Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

Here is Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon describing in rather technical language what his research has shown for decades about a school or school district’s standardized test scores as an accurate indicator of student demographics but not a good measure of school quality:

This blog will take a two week break.  Look for a new post on Tuesday, May 14.

“I use standardized test scores from roughly 45 million students to construct measures of the temporal structure of educational opportunity in over 11,000 school districts—almost every district in the U.S.  The data span the school years 2008-09 through 2014-15.  For each school district, I construct two measures: the average academic performance of students in grade 3 and the within-cohort growth in test scores from grade 3 to 8.  I argue that average test scores in a school district can be thought of as reflecting the average cumulative set of educational opportunities children in a community have had up to the time when they take a test.  Given this, the average scores in grade 3 can be thought of as measures of the average extent of ‘early educational opportunities’ (reflecting opportunities from birth to age 9) available to children in a school district.  Prior research suggests that these early opportunities are strongly related to the average socioeconomic resources available in children’s families in the district.  They may also depend on other characteristics of the community, including neighborhood conditions, the availability of high-quality child care and pre-school programs, and the quality of schools in grades K-3.”

Back in 2011, Reardon documented another important trend that describes aggregate test score variation across school districts. “In 1970 only 15 percent of families were in neighborhoods that we classify as either affluent (neighborhoods where median incomes were greater than 150 percent of median income in their metropolitan areas) or poor (neighborhoods where median incomes were less than 67 percent of metropolitan median income). By 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods,” and fewer families lived in mixed income neighborhoods.  What we have watched for fifty years across America’s metropolitan areas is school resegregation by family income. As quickly growing suburbs attract families who can afford to move farther from the central city, urban and inner ring suburban school districts enroll greater concentrations of poor children.

Unfortunately U.S News and local newspapers publish competitive high school rankings as though they are a measure or school quality.  A week ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer treated readers to another one of these misguided reports by quoting this year’s U.S News ranking of the nation’s best high schools.  Reporter Zachary Lewis explains that that top high schools in greater Cleveland this year are in Solon and Rocky River. “Other Greater Cleveland high schools in the top 25 in Ohio are Chagrin Falls (no 7), Hudson (No. 9), Brecksville-Broadview Heights (No. 15), Kenston (No. 15), Aurora (No. 20), and Bay High School (No. 24).

Lewis continues: “Common traits among the highest-ranked schools are those whose students scored high on state assessments for math, reading and science. These schools also had strong results for underserved student performance, focusing on students who are Black, Hispanic, or from low-income households, performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams, curriculum breadth and graduation rates, U.S. News said.”  There is a serious problem with this statement: none of these high schools serves many students who are Black, Hispanic, or from low-income households.

The point here is not that these are bad high schools. Each one is the comprehensive high schools that serves its suburban community. The point is that they serve wealthy, homogeneously white communities whose test scores are a mark of privilege, and that schools are far more complicated institutions than can be judged by the kinds of data—test scores, graduation data, and numbers of AP classes and AP exams passed—that are indicators of privilege.

In their book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain:  “Schools differ from other kinds of goods because they take time to understand and experience fully… Education, the quality of which is… difficult to assess, is what’s known as a ‘credence good.’ It can take months, or even years, to figure out the quality of a school… Exacerbating the issue is the fact that schools are highly complex institutions.” (A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, (pp. 146-148)

The 2002, No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) established the idea of judging schools by comparing their aggregate standardized test scores.  Education historian Diane Ravitch describes how schools in impoverished communities were punished because NCLB’s operational strategy of comparing test scores as an indicator of school quality  “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”

The Harvard University expert on the appropriate use of standardized tests Daniel Koretz wrote a book to expose the problems with the NCLB testing regime and with judging schools by their test scores and related numerical indicators: “Used properly… tests are very useful for describing what students know. On their own, however, tests simply aren’t sufficient to explain why they know it…. Of course the actions of educators do affect scores, but so do many of the other factors both inside and outside of school, such as their parents’ education.  This has been well documented at least since the publication more than fifty years ago of the ‘Coleman Report,’… which found that student background and parental education had a bigger impact than schooling on student achievement.” (The Testing Charade, pp, 148-149)

Koretz explains further: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms…. Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the Proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)

Reporters often tell readers that school ratings are based on other factors besides test scores, but it turns out that many of the other factors states consider when they do the ratings are in fact based mostly on school districts’ aggregate scores. The Ohio Department of Education’s guide to understanding the state school report cards lists five areas on which the state rates public schools and school districts: Achievement, Progress, Gap Closing,  Early Literacy, and Graduation. Four of the five categories in Ohio’s system depend on a school’s or a school district’s aggregate test scores, which have for years been highly correlated with a school population’s overall family income.

Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes his own academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

Arizona State University emeritus professor and former president of the American Educational Research Association, David Berliner is blunt in his analysis: “(T)he big problems of American education are not in America’s schools… The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children…  Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

Plain Dealer Editorial Correctly Condemns Voucher Entitlement for the Rich But Fails to Consider Strategies to Help Ohio’s Poorest Students

Last Friday, the Plain Dealer‘s editors correctly condemned what the Ohio Legislature did in last summer’s two-year state budget, when it raised the income eligibility cap on Ohio’s largest private school voucher program and thereby diverted hundreds of millions of our tax dollars into a massive private school tuition entitlement for wealthy and middle-income families.

The newspaper’s editors quote a statement from the Ohio House Republican leadership: “This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools.  By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”  The Plain Dealer’s editors, however, confront the truth. Our legislature expanded vouchers for wealthy families but did nothing for the poor.  The legislators grew the program by raising the income eligibility cap to enable families up to 450% of poverty to qualify for a full voucher and families with even higher incomes to qualify for a partial voucher.

There are, however, two serious problems with the editors’ assumptions and their suggestions for the program’s reform:

First, the editors seem to assume that in the state budget, the legislature capped the growth of expenditures on the new vouchers.

The editors quote reporter Laura Hancock’s article last week on the fact that already most of the money the legislature planned to spend this year on the voucher expansion is nearly gone:  “‘The legislature budgeted $397.8 million for EdChoice-Expansion this year,’ Hancock reports. ‘As of Feb. 26, the state had spent $387.5 million.'” While the newspaper’s editors seem to assume the legislature capped the amount to be spent on the EdChoice-Expansion for the current year, in reality the amount of $397.8 million was more like an estimate.  The voucher funds come out of the school foundation budget, and if there is an overrun in the cost of the vouchers, it will come from the same part of the budget that is needed for funding the state’s public schools. It will also likely imperil enactment of the third step in the phase-in of the Fair School Funding Plan, the state’s new public school funding formula.

