Robbing the Poor

Vouchers that send taxpayer money to private schools are a reverse Robin Hood: They rob the poor to benefit the rich. And most of us—the 99 percent—are, in these terms, among the poor.

Education savings accounts (ESAs) are sometimes termed “neovoucher” plans. ESAs, designed to bring Milton Friedman’s voucher concepts into the 21st century, are funded through donor tax credits. Arizona calls theirs Empowerment Savings Accounts, a play on the ESA initials. In The Way of the Future:Education Savings Accounts for Every American Family, Matthew Ladner lauds Arizona’s program. The book was published in September by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project of the National Education Policy Center by Charisse Gulosino of the University of Memphis and Jonah Liebert of Teachers College, Columbia University. The review was published today, October 23, 2012.

It is noteworthy that Ladner also is the co-author of the 17th ALEC Report Card on AmericanEducation, published this year with a foreword by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. ESAs come straight from the ALEC playbook. Here’s how Ladner parses the Arizona Education Savings Account Act in the ALEC report:

In 2006, Arizona’s then-Governor Janet Napolitano became the first Democratic governor to sign a new private choice program into existence. A coalition of groups opposed to private school choice, however, filed suit against the program. The Arizona Supreme Court ultimately ruled that a Blaine Amendment in the Arizona Constitution precluded the operation of a school voucher program. The ESA approach aims to allow parents to customize the education of their children, embracing customization over standardization while overcoming Blaine Amendments. (p. 9)

Gulosino and Liebert are not convinced that ESAs are all they’re cracked up to be, certainly not from a reading of Ladner’s The Way of the Future. These reviewers aver, “While the report claims a better education at lower cost, and a more equitable and democratic provision of education, no evidence is presented to support these claims. In fact, it is more likely that the implementation of ESAs would have exactly the opposite effects.”

With privatization of the public schools at stake, this conclusion is an understatement. Follow the links to the full documents referenced in this post. As ESAs spread, not only those who avail themselves of ESAs but all the rest of us—the demos—will find ourselves robbed of a democratic future in which public education is the tide that lifts all boats.

"Truth" Really?

Like his fellow travelers in the radical right school bus, Tony Bennett muddles his facts, sometimes completely obscuring them under a dense cover of neoliberal ideology. When he refers to “truth” in his online “The Truth About Testing” (http://www.doe.in.gov/achievement/assessment/truth-about-testing), the best that can be said is that he is being disingenuous. About the only thing he gets right is the grades at which testing takes place. That’s in the first paragraph. It’s downhill from there.

Let’s look at just four of Bennett’s “truths.” The first is that students spend no more than six and a half hours each year in testing. That’s more than the equivalent of a full student learning day devoted to test-taking alone. Bennett is arguing that this amount of testing time is miniscule over the course of a 180-day school year. What he fails to take into account—purposely, one must believe—is the amount of teacher, student, and administrator time that must be spent preparing for and administering the multiple tests that “take fewer than six and a half hours.”

With reading and math as the focus of high-stakes testing, it’s not unusual in some schools, particularly in the elementary grades, for teachers to spend three or more hours each day on these subjects, effectively shortchanging students in all other areas of the curriculum, in order to ensure acceptable test scores. So let’s multiply 180 by 3. Now we’ve added 540 hours to Bennett’s modest six and a half. According to Bennett, a typical 180-day school year provides “a minimum of 900” hours of instructional time. If prep and administration time is added to the period from “Please begin” to “Put down your pencils,” quite a bit more than half of a student’s year is spend on standardized testing—learning restricted to a narrow band of over-tested, over-emphasized skills at the expense of breadth and depth that used to be the hallmark of American education. As I’ve written previously, this amounts to dumbing down the curriculum in the name of school improvement.

Bennett sees this as a virtue, sees “teaching to the test” as a positive. Another “truth” he would have us believe is that “we should encourage teachers to help students meet the state standards and learn the content we believe will be fundamental to success in life.” I’m not sure who the second “we” is here. It’s certainly not me. I believe, along with many parents and nonparents alike, that “we” would best serve students—our future informed citizens after all—with teaching that goes beyond simple reading and math skills to engender deeper understanding of text and mathematical abstraction and knowledge and understanding in science, government, the arts, physical education, health, and much, much more.

Yet another “truth” Bennett claims is, “The data [from standardized tests] help educators assess those students’ weaknesses and offer tailored instruction to help them get up to speed.” Clearly, Bennett does not take into account that most standardized tests are administered in the spring, making the results unavailable to shape instruction during the year of test administration. It might be argued that the results, paltry as they are, in very general terms could be used to tailor instruction, but probably not for the students who actually took the test.

Finally, let’s talk money. Bennett admits that Indiana spends $46.2 million dollars on testing. His justification is that Indiana has to do so in order to receive federal money that amounts to much more. And, after all, that $46 million is less than one percent of the “total state budget.” It’s like the old saw that you have to spend money to make money. His economic footnote, however, points out that the federal dollars come through Title I and IDEA, both of which require assessments. However, the required assessments can and do vary considerably from state to state, and none is required to be “high-stakes.”

While in the great sweep of government finance $46 million may indeed be a drop in the bucket, in real terms it’s more than $124,000 per Indiana school district on average. If educators were getting a real return for that level of investment, then I might argue that it was money well spent. However, given the limitations of our informational return on investment and the vast amounts of undocumented time accompanying actual testing—time that isn’t free, incidentally—I have to conclude that most of the $46 million is ill spent. To be blunt: wasted. Like much of the time spent in test prep that might otherwise be devoted to higher-quality teaching and learning. These are truths, for me, that are hard to ignore.

