Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

by Diane Ravitch

  In 2012, Melinda Gates was interviewed on the PBS NewsHour. When the interviewer asked her what was “working and what can scale up,” she responded:

  If you look back a decade ago, when we started into this work, there wasn’t even a conversation across the nation about the fact that our schools were broken, fundamentally broken. And I think that dialogue has changed. I think the American public has woken up to the fact now that schools are broken. We’re not serving our kids well. They’re not being educated for the—for technology society.4

  The Gates Foundation and others financed a lavish, well-coordinated media campaign to spread the word about our broken public schools; its leading edge was a documentary film called Waiting for “Superman.” The film, which included interviews with Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and the economist Eric Hanushek, among others, made the central points that public education was failing, that resources don’t matter, and that the best ways to fix the national crisis of low test scores were to expand the number of privately managed charters, fire ineffective teachers, and weaken the unions that protected them. It was released in September 2010 with an unprecedented publicity campaign, funded in large part by the Gates Foundation, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The film was also the centerpiece of a week of programming on NBC, which the network called “Education Nation,” as well as the subject of two programs on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television show.

  The film told the story of five children who were desperate to enroll in privately managed charter schools and whose hopes depended on winning the lottery to gain admission. Each child was adorable, and the viewers’ emotions became engaged with their plights and their dreams of escaping from awful public schools (and in one case a Catholic school). The film painted public schools as failures whose teachers were self-centered, uncaring, and incompetent. The statistics in the film about poor educational performance were misleading and erroneous, as was its idyllic portrait of charter schools. Yet the producers and promoters of the film made sure it was viewed as widely as possible, giving free screenings throughout the country to parent groups, state legislatures, even to the national conference of the PTA.5

  Waiting for “Superman” provided the charter school movement with a degree of public visibility it had never had. It also gave the movement a populist patina, making it seem that if you were concerned about the plight of poor inner-city children, you would certainly support the creation of many more charter schools. The film burnished the claim by charter advocates that they were involved in “the civil rights issue of our time,” because they were leading the battle to provide more choice to poor and disadvantaged children trapped in low-performing public schools.

  The film’s narrative, as well as the larger public discussion, was directed away from the controversial issue of privatization to the ideologically appealing concept of choice. Reformers don’t like to mention the word “privatization,” although this is indeed the driving ideological force behind the movement. “Choice” remains the preferred word, since it suggests that parents should be seen as consumers with the ability to exercise their freedom to leave one school and select another. The new movement for privatization has enabled school choice to transcend its tarnished history as an escape route for southern whites who sought to avoid court-ordered desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

  To advance the privatization agenda, it was necessary never to mention the P word and to keep repeating the C word. After all, the public had no reason to be enthusiastic about the takeover of one of its essential public institutions by private financiers and entrepreneurs. Privatization of libraries, hospitals, prisons, and other basic services had long been hailed by those on the political right, but how could one persuade entire communities to hand over their children and their public schools to private sector corporations, some of which hoped to turn a profit off their children, in order to reward their shareholders? The only way to accomplish this sleight of hand was to pursue a skillful public relations campaign that drummed in the message, over and over, that our public schools are failures, that these failures harm our children and threaten our nation’s future prosperity. Repeat it often enough, and people would come to believe that any alternative would be better than the current system.

  Once that message sank in, Americans would be ready for the antidote: eliminating the public schools they had long known and cherished as the centers of their communities.

  The prestigious Council on Foreign Relations issued a report in 2012 intended to provoke fears that the public schools not only were failing but endangered the future survival of our nation. Joel I. Klein, former chancellor of the New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state in the administration of President George W. Bush, were co-chairs of the task force that produced the report. The report warned that the nation’s public schools were a very grave threat to national security. It recited doleful statistics showing that students in the United States were not leading the world on international assessments but scoring only in the middle (but not mentioning that this was the same complaint that had been expressed in A Nation at Risk thirty years earlier). It asserted that employers could not find qualified workers and that the schools were not preparing people to serve in the military, the intelligence service, or other jobs critical to national defense. On and on went the bill of indictment against the public schools.6

  The task force offered three recommendations. One was that the states should adopt the Common Core standards in mathematics and reading, already endorsed by forty-six states. Since the Common Core standards have never been field-tested, no one knows whether they will raise test scores or cause the achievement gap among different racial, ethnic, and income groups to narrow or to widen. One study, by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, predicted that the standards would have little or no effect on academic achievement; he noted that “from 2003 to 2009, states with terrific standards raised their National Assessment of Educational Progress scores by roughly the same margin as states with awful ones.” Loveless reported that there was as much variation within states, even those with excellent standards, as between states.7

  The task force’s second recommendation was that the schools of the nation should have a “national security readiness audit” to see if they were doing their job in preparing students to meet the nation’s economic and military needs. This seemed like a hollow attempt to revive Cold War fears, given that there was no military adversary comparable to the Soviet Union. The report did not suggest what agency should conduct this audit, what it would cost, and what would happen to those schools that failed it.