When legislators set up the Fair School Funding Plan in the FY 2022-2023 state budget, they chose not to set up the new formula by passing separate enabling legislation. Instead legislators left the new formula’s funding and full enactment up to the will of future legislators to fund each of the next two steps in upcoming state budgets. Many public school educators and parents now worry that legislators will prioritize the rapidly growing universal voucher program at the expense of fully funding of the final phase of the new public school funding formula in the FY 2026-2027 state budget.

Second, the Plain Dealer‘s editors suggest that there is a solution to the legislature’s mistake in creating a program that entitles primarily wealthy families tax dollars for paying private school tuition.  The editors propose that the legislature, “should rewrite the rules to guarantee that this money goes to children in underperforming schools, possibly relying on the state report cards to set the standard.” The newspaper’s editorial board deserves criticism for once again branding the schools in communities where poverty is concentrated as “failing” schools.

Experts will tell you that there is a long and comprehensive compendium of research demonstrating that standardized test scores DO NOT primarily reflect the quality of a district’s public schools. And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students. Neither do they describe a school’s strategies for school discipline; nor do they reflect the richness of the curriculum. Years of research instead clearly show that, when individual students’ standardized test scores are aggregated by school district, the rankings correlate with the family and neighborhood income of the community itself.

A school district’s test scores are primarily a measure of privilege. We have known for years that No Child Left Behind’s focus on test score achievement gaps embodies an inaccurate understanding the factors that shape opportunity in children’s lives. In September, 2022, in an article for Commonwealth Magazine, Jack Schneider, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Joel Boyd, the superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools explain: “As research indicates, test scores are highly indicative of the inequalities that afflict our communities, and are not a valid basis for determinations about overall school performance… Scholars have repeatedly shown (that) the leading predictors of student standardized test scores are demographic variables like family income and parental educational attainment.”

I wonder why the Plain Dealer‘s editors didn’t highlight the likely future competition for state funding between the Fair School Funding Plan’s full phase-in and the future explosive growth in EdChoice vouchers instead of suggesting that future voucher eligibility should be tied to public school district ratings on the state school district report card. Why not propose at least that the legislature set a hard cap on the future growth of school vouchers? And why not emphasize the urgent need to protect funding for the public school districts serving concentrations of poor children? Experts all agree that school districts serving masses of poor children need extra funding for services like more school social workers, smaller classes, and programs for English learners and disabled students as well as curricular enhancements and the arts.

Until the Fair School Funding Plan has been fully established and fully funded, the new formula won’t have the capacity to achieve its two primary purposes: prescribing the adequate provision of state funding and distributing state funding for equity across the state’s 610 school districts. While Ohio’s exurbs can more easily add extras for the students in their school districts by passing local property tax operating levies, for as long as I can remember the state has neglected to fulfill its responsibility to our state’s poorest urban and rural public school districts. One of the elements that has not yet been fully phased in, for example, is additional Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid (DPIA), a state funding stream  that allocates money for support services needed in public school districts serving concentrations of poor children. In a report at the end of 2022, school funding experts Howard Fleeter and Greg Browning documented that in Ohio: “(F)rom 2001 through 2021 total state aid for economically disadvantaged students has increased by 23.3%… while the number of economically disadvantaged students has increased by 57.5%….”

I commend the Plain Dealer’s editorial board for denouncing Ohio’s wildly expanded EdChoice vouchers, which now divert hundreds of millions of state tax dollars to reimburse upper-income parents for the tuition they are paying to the private schools where their children are already enrolled.  However, I wish the editors had explained what the massive loss to the state’s school foundation budget will mean for the 1.6 million students enrolled in Ohio’s 610 public school districts, and especially for the public schools in Ohio’s poorest communities.

Ohio’s recently expanded EdChoice vouchers epitomize the flaws identified in the 2023 book, The School Voucher Illusion, an authoritative analysis from Teachers College Press of widespread voucher expansion across the states:  “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

Supreme Court Allows Pro-Diversity but Race-Neutral Admissions Policy at Selective Virginia High School

Last year in Students v. Fair Admissions at Harvard, the U. S. Supreme Court ended colleges’ and universities’ use of race-based affirmative action to achieve a diverse student body. A 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts declared that race-based affirmative action violates the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law and the prohibition of discrimination based on race. As Roberts had famously declared in 2007, in the Parents Involved decision curtailing voluntary public school busing programs to racially integrate public schools: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Affirmative Action came before the U.S. Supreme Court again this week—this time in the context of K-12 schooling. For Politico, Josh Gerstein and Bianca Quilantan report: “The Supreme Court on Tuesday decided to punt on a case about the admissions policy at a selective public high school in Northern Virginia that had the potential to further dismantle the reach of affirmative action in education.”

Gerstein and Quilantan put this week’s action by the Supreme Court in context: “The Supreme Court’s move to review the case comes less than a year after its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which gutted the use of race-conscious admissions policies across most of higher education.  Buoyed by that ruling, anti-affirmative action groups are testing how many new restrictions the courts are willing to accept on the use of race in other settings and institutions.

The affirmative action case the U.S. Supreme Court considered this week was about an admissions policy at a public high school.  The justices chose not to consider an appeals court ruling that has permitted an elite Virginia high school to launch a new admissions policy featuring what the school claims are race-neutral steps to achieve a diverse student body. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a dissent, but the U.S. Supreme Court requires four votes when it decides whether or not to accept a case upon appeal.  There were sufficient votes to let the appeals court decision stand without accepting the case.

The NY Times‘ Adam Liptak describes the Fairfax County high school’s new admissions plan:  “Amid concerns about how few Black and Hispanic students attended the school… Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria Va. adopted what it said were race-neutral admissions standards. The school board did away with a rigorous entrance examination and prioritized admission to the top students from each public middle school in the area rather than the top applicants from any school. Admissions officers were also instructed to consider ‘experience factors,’ such as whether students were poor, learning English or attending a middle school that was ‘historically underrepresented.’ But the officers were not told the race, sex or name of any applicant.” The school district also dropped the $100 application fee that had been required for admission to the school.

Liptak recounts the history of the case: “The Supreme Court’s action let stand a ruling from a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, VA, which declared in May that (in the new plan) Thomas Jefferson did not discriminate in its admissions. The Pacific Legal Foundation asked the Supreme Court to hear their appeal, saying the new admissions plan was ‘intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination’… Lawyers for the school board responded that the new admissions criteria had nothing to do with race and were focused instead on removing socioeconomic and geographic barriers. ‘The new policy is both race neutral and race blind,’ the school board’s brief said. ‘It was not designed to produce, and did not in fact, produce a student  population that approximates the racial demographics of Fairfax County or any other predetermined racial balance.'”

