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

by Diane Ravitch

  But there is another problem with the testing regime in which we are now immersed. It does not acknowledge that noncognitive dimensions of development are as important as cognitive ones. They may even be more important. The ability to read and count matters, but so do the ability to work with other people, the ability to persevere when confronted with a difficult task, and the ability to listen and communicate well. Whether on the job or as a citizen, a person needs many traits of character and many kinds of behavior to be successful, and these are not measured by standardized tests. Being able to select the right bubble of four possibilities is not a skill of great value once one leaves school. But the ability to collaborate with others to get a task accomplished matters very much. And so too do such qualities of character as honesty, responsibility, determination, integrity, and care for others.

  The economist James Heckman has repeatedly made the case for noncognitive skills. He and a colleague at the University of Chicago wrote that “it is common knowledge outside of academic journals that motivation, tenacity, trustworthiness, and perseverance are important traits for success in life.” This is the lesson of the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” and of the book The Little Engine That Could, they said. Everyone knows of people with high IQs and high test scores who failed in life because they lacked self-discipline and drive, and of people who succeeded not because of their IQs but because they were persistent, reliable, and self-disciplined.5

  Building on the work of Heckman and others, Paul Tough writes in his book How Children Succeed that what matters most, as his subtitle declares, is “grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character.” Children don’t need more tests; they need the attitudes and values that help them succeed in the face of powerful adversity. What enables them to succeed is character. Schools don’t do a very good job of teaching character, but at the very least they should not ignore it or discount it or save all the accolades for the kids with high test scores.

  In a scholarly critique of the international focus on test scores, Henry M. Levin, a prominent economist of education, reviewed the importance of noncognitive skills. The idea of an international “race to the top” based solely on test scores makes little sense, he argued. For an individual to succeed, he or she needs interpersonal skills, the ability to relate well to others in different situations, teamwork, good judgment, problem-solving skills, motivation, the ability to listen and communicate, and the ability to plan the use of one’s time, to control one’s impulses, and to defer gratification. These attitudes and values may be even more important to employers than test scores. Indeed, employers place a high value on “punctuality, attendance, setting of goals, taking responsibility, and listening skills.” Standardized tests do not measure these attitudes and values. What matters most in life are “effort, self-discipline, persistence, cooperation, self-presentation, tolerance, respect, and other noncognitive dimensions.” Levin warns that “far from being harmless, the focus on test scores and the omission of the noncognitive impact of schools can create far-reaching damage.” As more and more pressure is exerted on schools to raise test scores, less time and attention are available to encourage the important noncognitive goals. He writes, “The instructional strategies used to raise test results, such as test preparation, cramming, tutoring, and endless memorization, may have little effect on the broader cognitive and noncognitive skills that people need if they are to perform as competent adults contributing to a dynamic economy.”6

  Leading scholars have warned that tying incentives to test scores is not a useful strategy for improving education or even test scores. A seventeen-member panel of the National Research Council conducted a nine-year study of test-based accountability and concluded that it is ineffective. “Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest-achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number of programs.”7

  Referring to No Child Left Behind, the committee identified some school-level effects, “but the measured effects to date tend to be concentrated in elementary grade mathematics, and the effects are small compared to the improvements the nation hopes to achieve.” Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke, said, “We went ahead, implementing this incredibly expensive and elaborate strategy for changing the education system without creating enough ways to test whether what we are doing is useful or not.” He added, “We’re relying on some primitive intuition about how to structure the education system without thinking deeply about it.” Kevin Lang of Boston University’s economics department, said, “None of the studies that we looked at found large effects on learning, anything approaching the rhetoric of being at the top of the international scale.” He said that the most successful effects of NCLB, according to the committee’s calculations, “moved student performance by eight-hundredths of the standard deviation, or from the 50th to the 53rd percentile.” Ariely said the report “raises a red flag for education. These policies are treating humans like rats in a maze. We keep thinking about how to reorganize the cheese to get the rats to do what we want. People do so much more than that.” Even worse, he said, was the idea that teachers could be motivated by bonuses: “That’s one of the worst ideas out there … In the process of creating No Child Left Behind, as people thought about these strategies and rewards, they actually undermined teachers’ motivations. They got teachers to care less, rather than more … [because] they took away a sense of personal achievement and autonomy.”8

  How can we escape this counterproductive approach to education, which in fact is antithetical to education itself? How can we break free of the failed belief that people can be “incentivized” to teach and to learn by threats and rewards? How can we stop relying on methods that crown some children as winners and stigmatize others as losers? Life may do that, but schools should not.

