by Penny, Laura
The other noteworthy aspect of the KIPP program is its focus on getting poor kids into college. Even though most KIPP schools are middle schools (junior highs), students are encouraged to think of themselves as college material and bust their butts accordingly. It’s laudable that KIPP schools are helping more poor and minority students make it to university, where they are still underrepresented. But broad school reforms cannot take the KIPP approach and steer everyone towards university. We need skilled tradespeople and college-trained professionals too. Public schools, particularly those in affluent school districts, already act as if university is for everybody, even though they do a half-assed job of making sure everybody is ready for university.
Despite my commitment to the battered and venerable public education system, I must concede that public schools are not great at preparing kids for college. Colleges and universities in North America offer thousands of remedial classes so their students can acquire the basic math and English skills they really should have learned many grades before. A 2006 survey of high-school teachers and college profs conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education shows a major difference of opinion between high-school teachers and the professoriate with respect to student preparation for college. A full 44 per cent of the profs thought students were ill-prepared for the rigours of college writing, while 36 per cent of the high-school teachers thought their former charges were well-prepared to write at the college level. A measly 6 per cent of the profs concurred with that rosy assessment of their students’ word power. The same was true for math, with 37 per cent of the high-school teachers thinking that students were well-prepared for college math, but only 2 per cent of profs agreeing.8
I do not buy the catastrophic rhetoric about schools, as so much of it comes from politically suspect sources. But public schools could and should be doing a much better job teaching kids to think, read, and write. I’ve seen the results of both education systems, in classrooms on either side of the border, and some are pretty glum, chum.
I’ve had a couple of students brag that they made it through the school system and into college without ever reading an entire book. Several of my students have wigged out about writing essays, claiming that none of their other teachers ever made such unreasonable demands. Couldn’t I just tell them what the poems and novels meant, and then test them? That’s how they learned to learn in regular school. Their K–12 teachers were kindly mama birds, willing to chew up the worms and spit the goopy food into their eager beaks.
There’s nothing like teaching quasi-adults basic argumentation and the rudiments of grammar to make one wonder what the hell they – and their teachers – have been doing for the past twelve years. Apparently I am not alone. Wondering what and how teachers are doing has become public policy, in the form of increased, and increasingly important, standardized testing programs. In January 2002 President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the most sweeping federal reform of the education system in years. The principal provision of NCLB was yearly high-stakes testing in English and math.
Standardized tests are another manifestation of our obsession with quantifying – reducing everything to metrics and scores and discounting anything that cannot be converted into numbers. The standardized testing industry has grown into a multi-billion-dollar business, thanks to pols and taxpayers spazzing out about accountability and transparency, demanding to know exactly how much brain-bang they’re getting for their tax bucks. Fairtest, an advocacy organization devoted to test reform, estimates that American schools administer a hundred million standardized tests a year.9
The Heritage Foundation, an uber-conservative think tank, has argued that NCLB “increased state and local governments’ annual paperwork burden by 6,680,334 hours, at an estimated cost of $141 million.”10 And over on the other side of the aisle, some argue that this tide of paperwork is unreliable at best. A report by the think tank Education Sector, called “The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act,” criticizes the Enronesque digit-juggling that educators use to claim their schools are always improving, just as Voltaire’s Pangloss claimed that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
The report uses the embattled Birmingham, Alabama, school district as its exemplary case, detailing the way state and local officials played with numbers and sample sizes to produce the illusion of astounding improvements. Other states, such as Missouri, met test goals by lowering standards for proficiency. Then there were loophole-hunting trailblazers such as Tennessee’s educrats, who came up with the following end run around those tough new rules:
Districts would only be identified as “in need of improvement” if they missed the state performance target in all three grade spans – elementary, middle, and high school – in the same subject, for two consecutive years. A district could fail two-thirds of its students every year and never be held accountable, as long as it wasn’t exactly the same two-thirds.11
This tactic was a big hit; twenty-eight other states got permission from the Department of Education to do their numbers this way too.
Another problem with test-heavy schemes like NCLB is that they provide openings for privatization by stealth. In a 2008 interview with Time magazine, Susan Neuman, a former Department of Education official, conceded that a number of her ex-colleagues “saw the NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda – a way to expose the failure of public education and ‘blow it up a bit … There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization.’”12 This is in keeping with the market-fundamentalist creed that private industry does everything better than public services, which assumes that profit-making entities and public services exist for the same reasons and should operate the same way. Do you really want your child’s education to be efficient? I seriously doubt that is the first adjective that leaps to mind.
Even if you accept the criterion of efficiency, public/private educational initiatives often fail by their own standards. Let me give you an example from my own backyard, as a cautionary tale for other school districts. In the 1990s, Nova Scotia needed to build dozens of new schools. The Liberal government entered into public/private partnerships (“P3s”) in 1994, signing contracts to build fifty-five new schools. The provincial auditor estimated that the P3 schools boondoggle ended up costing $32 million more than building the schools by tender as usual, thanks to cost overruns, construction delays, and expensive arbitration sessions to determine which P was responsible for various costs and liabilities.