Liptak describes the thinking expressed by appeals court Judge Robert B. King in his decision for the majority in the Thomas Jefferson High School decision.  Judge King declared that the percentage numbers (Black, Hispanic, Asian, White) were not at issue in the case: “Writing for the majority in the appeals court’s decision in May, Judge Robert B. King… said the before and after numbers were not the right place to start. That would, he said, quoting from the school board’s brief, turn ‘the previous status quo into an immutable quota.’ He added that the school had a legitimate interest in ‘expanding the array of student backgrounds.'”

Today in the midst of the widespread culture war fight over diversity, equity and inclusion, we can at least breathe a little easier.  The appeals court decision affirmed a public school school admissions policy premised on the principle that all students benefit when they attend a school with a diverse student body—the concept that has from the very beginning of litigation about affirmative action been the stated justification for affirmative action in education.

School Ratings and Rankings Cause Educational Redlining and Resegregation

Here is the lead in a story in the Washington City Paper (Washington, D.C.) that describes not only  how public school ratings and rankings work in the nation’s capital but also their impact in every public school district in the United States.  Read this carefully:

“Before the pandemic shut down D.C. schools, each public school, like each student, got a report card. Every fall the school report card included a STAR rating, from one through five. The rating was based on a formula designed and used by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), D.C.’s education agency. Federal law requires OSSE to identify the ‘bottom 5 percent’ of District schools, so that they can receive additional funding. In effect, OSSE’s STAR Framework ratings used a measurement of need to indicate a measurement of quality.  And as a measurement of quality, the formula failed.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The author of the commentary is Ruth Wattenberg, who formerly served on the Washington, D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE). She explains that the 2015 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act—the version that replaced the 2002, No Child Left Behind Act—requires all states to assign school ratings which are said to be a measure of need for the bottom 5 percent of “struggling” schools. However, in a place like Washington, D.C. with universal school choice, while ESSA requires states to rate schools to target the bottom scorers for improvement, parents use the ratings as an advertisement for the best schools in the system—perhaps the only evidence some parents consider as they choose a school for their children.

The ratings are always understood by the general public as a measure of school quality.

In a large city school district, when parents choose a school according to the ratings, these measures help resegregate the school district by income and race. Wattenberg explains: “In D.C., where families can choose to send their kids to any public school in the district, this flawed rating system is especially consequential. ‘Many kids have left their neighborhood schools’ because of the ratings, says Sheila Carr… grandparent of current D.C. students… A small exodus can trigger budget, staffing, and program cuts that have the potential to drive more families away from a particular school, triggering yet more cuts.  A decade ago Carr remembers, this meant multiple school closings. Although DCPS (D.C. Public Schools) has avoided more closures recently, enrollments at some schools are way down. Anacostia High School enrolls just 287 students.”

Across metropolitan areas where numerous suburban school districts surround the central city, the ratings redline the poorer and most segregated school districts and encourage anybody who can afford it to seek the the school districts with the highest ratings: the homogeneously white and wealthy exurban school districts.

Across the states, legislatures and departments of education have developed their own rating systems to comply with the federal mandate, but these systems almost always feature each district’s aggregate standardized test scores, which have been documented to reflect primarily family income.  Wattenberg explains the research she and her colleagues explored as they set out to redesign their rating system: “One expert showed us how high-poverty schools disproportionately got low ratings, even when test scores reported that their students had learned more than average. Education researcher and D.C. public school parent Betsy Wolf concluded that ‘our accountability system measures family income more than it measures school quality.’ Based on these findings, the SBOE resolved in 2022 that the rating system was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and recommended eliminating it… Education and poverty expert Sean Reardon says that average test scores ‘are the results of all the opportunities kids have had to learn their whole lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the school year.  So it’s misleading to attribute average test scores solely to the school where they take the test.'”

Apparently in Washington, D.C. the board came up with a new system that is not likely to be much better: “At the SBOE’s early January meeting, some parents’ hopes of pushing to revamp the report cards faded. OSSE surfaced its new report card, and, instead of labeling schools with stars, the new proposal assigns each school a number, one to 100, called an ‘accountability score.’ The number will still be highlighted on each school’s online profile and on the central School Report Card, where it will be among the first and primary impressions of a school that parents will see.  The formula that produces the new accountability score, while slightly revised and less toxic, is still biased against low-income schools. It is still the same formula OSSE uses to identify the neediest schools for the U.S. Department of Education.”

Wattenberg adds: “Less biased data on school quality measures educational practices and conditions known to promote student learning, such as teacher retention and the extent to which a school offers instruction on a variety of subjects, including social studies, science, and the arts, rather than an overly narrow focus on math and reading (which is what end-of-year tests focus on). Survey data showing student perceptions, such as the extent to which students feel academically challenged and supported is also an effective metric.”

From a parent’s point of view, the new summative grade tells no more about the teachers or the curriculum or students’ experiences at school.  It is really no different than the five star rating system Wattenberg remembers in Washington, D.C.’s previous system.  Here in Ohio, where I live, we have a five star system, which is no better than the A, B, C, D, F system we had before we got the new five stars.  In Washington, DC,  the new 1-100 rating number Wattenberg describes being earned by each school will only cue up competative parents to go for the highest rated schools in a giant competition. Most people choosing a school on the basis of the ratings will not be able to discern how the metric balances all the variables in each school or whether the rating really say anything about what is happening at the school.

Having attended school in a small Montana town, where we all went to the same middle school and high school, and having parented two children who attended our neighborhood elementary and middle school and came together at our community’s only high school here in a Cleveland, Ohio inner suburb, I prefer the old and more radical solution to the whole problem of school choice driven by metrics published in the newspaper or school report cards. In fact, for the majority of families in the United States, neighborhood schools are still the norm. A system of neighborhood schools embodies the idea that parents’ responsibility is to help their children embrace the opportunities at the school where they are assigned.

As parents when my children were in elementary school, we used the PTA meetings as places to strategize about how we could better support innovations and special programs to make school more fun and challenging for all the students.  A district-wide school support agency in our community provides a tutoring program for students who need extra help, and there is a community supported, district-wide music camp for a week in June when the high school orchestra director and his staff, along with a raft of graduates from the high school music program, help students from across the middle schools to prepare for joining the high school band and orchestra.  People from across the school district turn out for the concert that culminates the summer music camp.

This kind of community involvement connects parents with the community’s public schools in a qualitative way.  When people engage personally with a school, the teachers and the students, parents can learn so much more about a school than any metric can expose.

At the very least, it is time for the U.S. Department of Education to stop demanding that states rate and rank their public schools.  Wattenberg is correct that the ratings—a measurement of need—are misinterpreted by the press and misunderstood by the public as a measurement of quality.

