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

by Diane Ravitch

  WRAPAROUND SOLUTION: Parent education will support and intensify the impact of all other interventions.

  Parents are their children’s first and most important educators.

  Parents—whether there is one or two of them—determine the conditions of their child’s upbringing, given their knowledge and their means.

  Families have a greater influence on children’s success in school than teachers.

  Many parents need no outside assistance to raise their children well. But some do, either because they do not know how to parent well or because they are under enormous financial or emotional stress.

  All of the other interventions are reinforced by parent involvement. Some parents need support when they first bring home a newborn. High-quality preschool works best when parents get involved and learn how to help their child when he or she is not in school. Good programs teach parents to converse with their children in a way that builds vocabulary, to refrain from harsh disciplinary methods, to resolve conflicts amicably, to read to their children, and to engage them in thinking about the consequences of their actions. Some parents learn to help their children have a healthy lifestyle with a good diet and good hygiene, to limit their television-watching time, and to get them to do their homework.

  When parents are actively involved in their children’s lives, their children feel their support and their love. When they express interest in their schoolwork, children understand that their schoolwork matters to their parents. When they read to them, children learn to value language. When they smile and nod approval, children take pride in what they have done.

  Not every parent knows how to feed and care for a newborn. One of the exemplary national programs is the Nurse-Family Partnership, which helps young women during their pregnancies and even after. In this program, now active in forty states, registered nurses make regular home visits to poor women during their pregnancies and for two years after the child is born. The nurse visits once a week during the second trimester of pregnancy, then every other week. After the child is born, the nurse pays a weekly visit for six weeks to be sure the mother gets the advice and support she needs for her baby. The visits are then scheduled every other week until the baby reaches twenty months and continue once a month until the baby is two years old.

  During the pregnancy, the nurses “complete 24-hour diet histories, plot weight gains, coordinate visits with physicians, assess use of cigarettes, alcohol, and illegal drugs, and, if necessary, devise behavioral-change strategies to reduce use of such substances.” After the birth of the child, the nurses help mothers “improve the physical and emotional care of their children.” They work to “enhance parent-child interactions. Nurses help parents to understand their infants’ and toddlers’ communicative signals, enhance parents’ interest in playing with their children in ways that promote emotional and cognitive development, and help to create safer households for children. Nurses also help women establish and clarify their own goals, to solve problems that may interfere with their educations, finding work, and planning future pregnancies.”8

  Evaluations of the Nurse-Family Partnership found “significant positive effects on pregnancy outcomes, child health and development, and family economic self-sufficiency.” Randomized field trials reported “improved prenatal health, fewer subsequent pregnancies, increased maternal employment, and increased intervals between births for mothers, and fewer childhood injuries and improved school readiness for children.”

  In their recommendations for narrowing the achievement gap, Wilder, Allgood, and Rothstein recommend that the Nurse-Family Partnership model be continued until the age of three, when preschool begins, so there is no gap in promoting the well-being of children who grow up in low-income homes.

  Not every parent knows how to help a child grow and develop in healthy ways. Not every parent has had a good example to follow. Not every parent has the background knowledge to help a child succeed in school.

  If we help them, we help our society.

  CHAPTER 28

  Measure Knowledge and Skills with Care

  SOLUTION NO. 7 Eliminate high-stakes standardized testing and rely instead on assessments that allow students to demonstrate what they know and can do.

  Everyone interested in education knows about Finland. It is the counterexample to our own practices and policies. That nation determined to overhaul its educational system in the 1970s. It raised the admission standards for its teacher education colleges. They became so selective that today only 10 percent of those who apply are accepted. Every teacher has five years of education and training, including a master’s degree. Teachers are highly respected, as respected as any other profession. As professionals, they exercise broad autonomy in their classrooms and their schools, where they make decisions about pedagogy and curriculum. Because they are held in high regard, no one questions their professionalism. There is a broad national curriculum, but it leaves considerable room for every school to make its own decisions about what to teach and how to teach it. And here is the kicker: Finnish students never take a standardized test until they apply to college. Teachers prepare their own tests. They are trusted to determine whether their students are making progress and to decide what additional help they need.

  Finland has a national sampling system akin to our National Assessment of Educational Progress. There are no scores for individual students. Teachers are not judged by their students’ test scores, because students don’t take standardized tests and there are no scores. There is no merit pay based on scores because there are no scores. All teachers belong to a union; all principals belong to the same union. Oh, and one thing more: Less than 5 percent of children in Finland are growing up in poverty, compared with 23 percent in this country. That makes a huge difference.