Critics alleged that the point of the P3 arrangement was not to save money but to make it look like we were, by keeping school debts off the books. By the year 2000 the program had to be totally scrapped, but Nova Scotia taxpayers are still paying for it, and will be for quite some time, as many of the P3 schools are being leased back to the government for years to come. And the private contractors pulled all sorts of classy moves that tell you a lot about their interest in and commitment to such partnerships, like trying to claw back vending-machine revenue and cash from the sale of chocolate bars by students, and charging usurious fees to school teams and community groups using school spaces.
It’s bad enough that kids have to peddle overpriced candy to pay for their extracurricular activities. But for chisellers to be standing by, ready to snatch the chump change from their tiny hands lest it be wasted on luxuries such as band and basketball? This Grinchy conduct makes me doubt that privatization is a panacea. Instead it seems to be an invitation for pseudo-capitalist leeches to profiteer at the community’s expense.
The other problem with standardized testing programs like NCLB is the idea that learning can be inventoried like cheap Chinese toys in a Wal-Mart warehouse. Speaking at a Washington charter school in 2006, Dubya said:
Oh, I know people say we test too much, but how can you solve a problem until you measure? And how can you hold people to account when there’s an achievement gap that is not right for America, unless you measure? Measuring is the gateway to success.13
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br /> First, it’s not like we need more tests to show us the glaringly obvious achievement gaps. Innumerable studies demonstrate that students who are poor do worse than middle-class or affluent students. Second, the idea of accountability that Bush peddled presumes that teachers, school boards, and education experts should answer to the tight-fisted taxpayers who pay their salaries, a perfect example of the more-money-than-brains mindset at work.
There is nothing inherently good about measures, as any red-blooded American opponent of the devil’s own metric system can attest. In a speech protesting the U.K.’s batteries of standardized tests, British teacher Robert Palmer said the following, which I cannot improve upon:
Our education system is now strangled by the dead hand of Gradgrindism. Is this it, then? Is this all education is about, a series of hoops to jump through? Is this why we became teachers, so we could teach to the test, hold the hoops for our pupils just a little bit higher every time?14
Gradgrindism is a nice neologism. Palmer is referring to Thomas Gradgrind, the relentlessly utilitarian headmaster from Dickens’s Hard Times. Dickens lampooned Gradgrind’s nothing-but-the-facts approach to education, using the headmaster as a symbol of the heartless calculation of the Industrial Revolution – the same calculating mindset that still drives standardized testing policies.
Let me be perfectly clear. I’m not some hippie who thinks that rote learning has no place in education. Hell, no. Students definitely require a body of who, where, what, when, and why in order to ascend to higher-order thinking. The problem with test-o-centric policies is that they stop where a real education begins, at the level of scattered facts and basic skills.
Maybe the boomers and fogies who pitch these testing policies haven’t taken enough of the damn things to understand how students react to them. Most standardized tests are just multiple-choice fill-in-the-bubble forms. I remember taking the provincial versions as a kid every couple of years. We all knew that they didn’t really affect our grades, so wiseacres would invariably pencil in the bubbles to form dirty doodles or repeatedly spell AC/DC. We didn’t care, because the tests didn’t count. Now, given that funding and staffing decisions ride on those little graphite-filled bubbles, the tests matter. It is education in the broad sense that does not count anymore, that must be shoved aside so kids can cram for multiple-choice quizzes.
I object to the Gradgrindist bias that determines much of the available research on education. Policy analysts and think tanks could and should write about schools in a more substantive, qualitative way rather than relying on numbers and rankings, treating schools as Consumer Reports covers cars. But numbers are the coin of the realm in a more-money-than-brains world, so numbers are what we get. And then opposing camps such as teachers’ unions and corporate lobbyists spin the same stats to declare the same school systems the world’s finest or total failures.
How dire are the North American numbers, relative to the rest of the globe? Let’s start with one test, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the OECD‘s triennial survey of the aptitudes of fifteen-year-olds from many lands. In 2006 they tested teens’ science powers. Canadian students placed third, behind Finland and China/Hong Kong. The U.S scored eleven points below the 500-point average, placing twenty-ninth on the OECD scale, right between scientific powerhouses Latvia and the Slovak Republic. Its math skills, the main focus of the 2003 PISA study, were also below average. American students got 474, two points less than Azerbaijan, but seven points more than the next country on the list, Croatia. Hong Kong and Finland led the pack, with scores in the upper 540s, while Canadian students ranked third, scoring in the 530s.15
Another set of international rankings, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which assesses fourth-graders, also rated U.S. performance as middle of the pack. In the glass-half-full argot favoured by America’s National Center for Education Statistics, 2006 scores were “higher than the average score of students in 22 of the 44 other countries and educational jurisdictions that participated in the PIRLS assessment.”16 Some of the jurisdictions that outperformed the U.S. include the Canadian provinces that participate in the PIRLS, Luxembourg, Singapore, Russia, and Latvia.