Who Redefined Teaching as the Production of High Test Scores and Who Taught Us to Believe in the Myth of the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations?

The history that happens in our lifetimes is sometimes the most obscure.  We live it without thinking about it, and it hasn’t yet been recorded or analyzed by historians who help us sift out the important details and trace what has happened.  Fortunately today, public policy experts have been exploring parts of the last half century’s history of public education to help us see what we may have missed while living through these years.

Last April, James Harvey took us back 40 years to 1983, when Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education released A Nation at Risk, which blamed American public schools for our nation’s declining economic competitiveness. According to the commission’s report, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

Secretary of Education Terrell Bell appointed James Harvey, who was chief of staff to the National Institute of Education, the Department’s research arm, to help choose the members of the Commission. Harvey writes that as senior staff to the Commission, he, “developed two successive white papers reflecting on what we had heard from experts on the complexities of the school ‘system’ in the United States. The essence of the two lengthy papers was that American schools had accomplished great things for the United States and were now faced with the joint challenges of (1) successfully educating a more diverse and lower-income population through high school, and (2) improving standards or we risked becoming mired in mediocrity.”  However, “(v)irtually every reference to the accomplishments of American schools and the challenges of diversity and poverty disappeared from the succeeding drafts.”

Harvey describes one member of the Commission who presented a new draft document blaming public schools for the nation’s economic problems. Harvey reports that the commission rewrote the report to prove that thesis: “There were at least three problems with what the commission finally produced. First, it settled on its conclusions and then selected evidence to support them. Second, its argument was based on shockingly shoddy logic. And third, it proposed a curricular response that ignored the complexity of American life and the economic and racial divisions within the United States…

As a result, reports Harvey, we became an achievement-test-obsessed society in order to demand that our schools be held accountable.  What followed was the Clinton era’s Goals 2000, Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Race to the Top and all the punitive policies that constitute what remains our test-and-punish education culture.

Richard Rothstein is another expert who has helped us become more aware of the public education history many of us have lived through in the past half century. Rothstein wrote The Color of Law, the definitive history of how public policy contributed to the racial segregation of housing across the United States and how housing segregation turned into school segregation. Two weeks ago for the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics Blog, Rothstein examined how a 1968 book, Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion in the Classroom, has shaped what has come to be a key premise of the common knowledge about public schools to this day.

Rosenthal and a school principal, Lenore Jacobson, conducted an experiment they described as concluding that teachers’ expectations for each student shaped and predicted which students would be successful, independent of what was recorded as their IQ. “Some psychologists were skeptical, believing that the experimental design was not sufficiently rigorous to support such a revolutionary conclusion.” Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment was conducted on first and second grade students, but Rothstein reports, “Even the reported results were ambiguous. Teacher expectations had no similar impact on children in grades three through six.  Similar experiments elsewhere did not confirm the results even for first and second graders. Nevertheless, the book was very influential.”

Rothstein summarizes the impact of the book on public policy: “(I)gnoring how scanty the evidence was, education policymakers concluded from their research that the Black-white gap in test scores at all grade levels resulted from teachers of Black children not expecting their pupils to do well. And that, they reasoned, should be an easy problem to solve—holding teachers accountable for results would force them to abandon the racial stereotypes that were keeping children behind… The accountability movement grew in intensity during the Bill Clinton administration… In 2000, Bush was elected president; his campaign promised to demolish teachers’ ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.'” What followed was No Child Left Behind and a regime of testing every child every year from third through eighth grade and punishing schools whose scores did not quickly rise.

Rothstein remembers his conversation with a Congressional staffer at the time: “She predicted that within two years, the publication of test scores would so embarrass teachers that they would work harder, with the result that racial differences in academic achievement would evaporate entirely. Nothing of that sort has happened… Enthusiasm for charter schools escalated from a belief that operators could choose teachers with higher expectations, yet charter schools have not done any better (and in many cases worse) in closing the gap, once the sector’s ability to select students less likely to fail (and expel students who do) is taken into account.”

“Certainly,” Rothstein explains, “there are teachers with low expectations and harmful racial stereotypes, and it would be beneficial if those who can’t be trained to improve were removed from the profession.”  He adds: “Concentrating disadvantaged pupils in poorly resourced schools in poorly resourced and segregated neighborhoods (can) overwhelm instructional and support staffs.” As he looks back, however, Rothstein considers the impact of Pygmalion in the Classroom: “No book in the second half of the 20th century did more, unintentionally perhaps, to undermine support for public education and thus diminish educational opportunities for so many children, especially Black and Hispanic children, to this day. The book and its aftermath put the onus solely on teacher performance when it came to student achievement, disregarding so many critically important socioeconomic factors—at the top of the list, residential segregation.”

Academic research over the more than two decades since Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act has confirmed Rothstein’s conclusion. Here is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on the appropriate use of standardized tests: “Used properly… tests are very useful for describing what students know. On their own, however, tests simply aren’t sufficient to explain why they know it…. Of course the actions of educators do affect scores, but so do many of the other factors both inside and outside of school, such as their parents’ education.  This has been well documented at least since the publication more than fifty years ago of the ‘Coleman Report,’… which found that student background and parental education had a bigger impact than schooling on student achievement.” (The Testing Charade, pp, 148-149)

Koretz explains further: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms…. Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the Proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)

Just last year, in The Education Myth, John Shelton, a professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, reached the same conclusion about the essential flaw in No Child Left Behind: “At root, the very premise of the bill—that punishing schools for the scores of their students would improve the school’s performance—was simply flawed, particularly when school districts did not have the ability to raise students out of poverty or alleviate the trauma of racism.”  (The Education Myth, pp. 173)

It is important to consider the various ideas that have converged to shape today’s public policy. We can now see more clearly how No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on school accountability blocked our society’s addressing systemic racism and child poverty as primary barriers for too many American children.  We can also see that these are the same obstacles many state legislatures continue to ignore when they underfund the school districts serving concentrations of our society’s poorest children.

There remains, however, another serious consequence stemming from the school accountability movement and from Pygmalion in the Classroom and the idea of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as it was institutionalized in No Child Left Behind.  Our society has learned from the politicians who launched these reforms to put the children and their experience of schooling aside when we think about education.  Instead we have complacently allowed No Child Left Behind to redefine schoolteachers’ primary job as the production of high test scores.

