The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  A summary of research on charter schools by Tom Loveless and Katharyn Field of the Brookings Institution in 2009 found, as one might expect, a large divide between advocates and critics of these schools. Some researchers found positive effects, some found negative effects, but on the whole “none of the studies detects huge effects—either positive or negative.” Their review also indicated that charters probably promoted racial segregation, since parents chose schools “with a racial profile matching their own.” The authors predicted that the real debate about charter schools was ideological and would not easily be resolved. They concluded,As so often happens with competing ideologies, the empirical evidence on charter schools has not yet settled the theoretical arguments about their existence. We need better research on charter schools, it is true, a non-controversial recommendation endorsed by blue ribbon commissions. But we should not be overly optimistic that better data will settle the charter school debate. Future research will be of varying quality, the data will be mixed and difficult to interpret, and the findings subject to different interpretations. Just as it is unreasonable to expect charter schools to solve all of the problems of American education, it is unreasonable to expect research to settle all of the theoretical disputes about market-based education and school choice.48

  Buoyed by hope and the endorsement of important political figures, enthusiasm for charter schools far outstripped research evidence for their efficacy, as scholars Buckley and Schneider noted. They predicted that the demand for “evidence-based reform” was on a collision course with the demand for more charter schools. While they saw cause for optimism in some charters, they concluded that the push for charters was “characterized by too many promises that are only, at best, weakly supported by evidence . . . even the most basic descriptions of charter schools are often infused with hype. In turn, the creation of charter schools has become more than a reform; it has become a movement.”49

  Regardless of competing research studies, the charter school sector continued to expand rapidly, as states and districts turned to private agencies and entrepreneurs to solve the problems of education. As more charter schools opened, advocacy for charters in Washington and state capitals grew stronger, supported by major foundations, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, and wealthy entrepreneurs. Everyone knew the charter sector was big, bold, diverse, and getting bigger, bolder, and more diverse. Their quality ranged from excellent to awful. That’s what happens when an industry is deregulated and the sluice gates are opened to release a huge flow of innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. So, ironically, at the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as deregulation of financial markets got a bad name, many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.

  WHAT IS THE SECRET of successful charter schools, those that consistently record high standardized test scores? The higher scores may be the product of longer hours and weeks, dedicated teachers, motivated students, excellent curricula, and outstanding leaders. The scores may be affected by an encompassing culture that demands persistent effort and parental engagement. And they may be a result of peer effects. In other words, motivated students perform best when surrounded by other motivated students. Students may take their schoolwork more seriously when they are in a school where almost all their classmates are trying their best to do well and disruptive behavior is not tolerated.

  So this is the emerging scenario, particularly in urban districts. Charter schools enroll the most motivated students in poor communities, those whose parents push them to do better. Regular public schools in the same communities get the students who did not win the lottery, plus all the less motivated students. When the students who lost the lottery return to their public schools in poor neighborhoods, they will attend classes with a mix of peers, including some who just want to get by and some who are not interested in schoolwork. This seems likely to depress the academic performance of the motivated students.

  What lessons can public schools learn from the charter schools? Should they create more selective schools to hold on to motivated students? Should they separate their students by ability to prevent the unmotivated from negatively affecting the performance of the motivated? If they have longer hours and weeks, will that cause unmotivated students to become more motivated? How should regular public schools educate those who are not highly motivated and those who are not at all interested in their schoolwork, as well as those who are working hard and want a good education? These are the problems that Albert Shanker once imagined would be studied and perhaps even solved by innovative charter schools.

  As currently configured, charter schools are havens for the motivated. As more charter schools open, the dilemma of educating all students will grow sharper. The resolution of this dilemma will determine the fate of public education.

  The question for the future is whether the continued growth of charter schools in urban districts will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality. If so, we can safely predict that future studies will “prove” the success of charter schools and the failure of regular schools, because the public schools will have disproportionate numbers of less motivated parents and needier students. As charter schools increase in number and able students enroll in them, the regular public schools in the nation’s cities will be locked into a downward trajectory. This would be an ominous development for public education and for our nation.