  Finland has built a strong and successful public school system. There are no charter schools and no vouchers. Finland has built a strong education profession. There is no Teach for Finland. Finns boast that there are good public schools in every city, every town, and every village.

  For the past decade, Finland has performed well on every international assessment in reading, mathematics, and science, without making that performance its goal. The Finns improved their schools without testing their students, without merit pay, without privatization, without competition among schools, and without waving carrots and sticks at their teachers. They built a strong education profession, a trusted corps of career educators, and a high-quality public school system. Every child gets one meal a day and medical care. Pasi Sahlberg, the leading exponent of the Finnish school system, describes the approach now in vogue in the United States as the “global education reform movement,” or GERM, a virus characterized by testing, accountability, choice, and competition.1

  The Finnish answer is starkly different from our own education policies. The Finns say, select good recruits for the teaching profession; educate them well; prepare them well for the work they will be expected to do; trust their judgment; respect the profession; make sure that children grow up healthy and ready to learn; forget about standardized testing; forget about accountability; saturate children in the early years with whatever help they need to keep up with their peers; provide a curriculum that is balanced with academics, arts, and physical activity.

  Perhaps this is too great a leap for most Americans to take. How will we hold students and teachers and schools accountable without test scores? We tend to forget that the United States somehow managed to become the world’s leading economic and technological power before the advent of test-based accountability.

  Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, public education has been caught up in a frenzied effort to raise test scores. The legislative authors of NCLB assumed that a regime of punishments and rewards would make teachers work harder, which would in turn produce higher test scores.

  The assumption of the law’s framers that students would learn more if their teachers were enticed with carrots and threatened with sticks never made
sense. After all, it is students, not teachers, who ultimately decide whether they want to learn more. And the law’s assumption that standardized tests are the best way to measure learning has never been established. If that were true, all private and independent schools in the nation would be devoted to standardized testing, but they are not.

  The entire edifice of No Child Left Behind and its successor, Race to the Top, sits on the shaky foundation of standardized testing. The tests label, rank, and grade students, teachers, principals, and schools. They are ubiquitous. Schools that enroll mostly middle-income and affluent students get high scores and “succeed,” while schools that enroll large numbers of impoverished black and Hispanic students and students with disabilities are stigmatized as “failing” schools. Schools that test students before admitting them are “successful” schools. The tests turn out to be a fairly reliable measure of advantage and disadvantage, of family income and education.2

  Tests may be useful when they are used appropriately. They should be used to gather information about schools and districts so that programs may be assessed. They should be used for diagnostic purposes, to determine which students need more help with specific problems. They should be used to establish trends. The best tests have no stakes attached to them. The National Assessment of Educational Progress is an exemplar. It tests samples of students. No one knows who will take it. No one can prepare for it. No single student takes the entire test. No individual or school is punished or rewarded because of the scores on NAEP.

  High-stakes testing can sometimes be useful for students because the prospect of a test encourages them to study the material the test will cover. But much of the test’s usefulness depends on its quality. Tests that ask students to explain or demonstrate what they know elicit thoughtful responses. Multiple-choice tests may gauge little more than students’ ability to guess the right answer. A steady diet of multiple-choice questions over a dozen years may impair students’ ability to think critically and to reflect on alternate solutions to problems; instead, they are taught to guess “the right answer.”

  The tests should be a measure, not a goal of instruction. Standardized tests are not designed to measure school or teacher quality; they are designed to assess how well a student can read or do mathematics in comparison to others in the same grade. The tests are a snapshot on one day of what students know or remember or can figure out. They provide a means of comparing students, schools, and districts. But they are an imperfect measure.

  The tests are not scientific instruments, like a thermometer. They are social constructions whose questions and answers are written by fallible human beings. Multiple-choice questions are scored by computers, but written responses are typically graded by hourly, low-wage workers. Even though many of those test graders have no background in education, their decisions affect the fate of students, the reputations of teachers, and the survival of entire schools.

  Frankly, anyone who reads Todd Farley’s Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, would never again believe the results of standardized tests. Farley worked in the testing industry for fifteen years, scoring state tests and NAEP tests. Having seen the industry from the inside, he became completely cynical about it. In his book, he goes into elaborate detail about the hourly workers who grade standardized tests, the pressure they are under to complete their work quickly, and the arbitrary decisions that determine how they grade student answers. He writes, “I would say standardized testing is akin to a scientific experiment in which everything is a variable. Everything. It seems to me the score given to every response, and ultimately the final results given to each student, depended as much on the vagaries of the testing industry as they did on the quality of the student answers.” He maintains that it is “absolute folderol” to believe that a standardized test is capable of making fine distinctions about any student’s skills and abilities or that it is better to trust the testing industry instead of classroom teachers.