As a result, many people and many of the state legislators who allocate dollars for public education too easily blame and scapegoat the schoolteachers and the schools and school districts unable to raise test scores upon command.  We continue to watch school districts themselves ignore poverty and systemic racism as they close or punish the schools in the poorest neighborhoods, and we continue to watch state legislatures take over “failing” schools or school districts and install so-called turnaround experts. The polls show that most parents are grateful to their child’s own teacher, someone they know personally, but when people think about teachers in general, too many have learned from several generations of school reform to blame the teachers and look down on the so-called “failing” schools that can’t seem to produce high test scores.

Defund School Privatization, Defend Public Schools: Vouch for This!

A professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Thomas S. Poetter, has edited a new book about the danger of public school privatization, Vouch for This!  Defunding Private Interests, Defending Public Schools. The book, conceived and written as a graduate seminar collaborative project of 15 students exploring the meaning of today’s explosive enactment across conservative state legislatures of new or expanded school voucher programs, explores the meaning for students, their parents, their teachers, and their communities of the growth of school privatization as represented by charter schools and publicly funded private school tuition vouchers.

I’ll begin where Poetter ends the book’s final chapter: “(G)reed and racism lie at the core of the voucher movement… Choice is difficult to exercise except for the wealthiest of us and the public schools aren’t weak, though they are underfunded and underappreciated. It’s about money and flight…. When students leave and take their many potential contributions as talented human beings with them, it impoverishes those left behind … It’s a little sad to me, that is all of the potential for success and community alchemy lost when others leave, the promise of mutual benefit we accrue when we share our differences and become one.” (Vouch for This! p. 133)

Poetter believes that academic work investigating public policy, is, by definition, political: “I… made the case with students early in the course that I wanted them to participate in what scholarly policy entities call ‘advocacy scholarship,’ which we would claim that those behind the voucher and charter movements themselves have been creating and participating in from their very beginning, from their own political and economic agenda perspectives even though they may not define their work as policy advocacy.” (Vouch for This!, p. xx)

Poetter’s graduate seminar which produced this book took place during a late spring-early summer six week period just as the Ohio Legislature was considering several possible school voucher expansions, any of which might have been inserted into the state’s biennial budget then being drafted for passage by June 30, 2023.  In the book’s final chapter, Poetter summarizes the Ohio Legislature’s action: “Just recently a new universal voucher program was embedded in the state’s new budget in Spring 2023, with plans for it taking shape during our class (May-June) and with the details finalized just after we adjourned the class in late June 2023… One truth is that we have elected a supermajority in our state government that is hellbent on undermining/dismantling public education… (T)he legislature funded a new universal voucher plan in an education budget that guarantees generous tuition vouchers and funding for charter enrollments to every family/child in Ohio. The funding is not tied to tiny escape hatch nods to ‘failing schools’ as in the past, and barely protects the public from funding even rich citizens’ private education dreams, now realities (the economic exclusion is 450% of the poverty level or $135,000/year for a family of four, but every family will receive some scholarship regardless of income.)” (Vouch for This!, pp. 129-130)

Poetter organizes his graduate seminar according to a theory of currere, which demands that students explore scholarly study by considering the question: “What has been and is my journey in education?”  This sort of study “brings the scholar closer to a point of view and the phenomenon at hand, not more distant… (as) in a… more appealingly objective, safe, and authoritative space….” (Vouch for This!, pp. xix-xx)

Of the fifteen graduate students in Poetter’s seminar, several are international students, others have chosen education as a career because of difficult experiences in their own schooling in some cases relating to family poverty. The students divided themselves into five teams of three to explore several topics the students themselves defined—democratic accountability for education—the effect of rapid school privatization on communities—the public school finance implications of voucher expansion—what families are expressing when they choose a school—the personal choices families make. The book includes a chapter from each three-person team.

Reading the personal stories and reflections the students share (or the fictional narratives some groups collectively imagine) through the five chapters, we learn not only about what the students internalized from the materials in the class reading list, with some of the books and articles theoretical, abstract, and technical, but also how their reading has shaped their reflection on their own life experiences.  The required reading included the new The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, a collection of scholarly, academic, comprehensive, and in many instances technical articles examining today’s explosive growth of vouchers. The students’ task in their five collaborative writing projects is to personalize the findings exposed in this kind of research literature from the point of view of the students, parents, educators, and communities they know.

Here are some of the themes that emerge in the chapters written by the students as they reflect on school privatization in the context of their own experience, recount personal narratives, or create together a fictional narrative to depict their conclusions.

First:   From the point of view of parents of students in underfunded urban public schools, school choice in the form of a charter school or a voucher for private education is often seized as a symbol of hope:

• Parents “desire for more, to experience a beacon of hope amid a public school system that is not academically strong or a public school system that prioritizes certain school buildings with added resources over other schools in the same public school district is what thrusts so many students and their families into the world of… charter schools.  Many families say to themselves, ‘What do I have to lose?'”  (Vouch for This!, p. 89)
• “For these families school choice represented a glimmer of hope, providing them with a sense of optimism for the future…They saw it as a potential pathway to secure a brighter future for their children, one that encompassed well-funded schools equipped with modern facilities and high-quality instruction.  However….” (Vouch for This!, p. 10)

Second:   Accurate and transparent information about charter schools or the private schools available through vouchers is frequently incomplete or simply not available or accessible for parents making such an important choice.

• “Our critical analysis of this educational policy issue… reveals that the voucher movement and charter schools encounter serious transparency challenges such that allocation of funds through these programs/movements lacks accountability, (there is) limited information, (there are) huge risks of unequal access to quality education, potential fraud, as well as abuse of public resources.” (Vouch for This!, p. 11) This quote is from the group of three international graduate students from Africa enrolled in the program. They also reference their awareness of the same problem with  a privatized international program operating in Africa with funding from the World Bank and the IMF. (Vouch for This!, p. 8)
• “(A)ll this talk of current day vouchers has made me think about what if there had been a voucher system back then where an inner city, economically challenged student like me could have a parent… move me to a ‘better’ charter or private school?… How would my mother have known about it, or who would have made sure she was truly informed about the voucher system? If there had been this voucher system, who would have decided which students and parents were made aware of it?  I wonder if my mother had known about it, given our economic status, would we even have been able to take advantage or this new system? ” (Vouch for This!), p. 63)

Third:   In systems based on school choice, fear is frequently a motivator for parents.

• “I went online to see what I needed to do to enroll my (Kindergarten) daughter in the neighborhood public school. I searched online for the school and the first thing that appeared were the reviews: “Don’t send your kids here! Fighting, bullying, and incompetent teachers…” Negative words filled the page… After some more digging, I found that the school had been rated as failing for the past several years, and outcomes each year were worse than the year before… I pressed forward and chose a neighborhood charter school for my child. The building was beautiful, the teachers were friendly, the curriculum was STEM-focused, and the school boasted strong test scores… My daughter is now on her final strike at school.  If she breaks the conduct policy one more time, she’ll be kicked out…. Jasmine is hyperactive and needs a supportive, understanding environment I wish they’d work with her more.” (Vouch for This!, pp. 105-106)
• “Charter schools and school vouchers rise up in the midst of trauma and tragedy as a potential savior to save Black and Brown families from failing neighborhood schools.” (Vouch for This!, p. 81)

Fourth:   While they promote themselves as more responsive to parents than the neighborhood public schools, charter schools are not democratically operated.

