Our obsession with accountability and market-driven educational reforms has turned teachers in to robots and robbed our students of our teachers’ creativity.
That’s teh point of this week’s Dispatches.
Bret Schundler jumps into the voucher hypocrisy pool, dismissing stats that contradict his claims and call into question his proposals.
Someone should listen to Charles Murray.
The conservative intellectual, famous for his absurd treatise on IQ and biology, has come around to what I see as a sensible view of standardized testing: It is badly flawed and can be detrimental to students.
In today’s New York Times, he argues that recent studies “that have failed to show major improvements in test scores” for charter schools can not be “explained away.” But, he says, that does not mean that the charters are failures. Rather, he poses an interesting question:
Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.
I can’t argue. I’ve been saying for a long time that allegedly objective tests rarely are objective and that test scores offer only a very small piece of the puzzle in judging the progress of students and schools or the abilities of teachers.
Murray turned away from the standardized test several years ago for sound reasons. He calls the SAT “superfluous” and “outright bad for American education,” providing
little information about high school students not already provided by their grades and scores on so-called achievement tests, exams that are tied to specific academic subjects.
He believes “dumping the SAT would have numerous benefits:”
scuttling what he sees as a deceptive test-prep industry, undercutting the unproductive smugness that comes from thinking one’s high SAT score reflects personal glory (he views it as the luck of the genetic draw), and short-circuiting the contention that the SAT amounts to a conspiracy against low-income students.
In today’s Times, he expands on this theme, saying that “measurable differences in schools explain little about differences in test scores.”
The reason for the perpetual disappointment is simple: Schools control only a small part of what goes into test scores.
Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.
And a good students has just as little room to prove the same.
He remains a supporter of charter schools — a point with which I vehemntly disagree — but he’s right on testing and one can only hope that other conservatives follow, making it more likely that the testing regime that now rules our educational establishment will fall.
Here’s my Dispatches column, written in response to Chris Christie’s appointment of school-voucher advocate Bret Schundler as education commissioner.
This is not a good start, as far as I am concerned, appointing one of the more conservative Republicans in the state and its biggest advocate for school vouchers as commissioner of education.
Brett Schundler, former mayor of Jersey City, remains an advocate — but then, so is Gov. Chris Christie. But the voucher issue was not one that was front and center during a campaign focused on one issue — taxes — and needs to be explored during the confirmation process.
Schundler needs to be asked tough questions about school choice — not just about how it improves education for some, but what happens to the schools that lose students. It is easy to say that competition will improve all schools, but that is not how it is going to work.
Hank Kalet 