The United States does win the bronze medal in one OECD scholastic performance indicator: spending. Only Israel and Iceland spend a greater percentage of their GDP on educational institutions than Americans do. The next trio of countries on the spend-a-lot list are Korea, Denmark, and New Zealand. Some of them have better results to show for their spending: Korea’s and New Zealand’s scores are above average. But some of them do not, which just goes to show that funding isn’t the only factor that determines educational success.
Another thing worth noting about these figures is that Korea and the U.S. both spend a lot of private money on education. The rate of funding for U.S. public schools is actually below the OECD average, but the heaps of cash spent on private tuition at schools and colleges drives the overall average up. Moreover, this sort of survey doesn’t keep track of all the money people spend on child-improving para-educational whatnot, a bustling business that starts with Lamaze toys and Baby Einstein videos and continues through extracurricular activities and lessons and test prep programs, summer camps, and educational video games.
Nevertheless, despite all the spondulicks and speeches devoted to education, the high-school dropout rate in America has risen. Back in the 1960s, the U.S. led the world in high-school completion, but in 2005 they placed twenty-first out of the twenty-seven OECD countries surveyed. The census data for 2007 says that 86 per cent of Americans twenty-five or older have at least completed high school, a figure that includes GED (General Equivalency/Educational Diploma) holders. But some economists have found this number suspiciously rosy.
One study, done in 2008 by economists James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine, says that inclusion of the GED inflates the numbers. GED holders, who log less class time and test their way to a diploma, do about as well in the workplace as dropouts do. Their projections are not nearly as optimistic as the official numbers. They insist that
(1) the U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 per cent in the late 1960s and then declined by 4–5 percentage points; (2) the actual high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the 88 per cent estimate; (3) about 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics leave school with a high school diploma, and minority graduation rates are still substantially below the rates for non-Hispanic whites.17
In 2008, when the California school system got a long-awaited student-tracking system up and running, they found that one-quarter of their students dropped out. This was an improvement over some estimates, but much worse than the previous official numbers.18
The experts may still be squabbling about the data, but one thing is clear. Dropping out of high school makes it way more likely that one will end up in the slammer, on social assistance, or in the worn-to-a-frazzle ranks of the working poor.
The Canadian dropout rate has been decreasing steadily since the 1990s. According to Statistics Canada, it fell from 16.6 per cent in 1990–91 to 9.3 per cent in 2006–07. The majority of dropouts, in both Canada and the U.S., are young men. In Canada the problem is more rural than urban, with the highest dropout rates occurring in Quebec and the prairie provinces.
It’s worth noting that Alberta’s dropout rate is above the national average, which helps to explain why Alberta schools score well in international assessments. The easy availability of oil-patch gigs lures most of the uninterested, low-scoring types out of the system, making Alberta experiments such as charter schools look more successful than they might be. Conversely, the east coast made the greatest gains in high-school completion. This makes sense, as the primary and secondary industries that used to pull young men out of classrooms and into lucrative labour – the fisheries and plants that used to be our oil sands – have gone belly-up, so more people are staying in school.
The United States is split about the value of edu
cation. There’s a lot of hullabaloo about the state of the schools, but there is also more respect for unschooled, self-made successes. It has become an article of faith in Canada that people need education to succeed, which is one of the reasons why our public-school squabbles are not nearly so heated as those of our southern neighbours.
Canadian students tend to do well in international tests. In the PISA math and reading test results released in 2006, Canadian students performed above the OECD averages, placing seventh in math and fourth in reading. I’m not mentioning this so I can enjoy a gloating Canuck moment. Americans have a national education department and a national dialogue about the issue, which is more than I can say for my boring homeland. Sure, that conversation includes a lot of hysteria and crazy talk, but Canadians have no federal education portfolio or much in the way of a national conversation about schools.
Stephen Harper and his Cons are unlikely to start one. There’s barely a word about education in the party’s platform or on their policy website. Whenever Cons talk about education, they really mean trraining, a mere means to some job. And when Cons broach the topic of young people, they are usually talking about sending them to jail or to Afghanistan, not college or university. Inmates and soldiers, cons and cops, wardens and warriors – unlike lazy teachers and slack students – never get the whole summer off.
The gap between Canadian and U.S. test scores is interesting because it helps us rule out one of the usual excuses for poor student performance. Little Canucklings have equal access to all the distractions that cultural conservatives and pandering candidates blame for the stupefaction of youth. Canadian kids eat the same lousy food, watch the same moronic reality TV, play the same shoot-’em-up video games, and listen to the same dippy party rap as their southern coevals.