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

by Diane Ravitch

  So, contrary to the loud complaints of the reform chorus, American students are doing quite well in comparison to those of other advanced nations. Are the test scores of American students falling? No. Between 1995 and 2011, the mathematics scores of our students in fourth grade and eighth grade increased significantly. In science, the scores did not fall; they were about the same in both years. In reading, the scores increased from 2001 to 2011.12

  Although the media did not report the improvement, some reformers may recover from the shock of seeing American students performing well on international assessments by claiming credit. See, they might say, all that testing has raised our standing on the international tests. Perhaps the constant drilling in reading and mathematics did have some effect on test performance—as Yong Zhao points out, Chinese educators long ago perfected the art of test taking—but it would be ludicrous to give credit to the reformers’ other strategies. The number of students enrolled in charters and holding vouchers (perhaps 4 percent of American students) was too small to matter, and test-based evaluation of teachers was too new to affect student performance on tests taken in 2011. To what must certainly be the chagrin of our reformers, American public schools produced these strong results.

  What we can say with reasonable assurance is that American students have never been number one on the international assessments and—over the past half century—more typically scored either about average or even in the bottom quartile. It should thus be a source of satisfaction that in the latest international assessments of mathematics, science, and reading American students performed very well, and their performance is not declining.

  But what do these tests mean, and do they matter?

  Recall that A Nation at Risk warned that if we didn’t change course, our nation was in deep trouble. We stood to lose our global leadership, our economy, and even our identity as a people. A very stern warning. But thirty years after that warning was issued, the American economy was the largest in the world, and the nation did not seem to be in danger of losing its identity or its standing in the world. How could this be?

  Some of our policy makers look longingly at the test scores of Singapore, Japan, and South Korea even as those nations look to us and try to figure out how to make their schools more attentive to creativity and inquiry-based learning. Others look to Finland as a model, ignoring the fact that educators in Finland do not share our national obsession with testing. Finnish educators profess not to care about their standing on the international tests, other than to note that doing well protects their schools from demands for testing and accountability. Unlike us, the Finns place a high premium on creativity, the arts, and problem solving and still manage to do well on international tests, without subjecting their students to a steady diet of standardized testing.

  Yong Zhao sees the decentralization and absence of standardization in American education as one of its strengths. He writes, “American education has many problems, but to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, it is the worst form of education except for all others that have been tried. The decentralized system with local governance is a fundamentally sound framework that has evolved within the American context, that has led to America’s economic prosperity and scientific preeminence so far, and that is being studied and copied by others.” He worries that in our eagerness to copy nations with higher test scores, we may sacrifice the qualities of individualism and creativity that have been the source of our nation’s economic, social, and technological success.13

  Yong Zhao writes that China wants to transform itself from “a labor-intensive, low-level manufacturing economy into an innovation-driven knowledge society.” Innovative people, he says, create an innovation-driven society. “Innovative people cannot come from schools that force students to memorize correct answers on standardized tests or reward students who excel at regurgitating spoon-fed knowledge.” He asks the obvious questions: “If China, a developing country aspiring to move into an innovative society, has been working to emulate U.S. education, why does America want to abandon it?” Why would Americans “allow the government to dictate what their children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated”? Continuing to pursue this course of action, he warns, can do serious damage to American education because it demoralizes educators and at the same time “denies the real cause of education inequality—poverty, funding gaps, and psychological damages caused by racial discrimination—by placing all responsibilities on schools and teachers.”14

  The Chinese public “seems eager to embrace what is viewed as a more liberal and creative system.” Zhao quotes a Chinese journalist who was a visiting scholar in Arizona in the 1990s. The journalist admired American education because it had “no uniform textbooks, no standardized tests, no ranking of students, this is American education.” The journalist’s ten-year-old son attended an American school, and the father was impressed:

  American classrooms don’t impart a massive amount of knowledge into their children, but they try every way to draw children’s eyes to the boundless ocean of knowledge outside the school; they do not force their children to memorize all the formulae and theorems, but they work tirelessly to teach children how to think and ways to seek answers to new questions; they never rank students according to test scores, but they try every way to affirm children’s efforts, praise their thoughts, and protect and encourage children’s desire and effort.15

  Zhao observed that “what the Chinese found valuable in American education is the result of a decentralized, autonomous system that does not have standards, uses multiple criteria for judging the value of talents, and celebrates individual differences.”

  Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian American technology entrepreneur and academic, challenged the popular perception that U.S. schools are failing and that we are doing poorly in comparison to those in China and India. It is true, he said, that the schools of those nations are “fiercely competitive,” and that children spend most of their childhood “memorizing books on advanced subjects.” This kind of education has been a hindrance, he wrote, and that is why so many engineers trained in their schools and universities must spend two or three years unlearning the habits instilled by years of rote memorization. By contrast, American students learn independence and social skills. “They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation.”16

  The attitudes and skills that Wadhwa admires are the very ones that are sacrificed by the intensive focus on standardized testing that has been foisted on American schools by federal policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

  Keith Baker, who worked for many years as an analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, asked, “Are international tests worth anything?” Do they predict the future of a nation’s economy? He reviewed the evidence and concluded that for the United States and about a dozen of the world’s most advanced nations, “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless. There is no association between test scores and national success, and, contrary to one of the major beliefs driving U.S. education policy for nearly half a century, international test scores are nothing to be concerned about. America’s schools are doing just fine on the world scene.”17

  Baker argued that the purveyors of doom and gloom were committing the “ecological correlation fallacy.” It is a fallacy to generalize that what is good for an individual (a higher test score, for example) must be right for the nation as a whole. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, he said, but evidence, not just an assumption, is required to make the case. To test the predictive value of the international assessments, he used the results of the First International Mathematics Study, given in 1964 to thirteen-year-olds in twelve nations. Students in the United States placed next to last, ahead of Sweden.

  Baker looked at per capita gross domestic product of the nations whose students competed in 1964. He found that “the higher a nation’s test
score 40 years ago, the worse its economic performance on this measure of national wealth—the opposite of what the Chicken Littles raising the alarm over the poor test scores of U.S. children claimed would happen.” The rate of economic growth improved, he held, as test scores dropped. There was no relationship between a nation’s productivity and its test scores. Nor did high test scores bear any relationship to quality of life or livability, and the lower-scoring nations in the assessment were more successful at achieving democracy than those with higher scores.

  But what about creativity? On this measure, the United States “clobbered the world,” wrote Baker, with more patents per million people than any other nation. A certain level of educational achievement may be considered “a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success.”

  The United States has been a successful nation, Baker argues, because its schools cultivate a certain “spirit,” which he defines as “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.”

  Baker has a message for the reformers, foundation executives, journalists, policy makers, and government officials who have foisted an unhealthy obsession with testing and test scores on our nation’s schools:

  For more than a quarter of a century, the American public has been barraged by politicians and pundits claiming that America’s schools are disaster zones because we are not at or near the top of the league standings in test scores. This claim is flat out wrong. It is wrong in fact, and it is wrong in theory. For almost 40 years, those who believe this fallacious theory have been leading the nation down the wrong path in education policy. It turns out that the elementary teachers who have said all along that there is more to education than what is reflected in test scores were right and the “experts” were wrong.

  Trying to raise America’s test scores in comparison to those of other nations is worse than pointless. It looks to be harmful, for the only way to do it is to divert time, energy, skill, and resources away from those other factors that propel the U.S. to the top of the heap on everything that matters: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  The fixation with test scores also harms the nation by diverting time, attention, and resources away from America’s real educational problems, such as too few minorities graduating from college, the run-down schools in the nation’s inner cities, misdirected parental interference in schools, and the lack of parental and administrative support for teachers. There are more, of course, but nowhere on the list of our educational problems should we ever again find worries over our performance on tests compared to that of other nations.

  As Yong Zhao has pointed out, it is bizarre for the world’s leader in science and technology, the nation with the most powerful economy in the world, to be on a perpetual hunt for another nation to emulate. Of course, nations should learn from one another, but why would we want to copy the rote systems that nations like China and India are trying to shed? Why would we abandon the intellectual freedom and professional autonomy that have produced a spirit of inquiry and a love of tinkering and innovation? Why would we kill the seed corn of entrepreneurship by squeezing all of our children into a uniform mold? Why would we insist on judging their individual worth by their ability to guess the right answer to prescribed questions? Why do we not appreciate what we have that works and focus instead on solving our genuine problems?

  More testing does not make children smarter. More testing does not reduce achievement gaps. More testing does nothing to address poverty and racial isolation, which are the root causes of low academic achievement. More testing will, however, undermine the creative spirit, the innovative spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit that have made our economy and our society successful. Used wisely, to identify student learning problems, testing can be useful to teachers. But testing should be used diagnostically, not to hand out rewards or punishments.

