I get The New York Times. Each morning, it identifies the world's battlegrounds — military and ideological, political and economic. I discount and forgive its plainly "liberal" bent. If I owned a paper, it would have a tone of sorts.
But there are limits. One, I suggest, is the duty of all media, at an ethical minimum, to recognize, if only to dismiss, plausible arguments on all sides of any public issue. Readers deserve to know the writer's pre-judgments.
The Times is a collection of heady folk; one expects the best from them. Sadly, along with most of their profession, they have remained silent on the strongest argument for extending to the lower-income parent the same power of choice among all educators that is available, and so precious, to our middle- and upper-income classes.
In April, the Times offered its view on the efficacy of one form of empowerment for the non-rich under the headline: "Vouchers Found to Lower Test Scores in Washington Schools." The article discussed a study originating from the anti-voucher Obama Department of Education; it found that vouchers for choice of private schools by poor families in D.C. were followed by slightly lower scores on required tests. The Times cited a few concurring studies but strangely failed to note that these reports contradict two dozen other professional analyses.
But that particular form of selective reportage is not the only concern here. Much more troubling is the Times writer's assumption that test scores are the litmus test for success in school, and that, if scores slightly declined, there would be no justification for letting poor parents make those choices so dear to the rest of us.
The test score infatuation is still widely shared by the media. Historically, it stems in considerable part from the purely economic argument for choice so welcome to the utilitarian minds of the '60s and even today. (more…)
Over the past two weeks, we've aired six perspectives on testing and school choice.
We can't claim to have found all the answers, but we hope our contributors have raised some important issues in ways that go beyond the usual talking points.
Note: This is the sixth installment in our series on testing and educational choice. See previous installments here.
by Jason Bedrick
Tests are an important and perhaps necessary part of schooling. When used properly, they help teachers assess student progress, show students where they need to improve, and provide parents with crucial information when deciding where to enroll their children. What frustrates parents and teachers is when achievement on standardized tests becomes the primary purpose of schooling, rather than an aid to learning.
Mandating that private schools participating in school choice programs administer the state test can also stifle innovation and diversity and drive schools away, thereby limiting the choices available to families. Fortunately, the private sector can provide less rigid and more comprehensive forms of accountability that will empower families to make informed choices.
The Benefits and Limitations of Testing
Tests can provide valuable information, but the misuse of testing can have significant unintended consequences, particularly when the tests are transformed from diagnostic tools into cudgels. As the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Robert Pondiscio wrote recently, the “data from tests are some of the most valuable intelligence we can access in the struggle to improve our education system.”
However, he cautions, misusing that data can distort the system:
[T]he moment you set out to trigger corrective actions and interventions using tests (which are, after all, designed merely to measure student performance), you are fundamentally shifting their function from providing evidence of student performance to something closer to the very purpose of schooling. This is precisely what has been occurring in our schools over the last decade or more. When parents complain about over-testing, what they are responding to is not the tests themselves—which take up a vanishingly small amount of class time—but the effects of test-and-prep culture, which has fundamentally altered the experience of schooling for our children.
Note: This is the fifth installment of our guest series on testing and educational choice. See the previous entries here. Coming Tuesday: Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute.
by Tony Bennett
The current issues with standardized testing, and the potential solution to those issues, both lie in the same place: Alignment to the standards. It's kind of wonky issue, but I think it holds the key to a more workable accountability system. Let me explain.
When we began the whole Common Core movement in earnest back in 2010, most of us reformers had a shared belief. We agreed the next generation of assessments needed to be closely aligned to the new standards, all the way down to the item level. That is deep alignment. We wanted to be confident that questions on the tests would measure students’ progress toward meeting all the granular expectations within the standards.
Deep alignment would give states the confidence they needed to use the tests to assign school grades and assemble data for teacher evaluations. It would also give local school administrators a sense of security when it came time to evaluate teachers and make personnel decisions based on assessment data. Both of those are good things.
Conversely, deep alignment between the test and the standards creates some significant problems. Many of those problems led us to the current outcry by both the education establishment and some school choice advocates against assessment.
The first of those problems is testing time. Since the advent of the two multi-state assessment consortia, states have seen the time spent assessing students increase significantly. It's now common for students to spend about nine hours on their year-end assessments. If you want a test that is deeply aligned to the standards, you simply have to build a longer test to cover all the material.
Second, if students are taking tests that are so deeply aligned to the standards, that tends to dictate things like curriculum and instruction. This phenomenon feeds the "teaching to the test" and other claims about the erosion of local control, teacher creativity and the ability for some schools to break conventions. (more…)
Note: This is the fourth installment in our guest series on testing and choice. See previous contributions here. Coming Monday: Former Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett.
by Jane Watt
As chairman of the board of Marco Island Academy in Collier County, Fla., I have had an opportunity to witness firsthand how standardized testing requirements affect students, teachers and administration at a public charter school.
As a parent of three children in the public school system, I have personal experience with how testing has affected my own kids. In both cases, I have seen an unnecessary amount of stress caused by an abundance of standardized testing.