  Based on his career in the testing industry, Farley concludes that it is wrong to entrust the fate of students, teachers, and schools to an industry that is

  unashamedly in the business of making money instead of listening to the many people who went into education for the more altruistic desire to do good. It means giving credence to the thoughts of mobs of temporary employees who only dabble in assessment while ignoring the opinions of the men and women who dedicate themselves daily to the world of teaching and learning … It means ignoring the conclusions about student abilities of this country’s teachers—the people who instruct and nurture this country’s children every single day—to instead heed the snap judgments of bored temps giving fleeting glances to student work.3

  Another writer, Dan DiMaggio, described his experience as a test grader for a major corporation:

  Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies. Some of us scorers are retired teachers, but most are former office workers, former security guards, or former holders of any of the diverse array of jobs previously done by the currently unemployed. When I began working in test scoring three years ago, my first “team leader” was qualified to supervise, not because of his credentials in the field of education, but because he had been a low-level manager at a local Target.4

  The tests today are a club, a sword held over the heads of teachers and principals. This places too much emphasis on the tests. It distorts the purposes of education. We no longer speak of education as a process of human development. We no longer discuss the role of education in preparing citizens for our democracy. We no longer consider how education builds character. We focus only on one thing: test scores. The truly important goals of education are neglected.

  Even if state and federal test scores go up, and they have gone up in recent years (though less than they did prior to the implementation of NCLB), it is likely that students are getting a worse education. If they are not learning to think, to interpret, and to understand, then they are not getting a good education. If they are learning to pick the right answer rather than ask the right question, they are not getting a good education. If they are learning to take state tests but not learning the underlying skills and knowledge needed for unanticipated situations, they are getting a bad education. The standardized tests don’t measure the ability to interpret ambiguous situations or to understand complex issues.

  Worse, the heavy reliance on multiple-choice tests is itself deeply antagonistic to true learning. It teaches false lessons. It teaches students that questions have one right answer, and in life that is seldom correct. It is true that two plus two is always four. But many questions that people encounter on the job or in real life have answers shaded in gray. To figure out a complex social or political issue, adults must be able to assess the validity of the information they were given, to weigh alternatives, and to choose among courses of action that may or may not be right. In real life, people do not always agree on the right answer. The tests we now value don’t teach what matters most, which is the ability to think for oneself.

  There is a dubious assumption behind the entire testing mania. The testing advocates say that students who get higher test scores will get more education and will get better jobs and make more money. So, if everyone gets higher test scores, then everyone will get better jobs and make more money. But test scores don’t change the shape of the economy. No matter how high test scores go, they will not restore the good middle-class jobs that disappeared in the recession of 2008. Schools don’t control the economy. They prepare people with the skills and knowledge to qualify for jobs, but sch
ools don’t create jobs. In the 1930s, school enrollments increased, and people were better educated, but the schools and their graduates did not end the Great Depression. Public policy and events did.

  Even more curious is the unwarranted belief that more testing and accountability will close the achievement gaps between rich and poor, blacks and whites, and Hispanics and whites. Since the source of the gaps is socioeconomic inequality, it is sheer fantasy to believe that the test scores of these groups will converge if only there are higher standards plus more testing and accountability. The assumption is that those who teach the low-performing groups are not really trying, and a carrot or a stick will motivate them to try harder.

  Since the tests are scored around norms with a bell curve, there will always be some students at the top of the curve and others at the bottom, with most clustered in the middle. The bell curve is statistically unforgiving. There was never a time when all or almost all test takers were in the top half. And there is this nagging fact about standardized tests: they are highly correlated with family income and education. On every test ever administered, the children whose families have the highest income are overrepresented at the top, and the children whose families have the lowest income are overrepresented at the bottom. Of course, there are some poor kids at the top and some rich kids at the bottom, but on average family income is a reliable predictor of test scores. This is true of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, the ACT, state tests, and international tests. And it is true in every other nation.

  This being the case, why would anyone expect to close the achievement gap by imposing more testing and accountability? Those at the top will still be at the top and imagine that they deserve their exalted position, and those at the bottom will remain at the bottom, convinced that the tests have certified their lesser achievement and their lesser value. The test scores grade, rank, and brand students, who believe that they deserve the labels they receive. After all, the tests are supposedly “objective.”