  WITH THE ELECTION of Barack Obama as president, it seemed certain that federal support for vouchers was a dead issue, at least for the foreseeable future. For supporters of school choice, it mattered little, as they shifted their allegiance to charter schools as the vehicle that would inject market forces and competition into American education. And soon after he entered office, President Obama heartened charter school advocates by urging state legislatures to remove the caps on charter schools. The Obama administration’s Department of Education advised states that they would not be eligible for nearly $5 billion in discretionary funds unless they eliminated any legal limits on the expansion of charter schools.50

  This was puzzling. Here was a president who had been elected on a promise of change, yet he was picking up the same banner of choice, competition, and markets that had been the hallmark of his predecessors. There was little evidence that charter schools were generically better than public schools. Nothing in the record suggested that the entire sector was successful, that any charter school was better than any public school. Lost, it seemed, was the original vision of charter schools, in which they were supposed to help solve some of the hardest problems of public education. As originally imagined, charters were intended not to compete with public schools, but to support them. Charters were supposed to be research and development laboratories for discovering better ways of educating hard-to-educate children. They were not intended to siphon away the most motivated students and families in the poorest communities, but to address some of the public schools’ most urgent problems.

  In their current manifestation, charters are supposed to disseminate the free-market model of competition and choice. Now charters compete for the most successful students in the poorest communities, or they accept all applicants and push the low performers back into the public school system. Either approach further disables regular public schools in those communities by leaving the lowest-performing and least motivated students to the regular public schools. It matters not that the original proponents of charter schools had different goals. It does matter, though, that charter schools have become in many communities a force intended to disrupt the traditional notion of public schooling. The rhetoric of many charter school advocates has come to sound uncannily similar to the rhetoric of voucher proponents and of the most rabid haters of public schooling. They often sound as though they want public schools to fail; they want to convert entire districts to charter s
chools, each with its own curriculum and methods, each with its own private management, all competing for students and public dollars.

  If there is one consistent lesson that one gleans by studying school reform over the past century, it is the danger of taking a good idea and expanding it rapidly, spreading it thin. What is stunningly successful in a small setting, nurtured by its founders and brought to life by a cadre of passionate teachers, seldom survives the transition when it is turned into a large-scale reform. Whether charter schools are a sustainable reform, whether they can proliferate and at the same time produce good results, is a question yet to be resolved. Whether there is the will to close low-performing charters remains to be seen. Whether there is an adequate supply of teachers who are willing to work fifty-hour weeks is unknown. The biggest unknown is how the multiplication of charter schools will affect public education.

  In barely twenty years, the idea of school choice rapidly advanced in the public arena and captivated elite opinion. Given the accumulating evidence of its uneven results, this was surprising. Even more surprising was how few voices were raised on behalf of the democratic vision of public education.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Trouble with Accountability

  IN THE 1990S, ACCOUNTABILITY became the watchword of public officials and business leaders. Governors, corporate executives, the first Bush administration, and the Clinton administration agreed: They wanted measurable results; they wanted to know that the tax dollars invested in public education were getting a good return. Governors wanted better schools to attract new industries to their state, and business leaders complained that the nation was losing its competitive edge in the global economy. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush invited the nation’s governors to a national summit on education to set a course of action. The federal and state leaders agreed on six ambitious national goals for the year 2000 and established the National Education Goals Panel to monitor progress toward the goals.

  President Clinton enthusiastically supported the national goals (he had drafted the language for them at the Bush summit) and added two more for good measure. In 1997, Clinton asked Congress to authorize voluntary national testing in reading and mathematics for students in fourth and eighth grades, but Congress—controlled by Republicans—refused. Clinton’s proposed national tests disappeared and so did the national goals. None of the goals that had been proclaimed to much fanfare in 1990 was reached by the year 2000, and the Goals Panel quietly vanished.

  Undaunted, the second President Bush persuaded a willing Congress to pass his No Child Left Behind legislation in 2001. Democrats and Republicans alike agreed on the importance of accountability for teachers, principals, and schools, especially if their students were not achieving. The administration and Congress agreed that testing would spur school improvement. Unlike the first President Bush’s six national goals or Clinton’s eight national goals, NCLB contained one goal: All children would be “proficient” in reading and mathematics by 2014. This time, however, the goal was not merely a devoutly desired wish, but a federal mandate, with real consequences for schools whose students did not meet it.

  NCLB opened a new era of testing and accountability in American public schools. Educators and parents who objected to the new emphasis on testing were outraged. They railed against the tests, they filed lawsuits, they protested, all to no avail. Politicians dismissed them as anti-testing fanatics, and the courts rejected their lawsuits.

