The Really, Really Important Education Topic on which the Left and Right Agree!
And the welfare of our students, our democracy and our planet demand we do something about it
If you wanted our schools to help foster a citizenry ignorant of history, vulnerable to climate denialism, and unable to collaborate to solve big problems, you’d only have to go back about twenty years, look at the federal education reforms of the day — and change nothing.
Two decades ago, the federal government took an interest in school accountability and mandated standardized testing in basic math and literacy skills. The 2001 legislation was called “No Child Left Behind,” and it had bi-partisan support, including civil rights leaders who knew that the data would shine light on schools that were failing students. The hope was that schools would then be compelled to improve.
But it’s been two decades since NCLB, and the testing mandate may be doing more harm than good. I’m talking here about mandated state testing in math and literacy — not the more highly regarded National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). NAEP has been in the news recently because recent scores show how the pandemic impacted student learning. This fresh look at NAEP scores — from the 1970s through today — also reveals that the testing mandates haven’t led to NCLB’s promised improvements.
Indeed, improvements in skills measured by NAEP stopped just a few years after NCLB requirements took root. It’s remarkable how little scores have improved — ie, not at all. Overall the scores of 9 year olds in math were the same in 2020 as they were in 2004.
We should listen to what NAEP is telling us. It’s time for a reboot of the conversation about how states use tests to compel improvement and hold schools accountable. Fortunately, people on the political left and right agree on this idea.
Conservatives and Progressives Align
A 2019 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation documents the failings of federally mandated standardized testing to consistently improve student outcomes. The report argues that other nations, like Canada, get better outcomes in part because there aren’t the same federal mandates interfering with local decisions about what’s best for students.
A more recent report by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, affirms what many progressive educators have asserted for years, that students should be asked to engage in complex thinking and demonstrate learning in a rigorous — not rote — fashion. The report highlights the Performance Standards Consortium in New York City, a group of public schools that determine graduation readiness without heavy reliance on testing: “Their success in getting graduates into college — and the success of their students once they are in college — gets much less attention than they deserve.”
People on the political left and right will disagree significantly about what the next school accountability system should look like, but agreeing to reopen the conversation about high stakes testing is a good place to start.
A Nation Really At Risk
In addition to pushing schools away from teaching the complex thinking and problem solving that our colleges and employers desire, the high-stakes state testing regimes have also led schools away from meaningfully engaging students in science, history, and the arts.
In many parts of the country, especially in the early grades, essential knowledge and experiences in these subjects have become after-thoughts, getting sidelined as schools revise their curriculum to focus more and more preparing for the tests.
Even scholars who argue that NCLB is not the sole cause of a narrowed curriculum acknowledge that the testing “codifies and reinforces narrowing trends that require critical discussion.”
After two decades, the situation is dire in many places. The director of the New Hampshire state historical society recently lamented that many “school districts don’t offer social studies education before eighth grade.”
A narrowed curriculum separates math and literacy skill development from interesting subjects like science, history and the arts — and this not only destroys student motivation to gain those basic skills, it’s harming our democracy and our planet.
We have a polarized society in which people struggle to agree on evidence-based truths and struggle to see the humanity in each other. The testing mandates are not the only source of our problems, but what we teach our children — or neglect to teach them — shapes who we are as a people and how we approach challenges we hold in common.
Better Options
Changing how we hold schools accountable doesn’t mean schools shouldn’t use tests to measure progress in basic skills. Most schools have local assessment programs that help teachers monitor progress throughout the year. Schools should continue to use them in moderation. And at the state and federal level, we should continue to assess our public education systems using the test mentioned above, NAEP. It’s considered the “gold standard” and is more reliable than the state tests when it comes to judging how state school systems are doing.
But NAEP alone is not enough. States will still need ways to assess how individual schools are doing. There are good models available, including school quality reviews. Such reviews, combined with surveys of families and other school stakeholders, can be used to evaluate the quality of teaching and school leadership, with the results made public in school report cards.
When I was a principal in New York City, I valued such measures. Even though I was a strong proponent of local control, I was also a fan of the mandated quality reviews and surveys. These accountability tools helped educators and the public judge our performance, from academic outcomes, to the culture of the school and the quality of our relationships with families. Such factors matter in school communities today as much as ever.
Urgency for Change
We have a democracy that is threatened by mis-information that thrives on a flawed understanding of history. We have rural and urban zones facing environmental threats that demand a fuller understanding of science, engineering, global warming and climate change mitigation. We have polarized communities that need the humanity, empathy and healing that come from the arts and healthy school cultures.
Schooling that segregates basic skill acquisition from the work of seeing and solving big problems is not how a society experiencing crisis should be educating its children.
The state testing regimes mandated by the federal government are now more than twenty years old. It’s time for a new national conversation about how to measure school quality with academic rigor, strong relationships and a better world in mind.
