Back-To-School

“Between firing the worst teachers, paying more for the best, and convincing the Washington Teachers’ Union to sign on even as its members will be held to far higher standards, Rhee has claimed her position as the standard-bearer of urban education reform. What remains to be seen is whether the changes she’s wrought will lead to the results she has promised.”

Michelle Rhee believes teacher quality is the key to improving education and annual school testing is a way to measure teacher quality. Not everyone agrees. Brooking Institution education scholar Diane Ravitch made quite an about-face when she concluded that she had been wrong to support the school reform agenda adopted by George Bush and pursued by Barack Obama. Ravitch thinks the kind of testing mandated by the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law is a big mistake and the Obama Administration’s “Race to the Top” program is compounding it by funneling more money to states to support pay-for-performance, charter schools and other reforms.

In her new book on American schools Ravitch says education has been turned into a testing game. Some schools are stigmatized as “failing” because they do not meet the law’s utopian expectations for improving reading and math scores. But other schools claim to be making “adequate yearly progress”—the criterion for success under NCLB—when in reality what’s really happening is that teachers teach to the test and states lower their standards when measuring progress. As in Lake Wobegone, everyone gets to be above average.

Basically, Ravitch has lost faith in how policymakers are using the ideas of choice and accountability to create change. She does not think you can use standardized tests to measure school, teacher and student accomplishment, and she doubts that monetary rewards and punishments spur real education improvements. This puts her at odds with Rhee and the Fenty Administration, which is counting on these policies to help D.C. schools overcome decades of decline.

Earlier this month the D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) posted the mixed results in testing scores for D.C public and public charter schools. Only 15 of D.C.’s 198 traditional public and public charter schools achieved “adequate yearly progress” in the latest round of tests, a drop from last year when 47 schools made the grade.

A misleading headline in the Washington Post highlighted falling math and reading scores in two highly touted KIPP charter schools. Buried deep in the story was the data that the two public charter schools and other public charter middle schools outperformed most of D.C.’s traditional public middle schools. A KIPP spokesman said its 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders were the highest performing in the city. Overall KIPP scores dropped only because the KIPP system had expanded to admit 5^th graders, who had low initial scores.

The OSSE website also shows the great progress made at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a 390-student public charter secondary school located one block from the Anacostia Metro stop. A few years ago students at Thurgood Marshall might have gone to the old Anacostia High School, a violent and educationally dismal place that Rhee has overhauled and restructured, creating four separate public charter schools. Seventy-one percent of Marshall’s students are judged “proficient” in math and 62 percent are “proficient” in reading. Marshall was the highest performing open enrollment (no tuition or entrance exams) high school in the city.

When you read about the strongly held views of Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee it’s hard to know who’s right. Everyone wants to see improving test scores, but intuitively most of us know that test scores are inadequate measures of education. By seeing that the “experts” disagree about the basic elements of education, perhaps parents and students will gain the confidence to make their own judgments about what’s the best way to get a good education.