  Suppose schools used standardized tests only for purposes of information and diagnostics. One can envision a teacher requesting that a student take a specific test to determine her facility with fractions or vocabulary or grammar. The information gleaned from testing should inform the teacher about the students’ needs, not supply data to the state for meting out rewards and punishments. The primary assessments in schools should be designed to gauge the quality of student learning, such as essays, problem-solving exercises, teacher-made tests, research papers, book reports, scientific projects, computer simulations, and other demonstrations of skills and knowledge.

  Schools should treat the test scores of individual students as confidential information available only to students, parents, teachers, and, if need be, the principal. Just as doctors maintain confidentiality about their patients’ medical records, schools should view test scores as a personal record pertaining to each student. That is what the best private schools do. Student report cards should contain qualitative judgments written by children’s teachers, describing their accomplishments and their weaknesses, commending them where commendation is due and offering suggestions about how they might improve and where they need to apply greater effort. Written report cards offer the opportunity for teachers to evaluate students’ behavior and noncognitive traits as well. Do they participate in class activities? Do they complete their assignments on time? Do they work well with others? Are they good citizens of the school?

  We should have learned several lessons from the unfortunate experience of the No Child Left Behind era. First, tests are most valuable when they have no stakes attached to them; high stakes—punishments and rewards—must be used with caution as they encourage negative consequences, such as score inflation, cheating, and curriculum narrowing. Second, a good evaluation system should ask students to demonstrate and explain what they know and can do, not simply pick a right answer to a preset
question. Third, the testing system should not prioritize basic skills over other school studies. Fourth, testing should not determine what is taught and learned; tests are a measure, not the overriding goal of education.

  Much of the current demand for testing centers on evaluating teachers, not evaluating students. States are devising many new tests in every subject area, even in the arts and physical education, even in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten, so that teachers may be judged by how much their students’ test scores have gone up from September to May. The new tests are intended to measure teachers’ ability to raise test scores.

  Given what we know about the limitations of standardized tests, it is predictable that this method will not improve teaching and learning. It is predictable that reliance on this method will promote teaching to the test and narrowing the curriculum, even the occasional resort to cheating.

  There are better ways to hold teachers accountable, and they don’t involve high-stakes testing.

  Montgomery County, Maryland, has a well-established evaluation program called Peer Assistance and Review, or PAR. The county public schools enroll 145,000 students, one-third of whom are low income. PAR should be a national model of teacher evaluation, but Race to the Top has diverted attention from this successful method. It provides extra support for teachers who are struggling, both new teachers and experienced teachers, and it removes teachers who are unable or unwilling to improve. PAR engages senior teachers who are master teachers to mentor those who need help. After serving as mentors for three years, the master teachers return to their teaching assignments.9

  The system works with two groups of teachers: new teachers with no teaching experience and experienced teachers who received poor ratings from their principal. These teachers are assigned a “consulting teacher” to help them improve. The consulting teachers help teachers plan their lessons and review student work; they model lessons and identify research-based instructional strategies; they team teach with them and find appropriate resources. A panel of eight teachers and eight principals reviews the performance of the new and experienced teachers who have received one year of PAR support. The panel decides whether to offer the struggling veterans another year of PAR, to confirm their success, or to terminate their employment. The PAR panel has fired more than two hundred low-performing teachers for failure to improve. In the decade previous to PAR, only five teachers had been removed from their jobs.10

  This method of teacher evaluation has the support of teachers and principals. It works. It identifies teachers who are doing a poor job and helps them get better or removes them from the classroom. It relies on trust and professionalism. It does not rely on test scores.

  Can we hold teachers, principals, and schools accountable without the current regime of standardized testing? Yes, we can.

  Here is another model. New York City has a group of nearly thirty schools that banded together to try a different approach to teaching and learning in the mid-1990s. They did not want their students to be subject to the standardized-testing regime. They preferred performance assessment, where students were expected to demonstrate what they knew and could do to the satisfaction of a review panel of teachers, parents, and other observers. Classes at these schools emphasize teaching through discussion and inquiry. A dozen years after the New York Performance Standards Consortium began its work, it reported on its findings. The schools in the consortium have served a representative enrollment of the city’s children, with the same demographics as other public schools. Compared with students in other public schools, its students are less likely to drop out, more likely to graduate, more likely to go to college, and more likely to stay in college. The consortium schools are unusually successful in educating students who are English-language learners and students with disabilities. Such long-term, real-life outcomes are better indicators of school success than test scores.11