Trust Teachers

In the 1940s when my mother was a teenager, my grandfather, a respected businessman in their small Kansas community, taught her to drive. When he then took her to get her license, the license clerk asked him, “Can she drive?” My grandfather affirmed that my mother could indeed drive, and so the clerk issued the license. No written test, no road test. To my knowledge, Mom never had an accident over a lifetime of driving in several U.S. states and Europe. Probably she was lucky, but she also had a good teacher who knew his student’s abilities.

For decades now, critics have been hammering at public school teachers. Current movements are gaining momentum in several states to strip away collective bargaining rights and even do away with colleges of education in our universities. Much of this undermining of the public’s confidence in teachers is part of a broader assault on public education, as the Right pursues its anti-democratic agenda to transform the United States into a corporate oligarchy.

But here are some facts to ponder. In the forty-year period between 1970 and 2010, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP—also called “The Nation’s Report Card”—has documented consistently rising achievement in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores. During the same period the U.S. dropout rate fell from 15 percent to 7.4 percent. And yet, over those same forty years the public’s confidence in the public schools dropped from 58 percent to around 30 percent.* Exactly how were higher student achievement and lower dropout rates attained except by the effective work of good teachers in good public schools? I would argue that lack of confidence in teachers is wholly unfounded.

State-mandated mass standardized testing continues to grow, wasting valuable teaching time and vast sums of taxpayer money—more than $46 million in Indiana alone—to provide limited and misleading information about student learning. The heart of the problem is that the further assessment gets from the classroom, the less informative it becomes. It also gets more expensive.

At root, standardized achievement tests don’t tell us where a student started or how far he or she progressed in learning over a given period of time. Standardized test results, at best, tell us what a student knows within a narrow band of knowledge on a given day. Not only are such results misleading, in the sweep of a student’s education they are meaningless. Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett would have us believe that these test results help shape instruction. They do so only in the sense of narrowing the curriculum, rather than enriching it; focusing on failure that may, in fact, be the fault of factors beyond students’ and teachers’ control, instead of celebrating success and getting help to challenged students.

Competent, attentive teachers can use intense observation, portfolios of student work, and classroom-based assessment to ascertain more accurately what and how students are learning far better than any standardized test. Bear in mind that we make a big deal of rising SAT and ACT scores. Both the SAT and the ACT are designed to help predict whether a student will be successful in higher education—nothing more than that. But what has the research shown to be a better predictor? High school grades. The reason is simple: A course grade represents a composite evaluation of a student’s achievement based on multifaceted assessment by the student’s teacher.

The same principle applies at all levels of schooling. Teachers interact with their students every day and are far more accurate in assessing student achievement than standardized tests. The fiscal bonus is that we already pay teachers to do this work. So why send millions of taxpayer dollars to testing corporations to give us flawed information when we already get good information from the professionals we already employ? We need to trust our teachers.

* See “Restoring Faith in Public Education”

Dumber by the Test

Overuse and misuse of standardized tests are dumbing down the curriculum in our public schools.

Standardized tests are not bad per se. Some standardized tests are useful—for diagnosis, for research, and so on. But the wholesale use of mass standardized testing—essentially every student in every school—and the misuse of test results to judge individual students, teachers, schools, and entire districts is reductionist. Complex qualities such as student achievement, teacher quality, and school and district effectiveness cannot be reduced to a number or a set of numbers. No test score (or group of scores) should ever constitute more than a small fraction of the information used to evaluate a student’s learning or a teacher’s effectiveness. There are simply too many other factors that must be considered, many of them beyond the scope of the school to control or influence.

As standardized tests proliferate, teachers concentrate more time (often required by their supervisors) on direct test preparation, drilling their students on a narrow set of tested concepts and shunting aside richer learning opportunities that may, in fact, be lost forever. Researcher Qiuyun Lin comments:

Standardized tests create a system of education that reduces student learning to scores on a single test, rules out the possibility of discussing student learning in terms of cognitive and intellectual development, growth, social awareness and social conscience, and social and emotional development. (in “Beyond Standardization: Testing and Assessment in Standards-Based Reform.” Action in Teacher Education 23 (4): 43-49)

Over-testing limits students to acquiring basic knowledge at the expense of skills such as critical and creative thinking. When the goal is to determine answer A, B, C, or none of the above, there is no place left in the curriculum for students to develop higher-level thinking. So-called 21st-century skills don’t make the cut, however much they are touted by pundits and policymakers far from actual classrooms.

Bluntly stated, educators are running scared, faced with lawmakers, bureaucrats, and ideologues whose ramping up of standardized testing on a claim of “school improvement” is thin cover for a broad-scale effort to degrade public schooling and thereby validate the movement toward privatization. This takeover of public education is being orchestrated on the backs of children whose education is being impoverished, educators whose good work is under attack, and communities whose depressed education systems are graduating less well-educated students and, over time, whose schools will be seen as less attractive to potential new businesses. The health of a community’s schools and the health of a community’s business and industry run parallel. Indeed, the very fabric of our community is intimately connected to the wellbeing of our public schools.

Standardized tests do not improve education. Apart from their overuse narrowing the curriculum—dumbing down students’ learning—after getting test results education authorities at the state, and sometimes federal, level spend more time punishing schools and students that don’t do well (by taking over schools, for example), instead of spending time and money helping students and schools to improve. After all, in Indiana more than $46 million goes to testing, most of it paid to testing corporations, rather than to real school improvement. That’s a great deal of money that could be better invested in teaching than testing.

If our schools are to recover ground lost to over-testing, then mass standardized testing in the name of “school improvement” has to stop. There are better ways to use taxpayers’ money; there are more effective ways to use students’ learning time, and there are better ways to help teachers improve our schools.