  Surely, there is value in structured, disciplined learning, whether in history, literature, mathematics, or science; students need to learn to study and to think; they need the skills and knowledge that are patiently acquired over time. Just as surely, there is value in the activities and projects that encourage innovation. The incessant demand for more testing and standardization advances neither.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Facts About High School Graduation Rates

  CLAIM The nation has a dropout crisis, and high school graduation rates are falling.

  REALITY High school dropouts are at an all-time low, and high school graduation rates are at an all-time high.

  Everyone knows” that there is a dropout crisis in America and that huge numbers of young people never get a high school diploma. We read it in the newspapers, we see it in television documentaries, we hear annual reports on “the dropout crisis.” The conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse.

  But it is not true.

  The nation does not have a dropout crisis, and high school graduation rates are not falling. Those students who do not complete high school are certainly disadvantaged in their ability to earn a living, and a disproportionate number of them are African American and Hispanic students who drop out of highly segregated schools. Being poorly educated is a handicap in life, and we should strive to educate everyone well. But let us direct our efforts to improve the situation by relying on accurate information.

  Having a high school diploma is crucial for entry into almost any line of work these days, so it is important that everyone have one. This may be a mark of credential inflation, as there are many jobs where a diploma is required but not really necessary, such as truck driving, housekeeping, retail sales, and home health care. A high school diploma signifies, if nothing else, the ability to persist and complete high school. Certainly, all people should have the literacy and numeracy to survive in life, as well as the historical and civic knowledge to carry out their political and civic responsibilities. Unfortunately, the pressure to raise graduation rates—like the pressure to raise test scores—often leads to meaningless degrees, not better education.

  As a nation, we should continue to strive to raise the graduation rate and to reduce the dropout rate, but we should do so based on real facts, not based on fear-driven and inaccurate assertions.

  Not until 1940 did the high school graduation rate reach 50 percent. The graduation rate dropped during World War II, as young men went into the armed forces, but rose to 70 percent by 1970. By 1990, the four-year graduation rate reached 74 percent and remained virtually flat until 2010. (See graph 32.) In 2012, the Department of Education announced that the four-year graduation rate had reached 78.2 percent in 2010, the first significant increase in three decades. Nevada and the District of Columbia had the lowest graduation rates, while Wisconsin and Vermont had the highest. Headlines about the high school graduation “crisis” refer to the apparent long-term stagnation of the four-year graduation rate. This is the figure often cited by the secretary of education, other government officials, and many academics to raise alarms about the condition of American education.1

  The crisis talk that has been so common in recent years has fastened on dropout rates and graduation rates as sure signs of the low quality of American education, but the picture is more complicated. The persistent four-year rate of 75 to 78 percent may signify that nearly a quarter of our young people, for whatever reasons, are unable or unwilling to complete their studies in the traditional four years. Or it may signify that many high schools are maintaining standards for graduation and not granting degrees to those who are not qualified to graduate.

  The U.S. Department of Education uses the four-year completion rate as the gold standard; this method pro
duces the lowest possible graduation rate. It does not account for students who take more time to graduate or who earn a GED.

  The four-year graduation rate is one way to measure graduation rates, but it is not the only way. Many young people take longer than four years to earn a high school diploma. Some graduate in August, not May or June. Some take five or six years. Others earn a GED. When their numbers are added to the four-year graduates, the high school graduation rate is 90 percent.2 (See graph 33.)

  Thus, it is accurate to say that only about three-quarters of American students get a high school diploma in four years. And it is accurate to say that the graduation rate of 2010 (which was 78 percent) is only a few points higher than it was in 1970, when it was 70 percent. But it is also accurate to say that 90 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a high school diploma.

  In contrast to the current rhetoric of crisis, Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy of the Economic Policy Institute analyzed census data for the past four decades, not four-year graduation rates, and concluded that “there has been remarkable progress in raising both high school completion rates and in closing racial/ethnic gaps in high school completion.” In reviewing the debate among scholars, Mishel and Roy offer a valuable guide to the different ways of calculating graduation rates.3

  Mishel and Roy recognize that some students take longer than four years to get their high school diplomas. Some get a GED instead of a four-year diploma. By the time the census counts high school graduates in the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old cohort, 90 percent have a high school diploma. It’s true that a GED does not carry the same prestige as a four-year diploma, and economists say that holders of the GED do not earn as much as those with a four-year high school diploma. But most colleges accept a GED as evidence of graduation, and those with a GED have a chance to get postsecondary education and are likely to earn more than high school dropouts. Whatever its drawbacks, the GED is nonetheless a high school diploma, and for many young people whose high school education was interrupted, for whatever reason, it is a lifeline.