  The key recommendation of the task force, whose members included leading figures in the corporate reform movement, was that more school choice was needed, specifically the expansion of privately managed charter schools and vouchers.

  If it were true that the nation faced a very grave security threat, this was not much of a call to arms to combat it, since most states had already adopted the Common Core standards and were increasing school choice in response to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

  Perhaps the most curious development over the three decades from A Nation at Risk to the 2012 report of the Council on Foreign Relations was this: what was originally seen in 1983 as the agenda of the most libertarian Republicans—school choice—had now become the agenda of the establishment, both Republicans and Democrats. Though there was no new evidence to support this agenda and a growing body of evidence against it, the realignment of political forces on the right and the left presented the most serious challenge to the legitimacy and future of public education in our nation’s history.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Facts About Test Scores

  CLAIM Test scores are falling, and the educational system is broken and obsolete.

  REALITY Test scores are at their highest point ever recorded.

  Critics have complained for many years that American students are not learning as
much as they used to or that academic performance is flat. But neither of these complaints is accurate.

  We have only one authoritative measure of academic performance over time, and that is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP (pronounced “nape”). NAEP is part of the U.S. Department of Education. It has an independent governing board, called the National Assessment Governing Board. By statute, the governing board is bipartisan and consists of teachers, administrators, state legislators, governors, businesspeople, and members of the general public.

  President Clinton appointed me to that board, and I served on it for seven years. I know that the questions asked on its examinations are challenging. I am willing to bet that most elected officials and journalists today would have a hard time scoring well on the NAEP tests administered across the nation to our students. Every time I hear elected officials or pundits complain about test scores, I want to ask them to take the same tests and publish their scores. I don’t expect that any of them would accept the challenge.

  Critics may find this hard to believe, but students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty or fifty years ago. People who doubt this should review the textbooks in common use then and now or look at the tests then and now. If they are still in doubt, I invite them to go to the NAEP Web site and review the questions in math and science for eighth-grade students. The questions range from easy to very difficult. Surely an adult should be able to answer them all, right? You are likely to learn, if you try this experiment, that the difficulty and complexity of what is taught today far exceed anything the average student encountered in school decades ago.

  NAEP is central to any discussion of whether American students and the public schools they attend are doing well or badly. It has measured reading and math and other subjects over time. It is administered to samples of students; no one knows who will take it, no one can prepare to take it, no one takes the whole test. There are no stakes attached to NAEP; no student ever gets a test score. NAEP reports the results of its assessments in two different ways.

  • One is by scale scores, ranging from 0 to 500. Scale scores reflect what students know and can do. It is like a scale that tells you how much you weigh but offers no judgment about what you should weigh.

  • The other is achievement levels, in which the highest level is “advanced,” then “proficient,” then “basic,” and last “below basic.” Achievement levels are judgments set by external panels that determine what students should know and be able to do.

  To see how these two measures work, consider the reporting of scores for fourth-grade mathematics. If we were looking at the scale scores, we would learn that the scale score in the year 2000 was 226; by 2011, it was 241. The score is higher, but there is no qualitative judgment about what it ought to be. The maximum on the scale is 500, but there is no expectation that the nation will one day score 500 or that a score of 241 can be translated to mean 241⁄500. It is not a grade of 48 percent. It is not a passing grade or a failing grade. It is a trend line, period.

  If you take the same fourth-grade mathematics report and look at the achievement levels, you will learn that 65 percent scored at basic or above in 2000, and 82 percent were at basic or above in 2011. Unlike the scale score, which shows only the direction of the trend, the achievement levels represent a judgment about how well students are performing.

  *Significantly different (p<.05) from 2011

  *Significantly different (p<.05) from 2011

  The NAEP governing board authorized the establishment of achievement levels in the early 1990s with the hope that the public would have a better understanding of student performance, as compared with scale scores. Critics of the achievement levels complained at the time that the process was rushed and that the standards might be flawed and unreasonably high. But a member of the governing board, Chester E. Finn Jr., said it was necessary to move forward promptly and not to let the perfect become the “enemy of the good” for fear of sacrificing “the sense of urgency for national improvement.”1

  The critics were right. The achievement levels have not led to better understanding. Instead, the public is confused about what expectations are appropriate. The achievement levels present a bleak portrait of what students know and can do and, like No Child Left Behind, create the expectation that all students ought to be proficient.