• “The establishment of charter schools in economically disadvantaged areas does not adequately involve or empower local communities in decision-making processes. Charter schools have their own governance structures, do not have locally elected boards, and in some cases are run by large corporations who operate schools in multiple states.  Parents have little say in the daily operations or educational tactics of the school… Charter schools tend to locate in urban areas with high concentrations of minority and low-income students.” (Vouch for This!, p. 22)
• “Charter school receive public funding but are usually exempt from some state regulations…. Additionally, charter schools receiving public funds often operate with minimal government regulation, and are not built to foster parental participation.  In this regard, participating schools are not obligated to provide access to crucial school records, budgets, or administration details. The absence of external authority to assess curriculum, attendance, disciplinary measures, special education policies and practices further exacerbates the accountability gap.) (Vouch for This!, p. 12)

In the book’s epilogue, Professor Poetter addresses the practical meaning for the state’s public schools of the universal school voucher expansion the Ohio legislature inserted into the state’s new budget:  “(T)he fact remains that the state will be spending more per pupil on individual children in private high schools with its voucher program… than it will for individual public school students across the state… And just think of all that could be done in our public schools to better our offerings… if we weren’t sending more than $1 billion a year into private hands to be used in ways that none of us would ever approve of in public education… Do citizens know that private schools and charter schools alike pay unqualified teachers, use public money to pay for the teaching of religious doctrine… and deliver students to the doors of charter/private schools on the public dollar every single day when many of those districts have drastically cut busing and when the football team at the public school in many locales has to find its own way to the Friday night game, no matter how far away the opponent?” (Vouch for This!, pp. 130-131)

Poetter introduces Vouch for This! by posing the following questions for readers to consider: “What becomes of our way of life, our democratic republic… when we create seemingly parallel systems of education that overwhelmingly advance the segregation of students of color and those who are low-income from the rest… when we establish rules of action so dissimilar (between public and schools privatized at public expense)… when we create school opportunities for students that don’t have the baseline protections we demand for every student in traditional public schools…  when we give up on our responsibilities to maintain a public education system as a public good for all…? ” (Vouch for This!, pp. xxx-xxxi)

Why I Am Looking Forward to Next Weekend’s Network for Public Education Conference

Many of us will be traveling to Washington, D.C. next weekend for the 10th Anniversary Conference of the Network for Public Education. We will have an opportunity to greet friends and colleagues, listen to experts examine today’s attack on public schooling, and strategize about confronting the opponents of our society’s historic system of free and universal public education.

As well-funded interests like Moms for Liberty try to invade local school boards, as the Heritage Foundation, EdChoice, the Bradley Foundation, Koch and Walton money, and Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children support a school voucher revolution across the state legislatures, and as state legislators in many places obsess over test scores without grasping the human work teachers and students must accomplish together, we will gather to strategize about strengthening support for the public schools that remain the central institution in most American towns and neighborhoods.

There will be keynotes from Gloria Ladson-Billings, former chair of urban education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Becky Pringle, President of the NEA; Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT; Diane Ravitch, and several other prominent speakers. Participants will also be able to choose from among more than 40 workshops:

• sessions exploring strategies and messaging to fight school privatization—including reports from Indiana, Florida and Arizona on vouchers; sessions on problems with charter schools in Pennsylvania and Texas; and a workshop on constitutional issues around religions charter school;
• workshops addressing the need to overcome far-right attempts to hijack school boards including the fake grassroots parents’ groups funded by far-right philanthropy; reports on advocates working in a number of communities to engage parents as local school board advocates; and several Florida school board members sharing their experiences as their school boards were taken over and politicized;
• discussions exploring the long impact of test-and-punish school reform including workshops examining state takeovers in several districts including this year’s state seizure of the Houston, Texas Public Schools; and a session about efforts to rid the Denver Public Schools of Portfolio School Reform;
• conversations helping advocates support the retention and recruitment of teachers in these difficult times when, after COVID, many have blamed teachers for test scores and discipline problems, and when teachers’ autonomy has been undermined and their salaries remain low;
• sessions to develop skills for coalition building, one of them from California stressing the need to build joint parent-teachers union coalitions; another from Wisconsin on statewide parent organizing; and other workshops emphasizing coalition building with communities of faith to preserve the Constitutional protections for religious liberty;
• conversations helping advocates better frame and articulate an agenda to undermine racism, protect a diverse curriculum, and focus on students’ needs;
• workshops celebrating full-service, wraparound Community Schools and strategizing to expand the number of Community Schools; and
• discussions of specific issues: support for early childhood education, the need to protect student privacy, and the danger of outsourcing the work of education support professionals to private contractors.

As a blogger and an Ohio resident who worries about the diversion of public school funding to our state’s new universal vouchers, however, I am also looking for some broader help than any one of these specific workshops can provide.  While it is possible to identify the forces unraveling support for public education, I struggle to find adequate language to articulate why the public schools we have taken for granted for generations are so important. I will be grateful at this conference to listen as experts name the essential role of the public schools in our diverse, democratic society. I will be listening as presenters and advocates emphasize these core principles.

Here are three examples of people writing about or speaking about what public schooling can accomplish.  First from the late political theorist Benjamin Barber is a rather complex but also important declaration about school privatization as an expression of radical individualism in contrast with public education as an institution in which the public can protect citizens’ rights: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all… With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Second, William Ayers updates John Dewey’s 1899 declaration in The School and Society: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.” Here is how, in an essay in the 2022, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Ayers defines the kind of public education that every American child today ought to have: “Every child has the right to a free, high-quality education. A decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family. This is easy to envision: What the most privileged parents have for their public school children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education and athletic fields and gymnasiums, after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts—is the baseline for what we want for all children.” (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

Third, Jitu Brown, the Chicago community organizer who now leads the national Journey4Justice Alliance, will be a presenter again at this year’s Network for Public Education conference. My notes from one of the earlier conferences quote Brown rephrasing in another way Dewey’s formulation about what public schooling must accomplish: “We want the choice of a world class neighborhood school within safe walking distance of our homes. We want an end to school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansion.”