At the state and federal level, legislators have expressed a greater desire to measure student learning through assessments. In an effort to ensure that all students succeed, the U.S. has inadvertently created test-taking factories in the public school system.
Schools must have high expectations and an effective way to measure student learning. But at what point do we determine that additional testing is not the solution to a much more complex problem? Are the standardized tests aligned with the standards that are taught in class? Do the test results give teachers useful data to guide instruction? Based on my experience, the answer to these questions too often is no.
Last year, students at MIA spent approximately half their instructional days during second semester taking tests of some kind. Between the Florida Standards Assessments, mandatory end of course exams, and the advanced-curriculum AICE and Cambrige International exams, students in every class were tested, sometimes multiple times in the same course. In the pre-Cambridge Biology class, for example, students took a state-mandated Biology end-of-course exam and the pre-AICE test.
Administrators had to coordinate logistics. They had to establish seating charts prior to each test and submit them to our local district. Our small community charter school cannot afford a full-time IT team. Instead, we spent thousands of dollars to have an IT representative visit the school and set up all the computers prior to each test. Our guidance counselor doubled as a full-time test administrator. Teachers were pulled from their classrooms to proctor exams. We had to hire substitute teachers to take their place. (more…)
Note: This is the third installment in our guest series on testing and parental choice. See the first contribution here and the second here. Coming Friday: Parent and charter school leader Jane Watt.
by Michael J. Petrilli
If every school in America was pretty good — if not better — our education policy debates would largely evaporate. Politicians would feel comfortable leaving educators alone to do their thing. And they would empower parents with the ability to choose the good (or great) school that best fit their values and their children’s needs.
And in fact, that’s how we should treat the vast majority of schools today — district, charter, and private. Do they keep kids safe? Check. Can they demonstrate reasonable evidence that they are putting young people on a pathway to success in what comes next (postsecondary education, the workplace, and citizenship, especially)? Check. Fantastic! Parents, take your pick, and send the taxpayers the bill.
All the talk of backlash, opt-outs, and teachers quitting in despair would simply melt away, because both parents and educators would feel in charge again. No more micromanagement from Tallahassee or Washington. No more second-guessing decisions made on the ground. No more desperation at feeling pressured to narrow the curriculum, teach to the test, or follow bureaucratic dictates. Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’d be free at last!
If I were king, that’s exactly how our system would work for the vast majority of schools. Every five or ten years, I’d ask them for reasonable evidence that they are one, safe and two, putting their students on a pathway to success. Meanwhile, I’d publish comparable information for parents to help them make good decisions for their children, including test-score data but other indicators too. Otherwise, I’d leave schools alone. I’d throw out the rule book — no class-size mandates, no teacher evaluation requirements, nothing.
Sound good?
Here’s the one problem: not all our schools are good or great. Some are downright God-awful. They might be safe, but they aren’t putting their students on a pathway to success. Their students hardly know more in June than they knew in September. Their teachers are ill-trained, ill-equipped, and outmatched. And yet they live on, zombie-like, in the district, charter, and private school sectors. They are the payday lenders of the education system, preying mostly on low-income parents who either don’t have a choice, or, for a variety of reasons, are making bad decisions with the choices they’ve got. These schools are serving neither parents’ interests nor the public good. (more…)
Note: This is the second installment in our guest series on testing and educational choice. See the first contribution here.
by Tom Vander Ark
President Obama joined the too-much-testing bandwagon recently with a late and vapid announcement. He can read opinion polls and probably sees the end of standards-based reform, but he — and other people that care about equity — may be wondering: What’s next?
It’s clear that measurement has improved student learning and educational options for low income families. It’s also clear that American schools spend a lot of time measuring.
Let’s briefly recall how we got here.
Why test? Assessment plays five important roles in school systems: (more…)
Note: This is the first contribution to our series of guest posts on testing and choice.
by Jacqueline Cooper
We can’t help our children, especially Black children from low-income and working-class families, if we don’t know how well schools are serving them. This is especially true when it comes to expanding the high-quality options our children need to gain equity and access to great teaching and learning. This is why the Black Alliance for Educational Options and others in the education reform movement are so committed to ensuring all schools are held accountable through annual statewide tests and other measures.
But there are some allies in the movement who are concerned that parental choice programs and public charter schools may be subjected to excessive accountability standards. They contend that data from tests don’t provide information on the benefits that charters and private schools bring to the lives of children outside of academic achievement. They also argue that requiring private schools to conduct annual statewide testing as a condition for participating in voucher or opportunity scholarship programs restricts the number of schools children can attend.
Those concerns have some validity. But for the most part, they don’t have merit.
Researchers such as Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard University, through their research on the impact of teachers using student test score growth data, have demonstrated the strong correlation between achievement on tests and later economic outcomes. If we as parent choice activists don’t believe testing is valid, then why did we just celebrate charter school exam scores in Arizona or the steady progress of all students in Washington, DC on this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress? (more…)