  All definitions of education standards are subjective. People who set standards use their own judgment to decide what students ought to know and how well they should know it. People use their own judgment to decide the passing mark on a test. None of this is science. It is human judgment, subject to error and bias; the passing mark may go up or down, and the decision about what students should know in which grades may change, depending on who is making the decisions and whether they want the test to be hard or easy or just right. All of these are judgmental decisions, not science.

  Here are definitions of NAEP’s achievement levels:

  “Advanced” represents a superior level of academic performance. In most subjects and grades, only 3–8 percent of students reach that level. I think of it as A+. Very few students in any grade or subject score “advanced.”

  “Proficient” represents solid achievement. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) defines it as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.” From what I observed as a member of the NAGB who reviewed questions and results over a seven-year period, a student who is “proficient” earns a solid A and not less than a strong B+.

  “Basic,” as defined by the NAGB, is “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade.” In my view, the student who scores “basic” is probably a B or C student.

  “Below basic” connotes students who have a weak grasp of the knowledge and skills that are being assessed. This student, again in my understanding, would be a D or below.

  The film Waiting for “Superman” misinterpreted the NAEP achievement levels. Davis Guggenheim, the film’s director and narrator, used the NAEP achievement levels to argue that American students were woefully undereducated. The film claimed that 70 percent of eighth-grade students could not read at grade level. That would be dreadful if it were true, but it is not. NAEP does not report grade levels (grade level describes a midpoint on the grading scale where half are above and half are below). Guggenheim assumed that students who were not “proficient” on the NAEP were “below grade level.” That is wrong. Actually, 76 percent on NAEP are basic or above, and 24 percent are below basic. It would be good to reduce the proportion who are “below basic,” but it is 24 percent, not the 70 percent that Guggenheim claimed.2

  Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools, makes the same error in her promotional materials for her advocacy group called StudentsFirst. She created this organization after the mayor of Washington, D.C., was defeated and she resigned her post. StudentsFirst raised millions of dollars, which Rhee dedicated to a campaign to weaken teachers’ unions, to eliminate teachers’ due process rights, to promote charter schools and vouchers, and to fund candidates who agreed with her views. Her central assertion is that the nation’s public schools are failing and in desperate shape. Her new organization claimed, “Every morning in America, as we send eager fourth graders off to school, ready to learn with their backpacks and lunch boxes, we are entrusting them to an education system that accepts the fact that only one in three of them can read at grade level.” Like Guggenheim, she confuses “grade level” with “proficiency.” The same page has a statement that is more accurate, saying, “Of all the 4th graders in the U.S., only ⅓ of them a
re able to read this page proficiently.” That’s closer to the NAEP definition, yet it is still a distortion, akin to saying it is disappointing that only ⅓ of the class earned an A. But to deepen the confusion, the clarifying statement is followed by “Let me repeat that. Only one in three U.S. fourth-graders can read at grade level. This is not okay.” So, two out of three times, Rhee confuses “proficiency” (which is a solid A or B+ performance) with “grade level” (which means average performance).3

  What are the facts? Two-thirds of American fourth graders were reading at or above basic in 2011; one-third were reading below basic. Thirty-four percent achieved “proficiency,” which is solid academic performance, equivalent to an A. Three-quarters of American eighth graders were reading at or above basic in 2011; a quarter were reading below basic. Thirty-four percent achieved “proficiency,” equivalent to a solid A. (See graph 5; graphs 5–41 appear in the appendix.)

  Unfortunately, you can’t generate a crisis atmosphere by telling the American public that there are large numbers of students who don’t earn an A. They know that. That is common sense. Ideally, no one would be “below basic,” but that lowest rating includes children who are English-language learners and children with a range of disabilities that might affect their scores. Only in the dreams of policy makers and legislators is there a world where all students reach “proficiency” and score an A. If everyone scored an A or not less than a B+, the reformers would be complaining about rampant grade inflation—and they would be right.

  In recent years, reformers complained that student achievement has been flat for the past twenty years. They make this claim to justify their demand for radical, unproven strategies like privatization. After all, if we have spent more and more and achievement has declined or barely moved for two decades, then surely the public educational system is “broken” and “obsolete,” and we must be ready to try anything at all.