservatives, who had never supported public education, to try and effect a massive shift of funding from public schools to private ones through School Choice Vouchers, a sort of nationwide extension of California’s disastrous Proposition 13. Finally, I have no patience for sloganeering. It was my belief that by just saying, hey, folks, we believe in leaving no child behind, but not actually doing anything about trying to fund progressive educational solutions based on research and/or input from actual educators, the Bush administration was, in fact, doing more harm than good. It was sweeping the complex problems in our schools under the collective linoleum with a kind of heckuva-job-Brownie sideswipe, a sort of smiling Potemkin village of reforms that would only serve to retard whatever progress schools had long been laboring to make.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the cafetorium…

Educators took the idea of leaving no child behind seriously. They actually believed that - regardless of what the federal government was planning on pretending to fund or how it over-simplified what it meant to actually learn something - this notion of attempting to help every single child in the building succeed should be the new way in how they measure success.

I believe this is a sea change not only in American education but also, in a broader fashion, in how America views its own character. Honestly, as a country, I don’t think we’ve ever truly cared about who gets left behind. We’ve believed (on some level) in the idea of providing opportunities for people to succeed, and then in letting them sink or swim based on their own effort. Obviously, we haven’t always lived up to even that ideal. We’ve restricted opportunities based on race, sex, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc., since our inception and we haven’t stopped doing that, yet at least most people in this country say they believe that everybody deserves a chance, that in America anyone can follow his/her dreams if he or she tries hard enough.

But we’ve never extended that idea to mean we should make it a priority to help. We’ve never said we should try and do all that we can for people who don’t appear to be succeeding so that they can achieve the same level of success as those who are. My sense is that education in this country has always meant we open the doors for everybody; we try to create schools that offer opportunities for everybody to learn and grow; and then we sit back and rank students in Social Darwinian fashion based on who does what with what we put on the table. In other words, we lead all the horses to the water, and whoever drinks the most, well, they’re the winners. That makes the water a very capitalistic trough and very much in the spirit of the way things work here in the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps United States of America.

It’s also how I remember my own educational experience. Everybody had the chance to do well, but the kids who worked hard (or didn’t, but were naturally talented) were the ones who succeeded and were lauded for their efforts. They were also then accepted into the finest colleges and on their way to the good life. Sure, teachers would meet people at lunch or after school to offer extra help if somebody asked for it, but there was no mandate to try and get everybody to succeed. Kids who demonstrated little academic promise from the outset were shunted to a non-college-bound track where they learned how to fix cars or bake cookies and if they dropped out after they turned sixteen, so be it, that just demonstrated their own priorities, school wasn’t for everyone anyway. In my high school of 1600 students, it was a successful year if a handful of kids earned Ivy League acceptances. The teachers had done their jobs.

The idea of actually leaving no child left behind is, in fact, a revolutionary prism through which to view our schools. It says that we don’t believe in letting everyone into the pool and saying, okay, now sink or swim; we believe in trying to help everybody stay afloat, at more or less the same level. It is the educational equivalent of universal coverage for health care where doctors are held accountable for curing everybody who’s sick, regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Can you imagine if our country talked about decreasing the income gap in the same way we talk about the achievement gap in our schools? If we tried to develop strategies that said, hey, see that White dude on Wall Street who just banked $4 billion hedge-funding with Goldman Sachs? We need to make sure that the immigrant who barely speaks English and works as a migrant farmer - who makes seven thousand a year compared to four billion - we need to condense that gap in income so everybody’s more or less pulling in the same deal.

Maybe I’m being overly cynical and exaggerating, but politicians should be careful about what they say they stand for - and so should the general public - because teachers will try and make it happen. It’s not perfect, and not everyone’s on board. Trust me, I still don’t believe in standardized tests, and I don’t for a second think it’s what politicians actually intended, but a lot of teachers - a lot of teachers - are working every day to try and see that every kid in their school makes it. The problems in education are deep and complex and won’t be solved with one-touch slogans, still, think about it for a second. What if teachers actually were focused on making every kid succeed? Every single kid?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the new educational policies coming out of Washington are called something different - Race to the Top. Sounds a lot more capitalistic, doesn’t it?

** NOTE ** - The next huge poetry event in Ann Arbor is Literama and it’s happening this week! Put on by the Ann Arbor Book Festival, it’s coming up Friday, May 14th @ The Neutral Zone. Area high school and college students and other adults in the community will compete in an Intergenerational Poetry Slam. The event will also feature readings by dynamic New York poets Aracelis Girmay and Rachel McKibbens, local poet Scott Beal, and younger students from the Ann Arbor Open School. In addition the AABF will present its annual LILA (Leader in Literary Arts) Award. It all happens @ 7pm on Friday night, May 14th, @ the Neutral Zone. Just $5. For more information, check out aabookfestival.org.

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Thursday morning throughout the school year.