No Iraqi Left Behind

Nearly a year ago, an article in this fine publication suggested that teachers would be uniquely qualified to mediate the conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Although State department officials in the end failed to consider such an approach, parallels between education and foreign policy continue to crop up, and I, for one, plan to illuminate them.

Take, for instance, the word “benchmark,” which has lately resurfaced as central to both Democrat and Republican plans to hasten the end of the Iraq War. The Democrats want so-called benchmarks to track Iraqi progress, and the President agrees (in an October 2006 press conference, he said the word 13 times). The sticking point, however, is whether to penalize Iraqis if they fail to meet the established benchmarks.

Sound familiar, school children of America? No Child Left Behind and state legislation seeks to hold students and teachers accountable via end-of-the-year standardized tests, which are supposed to measure student achievement on the learning objectives outlined in each grade’s course of study. In Durham Public Schools, “benchmark testing” refers to the quarterly standardized tests developed by the district to prepare students for the big one, the North Carolina End-of-Grade Test (EOG).

If you think the link between Iraq and standardized testing is just another analogy stretched to the breaking point, read what Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had to say about the connection:

“While holding America’s school children accountable with consequences, the president refuses to hold the Iraqis’ government responsible with consequences, while our young people in Iraq are dying.”

Pelosi is partly right; No Child Left Behind does impose consequences on failing schools, but the brunt of those penalties fall not upon students but teachers and school administrators. Nevertheless, her comment lays naked the president’s inconsistency: if he believes accountability to be essential for progress in education policy, why not in foreign policy as well? How successful would No Child Left Behind be if it threatened to close failing schools, but never followed through with action?

The word benchmark itself originates from surveying; it literally describes the mark surveyors would cut into a rock to use as a reference in determining altitudes (let’s just say it involves something called an angle-iron and a leveling-staff and leave it at that). In modern lexicon “benchmark” denotes a more general reference point (in my attempts to translate it into Spanish, the best I could find was “punto de referencia”), which can be used to evaluate progress in a specific endeavor.

In this sense, the benchmark tests that we give students reflect the word’s original meaning; they are used to establish a baseline for student performance and then track progress. Results from each benchmark test allow us to see how well students are grasping the concepts we are teaching, and indicate the areas in which students need to improve. These benchmarks are diagnostic – if students are not “on the right path,” we attempt to provide them with the extra support and instruction they need to achieve success on the EOG.

The Iraq benchmarks, however, do not appear to be designed to engender success. Take, for instance, those currently under discussion: ordering the Iraqi government to fulfill promises on allocating oil resources, amending its constitution and expanding democratic participation. These so-called benchmarks are merely goals the United States would like to see the Iraqi government achieve. According to Vali Nasr, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, little is being done on the ground to help the Iraqi government move toward them. “…The United States is looking for a way to extricate itself from Iraq, and also to put pressure on the Iraqi government to achieve the desired goals without actually helping the Iraqi government with a negotiations process, with a regional engagement that would facilitate it,” Nasr explained in a May 15 interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep . Since neither the Republican nor the Democrats appear interested in providing Iraqi politicians with the tools they need to solve the country’s problems, benchmarks in this case add up to a cheap rationalization for withdrawal. In Nasr’s opinion, they are designed to provide a domestic political solution for America rather than a basis for meaningful success in Iraq. To look at it from Bush’s perspective, imposing penalties when the Iraqi government fails to meet these goals would be tantamount to denying a failing student the access to the materials he or she needs to improve.

Politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, should avoid equating accountability with benchmarks; while the former aims to penalize the party most responsible for failure, the latter should be a measure of weaknesses that need to be addressed by all concerned parties. Does this mean I think Iraqis shouldn’t be accountable for getting their country together? Certainly not. But perhaps they might be more convinced of the urgency of the matter if American politicians would stop hiding behind their leveling-staffs, set a date for U.S. troop withdrawal, and put all possible resources into helping the Iraqi government meet these goals by that date.

After all, school children must face that fact that EOG week is only 4 days away.