I am looking forward to next week’s conference.  In addition to all the practical strategy sessions and great keynotes, I hope we will actively be sharing our continued confidence in the foundational values represented by our American system of public schools—publicly funded, universally available and accessible, and guaranteed by law to meet each child’s needs and protect all children’s rights. School privatization cannot move our society closer to these goals. Although we will need to work doggedly to ensure greater equality of opportunity and to continue to improve our public schools, they remain the optimal educational institution for the investment of our efforts and tax dollars.

Marilynne Robinson Considers Iowa’s Rightward Turn and What It Means for Education

In Dismantling Iowa, in the November 2, 2023 New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson examines Governor Kim Reynolds’ Iowa as the microcosm of the conservative Republican attack on the rights of children and on the promise of K-12 and university education. Robinson is a novelist and retired professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa; she has been an artist-in-residence at a number of other colleges. Her style contrasts with the writing of policy wonks, but she comes to the same conclusions. Her comments are about today’s politics in Iowa but at the same time reflect on the politics of other states like Florida and Wisconsin and Ohio.

Robinson begins with a bit of history—the sudden rightward turn of states once known for their progressivism. She defines a “liberal” education, the foundational principle of progressive colleges established in the nineteenth century by abolitionists across the Midwest: “American higher education is of the kind historically called liberal, that is, suited to free people, intended to make them independent thinkers and capable citizens. ‘Liberal’ comes from the Latin word liber, meaning ‘free.’ Aristotle, a theorist on this subject of incalculable influence until recently, considered education a natural human pleasure, essential to the perfecting of the self, which he says it is in our nature to desire. Obviously when he taught there was no thought of economic utility that would subordinate learning to the purposes of others, to the detriment of individual pleasure or self-perfection. Training in athletics, music, then philosophy were to be valued because they are liberating.” “(W)e are in a period when the value of education is disputed. Regrettably, it has become expensive enough to be regarded by some as a dubious investment of time and money. Its traditional form and substance do not produce workers suited to the present or the future economy—as these are understood and confidently imagined by its critics.”

At the K-12 level, Robinson prefers free public education to school privatization exemplified by Iowa’s new publicly funded private school tuition vouchers.  She examines the provision of education through the lens of equality, one of the principles our society has historically endorsed, but which Robinson believes Governor Reynolds and her legislature have sacrificed: “The governor has been very intent on achieving equality as she understands it for Iowa students. She and her legislature have provided a grant of public money for every child who is approved by the state to attend a private school, the money to be released when the child is accepted there…  It should be noted that ‘private’ in this context can mean religious in some—or any—sense of the word. The constitutional issues that might arise from this use of public money seem to be of no concern. As for the character of these schools… the implicit promise seems to be that contact with ideas and people some find problematic can be avoided, that they can be and will be excluded on what are called religious grounds. So public money will be used to deprive some children of the kind of education the governor deems beneficial while other children are deprived of the education that comes with encountering a world not yet structured around polarization.”

Will the state protect the rights of students receiving state support for private school?  “State governments can intervene in public schools, hector, threaten, and substantially control them. Private schools are too disparate to be the objects of sweeping denunciation…Now that state money will come into such private schools as there are in Iowa—forty-one of the ninety-nine counties don’t have even one—it will be interesting to see if the governor and her like have a comparable interest in interfering with them. These schools can be selective, which is a positive word now, though the honor and glory of public education is that it does not select… An element in all this is the fact that we have let the word ‘public’ seem to mean something like ‘second-rate.’ This is very inimical to the open and generous impulses that make a society democratic.”

Robinson explores some other legislative actions Iowa has undertaken supposedly to provide freedom from regulation for Iowa’s parents and children: “Consistent with this current ‘conservative’ passion for dismantling things, including gun laws… the governor and the legislature of Iowa are stripping away legal limits on child labor… All this is being done in the name of freedom. It is always fair to ask when rights are being claimed whether they impinge on others’ rights.  The question certainly arises here. We know that the employment of children does not reliably bring out the best in employers… Migrant children, unprotected or worse, work under sometimes intolerable conditions… (I)t is jarring that Iowa children will… do work previously prohibited as dangerous, at hours previously prohibited as incompatible with their schooling.  They are making the most of a new opportunity, according to the governor, to ‘develop their skills in the workforce.’ Not incidentally, they will also be easing the labor shortage from which the state suffers. The minimum wage in Iowa is $7.25. In Illinois it is $13.00, in Missouri $12.00, in South Dakota $10.80.  Surely these figures suggest another possible solution to the shortage of workers, a better way to compete with surrounding states than to expose children to the possibility of injury, or to the costly lack of a high school diploma. There is much talk about choice in Iowa, but many children will find that, for them, important possibilities have been precluded.”

What about the culture wars in public schools?  “(T)he Iowa governor and her legislature have launched a campaign to embarrass the public grade schools. Of course there is now great perturbation about what can or cannot be included in their libraries. This intrusion of the state government on traditionally more or less autonomous communities has the tenor of a moral crackdown. New laws have been enacted to bring unruly librarians to heel. Educational standards for new librarians have been lowered. The governor says, of course, that the legislation ‘sets boundaries to protect Iowa’s children from woke indoctrination.’ It is as if parents zipping up their five-year-old’s jacket feel a qualm of fear because of potential classroom exposure to sinister ideas, not because their state now allows permitless concealed and open carry.”

A good part of Robinson’s essay reflects on the history and purpose of higher education: “Iowa was very much a part of the zeal for education that characterized the early Midwest, an inheritance from its activist settlers. Now the old Iowa is under attack by… ‘conservatives.'” “They pose as champions of the people, but they are making a wholesale attack on the basic institutions of the country; by policy and by the spread of pernicious distrust that undercuts the authority of institutions they do not control… American culture, with all the changes the country has passed through over the years, has maintained a consensus about the importance of higher education… The whole phenomenon depends on our preparing children to have a part of it when they come of age. Whatever the benefit university conveys, it is in trust for them until that time. To put the matter another way, society can very largely determine the course of lives by respecting or denying the importance of childhood.  If there is any good faith behind the talk of freedom and democracy, this fact should have weight. Education is a special case within the larger issue of the inequities that arise from social injustice as it has an impact on children.”

Protecting Public Education to Protect Democracy: A Challenge for Our Times

I find myself struggling these days to understand how those of us who prize our U.S. system of public education seem to have lost the narrative. As I listen to the rhetoric of today’s critics of public schooling—people who distrust or disdain the work of school teachers and who believe test scores are the only way to understand education, I worry about the seeming collapse of the values I grew up with as a child in a small Montana town whose citizens paid so much attention to the experiences its public schools offered for the community’s children. The schools in my hometown provided a solid core curriculum plus a strong school music program, ambitious high school drama and speech and debate programs, athletics, a school newspaper, and an American Field Service international student every single year at the high school. While many of us continue to support our public schools, what are the factors that have caused so many to abandon their confidence in public education?