  Here is another possible model. Just imagine that every school district and state had a team of expert educators who regularly visited and inspected schools. They would review student work and meet with a school’s principal, teachers, parents, and students. They would analyze the demographics, the curriculum, the staff, the resources, and the condition of the school. They would gauge the readiness and progress of students who advanced to the next level of schooling, from elementary school to middle school, from middle school to high school, and from high school to postsecondary studies. Schools that are struggling to meet the needs of their students would get frequent visits. Schools that are successful would require fewer inspections; some might get a visit only once in three or four years. The evaluation team would make recommendations to help schools improve and send in support personnel when needed. It would prod the authorities to make sure the school got the resources and support it needed. The goal of the evaluation should be continuous improvement, not a letter grade or a threat of closure.

  There may be other models that would work. States and districts should be enabled to devise their own approaches, free from the perverse incentives and stigmatization of the high-stakes testing regime.

  Accountability should be turned into responsibility. Those in charge of state and local systems should be accountable and responsible for supporting schools in their care, not for closing them down. If they don’t know how to help them, they should not be in charge. Accountability begins at the top, not the bottom. Those in charge of school systems should have the experience and wisdom to make helpful changes in public policy, and they should respect the professionals in the schools. Adults should take responsibility for making schools work better to meet the needs of children and young people and to uphold high standards for the quality of education. Professional educators should be treated as professionals whose judgment matters, not as cogs in a machine, nor as compliant civil servants bound to obey their superior.

  The overemphasis on standardized testing in the past decade and more has undermined the quality of education and demoralized professional educators. Our standards and expectations for our students must be much higher and more complex than the skills needed to pass a standardized test. If we want students to be creative, if we want them to be ingenious, if we want them to be thoughtful and serious of purpose, then we must realign our means and our ends.

  CHAPTER 29

  Strengthen the Profession

  SOLUTION NO. 8 Insist that teachers, principals, and superintendents be professional educators.

  One of the most disheartening aspects of the current reform movement is its disdain for the education profession. In many states, governors and mayors have sought out non-educators, or people with meager experience in education, for positions of leadership. They have at times selected non-educators as state commissioners of education and district superintendents. Sometimes they choose a business leader, assuming that education should operate like any commercial enterprise, recording gains every quarter. Or they choose a lawyer, assuming that he or she has the legal skills to negotiate with others. Or they choose a military leader, assuming that command authority may overcome all barriers to change. Some of the worst education policies today, especially those that rely exclusively on standardized testing, have been imposed by non-educators who were wrongly hired as state or city commissioners of education. People who have devoted their careers to education are rightly offended when someone with little knowledge or experience of education is chosen to rule over them and redesign the conditions of their work.

  To raise the quality of education in our schools, states and districts must strengthen the education profession.

  Ideally, teachers should have a four-year degree with a major in the subject or subjects they plan to teach. Those who enter teaching should be well educated. They should be able to pass qualifying examinations for entry into professional education programs by demonstrating their command of reading, writing, and mathematical skills, as well as mastery of their subject or discipline.

  Once they are admitted into a professional education progra
m, they should engage in a year of study of such subjects as cognitive science, literacy, child development and adolescent psychology, the sociology of the family and the community, cultural diversity, the needs of students with disabilities, the nature of testing, and the history, politics, and economics of education. They should deepen their knowledge of the subject or subjects they plan to teach, with opportunities to plan lessons and work with mentors. They should practice teaching under the guidance of an experienced teacher. No one should be allowed to teach who has not spent a year in the study and practice of the profession.

  Once hired, they should work closely with a mentor teacher. The school and the district should provide frequent opportunities for professional development, collaboration, and intellectual stimulation for teachers, giving them opportunities to learn more about their field as well as to work with colleagues who share their interests.

  Principals should be chosen from the ranks of master teachers. Before they become principals, they should have at least seven or eight years of experience in the classroom. Their most important job as principal will be to evaluate and help teachers. They can’t do that unless they are accomplished teachers themselves.

  Superintendents should be experienced educators. In order to have the respect of those they lead, they should have a strong background as a teacher and a principal. It is foolish to choose non-educators to run school systems because they don’t know as much as those they lead. This is a recipe for hit-or-miss leadership. The superintendent should be knowledgeable about teaching and learning, about children, about curriculum, about building relationships with parents and communities, and about defusing conflict. Working with a business manager, the superintendent should make decisions about the budget and capital planning from the perspective of an educator who puts the core mission of the schools first.