  The anti-testing forces lashed out against the wrong target. Testing was not the problem. Tests can be designed and used well or badly. The problem was the misuse of testing for high-stakes purposes, the belief that tests could identify with certainty which students should be held back, which teachers and principals should be fired or rewarded, and which schools should be closed—and the idea that these changes would inevitably produce better education. Policy decisions that were momentous for students and educators came down from elected officials who did not understand the limitations of testing.

  The information derived from tests can be extremely valuable, if the tests are valid and reliable. The results can show students what they have learned, what they have not learned, and where they need to improve. They can tell parents how their children are doing as compared to others of their age and grade. They can inform teachers whether their students understood what they were taught. They can enable teachers and school administrators to determine which students need additional help or different methods of instruction. They can identify students who need help in learning English or special education services. They can inform educational leaders and policymakers about the progress of the education system as a whole. They can show which programs are making a difference and which are not, which should be expanded and which should be terminated. They can help to direct additional support, training, and resources to teachers and schools that need them.

  The federal tests—the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP—measure the progress over time of students in the nation, states, and a number of urban districts. International assessments offer insight into how students compare to their peers in other countries. Most selective colleges rely on admissions tests to find out whether prospective students are prepared to meet their academic expectations, though they always look at test scores in tandem with grades, essays, and other indicators of students’ ability. Many universities routinely test incoming students to determine whether they need remedial courses. Used judiciously, this is valuable information.

  Tests have been a fixture in American education since the early decades of the twentieth century, when they were used to make decisions about matters such as promotion to the next grade, graduation, and college admissions. Schools regularly tested their students to see if they had mastered what they were taught. Students who didn’t pass tests in history, geography, literature, and arithmetic were often “left back.” Schoolteachers were sometimes required to pass a test of their knowledge when they entered the profession. But once they were hired, there were no more tests of their suitability or capacity.

  Educational tests began to change in the 1920s, in response to new developments in the technology of testing. During World War I, the nation’s leading psychologists designed intelligence tests to help the army sort recruits into their roles as officers or enlisted men. These new tests, the psychologists believed, were scientific and objective, in contrast to the tests written by school districts and teachers. The psychologists criticized tests with written answers, because their grading was necessarily subjective. Educators became persuaded that the new standardized, multiple-choice tests were the leading edge of scientific efficiency. The schools began to use them to classify students according to their ability. And the new tests had another advantage: They could be scored quickly and cheaply, often by machines, an important consideration at a time when enrollments were growing rapidly.

  Today, NCLB requires every state to test students annually in grades three through eight in reading and mathematics. Due to technological advances, many states and districts have the capacity to attribute the test scores of specific students to specific teachers, and (with the active encouragement of the Obama administration) many will use this information to hold teachers accountable for the rise or fall of their students’ scores. If testing inspires a degree of loathing, it is because it has become the crucial hinge on which turns the fate of students and the reputations and futures of their teachers, principals, and schools.

  The problem with using tests to make important decisions about people’s lives is that standardized tests are not precise instruments. Unfortunately, most elected officials do not realize this, nor does the general public. The public thinks the tests have scientific validity, like that of a thermometer or a barometer, and that they are objective, not tainted by fallible human judgment. But test scores are not comparable to standard weights and measures; they do not have the precision of a doctor’s scale or a yardstick. Tests vary in their quality, and even the
best tests may sometimes be error-prone, because of human mistakes or technical foul-ups. Hardly a testing season passes without a news story about a goof made by a major testing company. Sometimes questions are poorly worded. Sometimes the answers are wrongly scored. Sometimes the supposedly “right” answer to a question is wrong or ambiguous. Sometimes two of four answers on a multiple-choice question are equally correct.1

  All tests have a margin of error, like opinion polls, and the same student could produce different scores when taking the same test on different days. The scores might not be wildly different, but they might be different enough to nudge the student’s rating across the line from “not proficient” to “proficient,” or drop her down a notch. So, a student who failed a test on Monday might pass if she took the same test on Wednesday. Maybe the student got a good night’s sleep one day, but not the next; maybe she was distracted by a personal crisis—a spat with her best friend—one day, but not the next. Tests themselves differ from one another, even when they are designed to be as similar as possible. So a student could pass one test and fail another that was designed to be of equal difficulty. Testing experts frequently remind school officials that standardized test scores should be used not in isolation to make consequential decisions about students, but only in conjunction with other measures of student performance, such as grades, class participation, homework, and teachers’ recommendations. Testing experts also warn that test scores should be used only for the purpose for which the test was designed: For example, a fifth-grade reading test measures fifth-grade reading skills and cannot reliably serve as a measure of the teacher’s skill.