It is in this context that I found myself reading “Education and the Challenges for Democracy,” the introductory essay in the current issue of Education Policy Analysis Archives. In his essay, Fernando M. Reimers, a professor in the graduate school of education at Harvard University, explores the interconnection of public education and democracy itself. Reimers explains, for example, that the expansion of our democracy to include more fully those who have previously been marginalized is likely to impact the public schools in many ways and that these changes in the schools will inspire their own political response:

“(T)he expansion of political rights to groups of the population previously denied rights (e.g. women, members of racial or religious minorities) may lead to increased access for these groups to educational institutions and a curriculum that prepares them for political participation. These changes, in turn, feed back into the political process, fostering increased demands for participation and new forms of representation as a result of the new skills and dispositions these groups gained by educational and political changes. But these increases in representation may activate political backlash from groups who seek to preserve the status quo. These forces may translate into efforts to constrain the manner in which schools prepare new groups for political participation. In this way, the relationship between democratic politics and democratic education is never static, but in perpetual, dynamic, dialectical motion that leads to new structures and processes. The acknowledgement of this relationship as one that requires resolution of tensions and contradictions, of course, does not imply an inevitable cycle of continuous democratic improvement, as there can be setbacks—both in democracy itself, and in education for democracy.”

Reimers continues: “Democracy—a social contract intended to balance freedom and justice—is not only fluid and imperfect but fragile.  This fragility has become evident in recent years… In order to challenge the forces undermining democracy, schools and universities need to recognize these challenges and their systemic impact and reimagine what they must do to prepare students to address them.”  While Reimers explains that the goal of his article is not only, “to examine how democratic setbacks can lead to setbacks in democratic education, but also how education can resist those challenges to democracy,” he presents no easy solutions.  He does, however sort out the issues to which we should all be paying attention—naming five specific challenges for American democracy:

“The five traditional challenges to democracy are corruption, inequality, intolerance, polarization, and populism… The democratic social contract establishes that all persons are fundamentally equal, and therefore have the same right to participate in the political process and demand accountability. Democracy is challenged when those elected to govern abuse the public trust through corruption, or capturing public resources to advance private ends… Democracy is also challenged by social and economic inequality and by the political inequality they may engender… One result of political intolerance is political polarization… Political intolerance is augmented by Populism, an ideology which challenges the idea that the interests of ordinary people can be represented by political elites.” (emphasis in the original)

Reimers considers how these threats to democracy endanger our public schools: “The first order of effects of these forces undermining democracy is to constrain the ability of education institutions to educate for democracy. But a second order of effects results from the conflicts and tensions generated by these forces….” As the need for schools and educators to prepare students for democratic citizenship becomes ever more essential, political backlash may threaten schools’ capacity to help students challenge the threats to democracy.

In their 2017 book, These Schools Belong to You and Me, Deborah Meier and Emily Gasoi articulate in concrete terms what Reimers explains abstractly as one of the imperatives that public schools must accomplish today: “(W)e need a means of ensuring that we educate all future citizens, not only to be well versed in the three Rs, and other traditional school subjects, but also to be able to see from multiple perspectives and to be intellectually curious and incisive enough to see through and resist the lure of con artists and autocrats, whether in the voting booth, the marketplace, or in their social dealings.” (These Schools Belong to You and Me, p. 25)  Schools imagined as preparing critical thinkers—schools that focus on more than basic drilling in language arts and math—are necessary to combat two of the threats Reimers lists: corruption and populism.

But what about Reimers’ other threats? How can schools, in our current polarized climate, push back against intolerance, inequality, and polarization? Isn’t today’s attack on “diversity, equity and inclusion” in some sense an expression of a widespread desire to give up on our principle of equality of opportunity—to merely accept segregation, inequality and exclusion? This is the old, old struggle Derek Black traces in Schoolhouse Burning—the effort during Reconstruction to develop state constitutions that protect the right to education for all children including the children of slaves—followed by Jim Crow segregation—followed by the Civil Rights Movement and Brown v. Board of Education—followed by myriad efforts since then to keep on segregating schools.  Isn’t the attempt to discredit critical race theory really the old fight about whose cultures should be affirmed or hidden at school, and isn’t this fight reminiscent of the struggle to eliminate the American Indian boarding schools whose purpose was extinguishing American Indian children’s languages and cultures altogether? Isn’t the battle over inclusion the same conflict that excluded disabled children from public school services until Congress passed the Individuals with Disability Education Act in 1975? And what about the battle that ended in 1982, when, in Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court  protected the right to a free, K-12 public education for children of undocumented immigrants?  Our society has continued to struggle to accept the responsibility for protecting the right to equal opportunity. As Reimers explains, action to address inequality has inevitably spawned a reaction.

Educators and political philosophers, however, have persistently reminded us of our obligation to make real the promise of public schooling.  In 1899, our most prominent philosopher of education, John Dewey, declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”  (The School and Society, p. 1)

In 1992, political theorist Benjamin Barber advocated for the very kind of public schooling Reimers would like to see today:  “(T)he true democratic premise encompasses… the acquired virtues and skills necessary to living freely, living democratically, and living well. It assumes that every human being, given half a chance, is capable of the self-government that is his or her natural right, and thus capable of acquiring the judgment, foresight, and knowledge that self-government demands.… The fundamental assumption of democratic life is not that we are all automatically capable of living both freely and responsibly, but that we are all potentially susceptible to education for freedom and responsibility. Democracy is less the enabler of education than education is the enabler of democracy.” (An Aristocracy of Everyone, pp. 13-14)

In a 1998 essay,  Barber declared: “America is not a private club defined by one group’s historical hegemony. Consequently, multicultural education is not discretionary; it defines demographic and pedagogical necessity. If we want youngsters from Los Angeles whose families speak more than 160 languages to be ‘Americans,’ we must first acknowledge their diversity and honor their distinctiveness. English will thrive as the first language in America only when those for whom it is a second language feel safe enough in their own language and culture to venture into and participate in the dominant culture. For what we share in common is not some singular ethnic or religious or racial unity but precisely our respect for our differences: that is the secret to our strength as a nation, and is the key to democratic education.” (“Education for Democracy,” in A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, p. 231)

These same principles are prophetically restated by William Ayers in his final essay in the 2022 book, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy:  “In a free society education must focus on the production—not of things, but—of free people capable of developing minds of their own even as they recognize the importance of learning to live with others. It’s based, then, on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being, constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all…  Schools don’t exist outside of history or culture: they are, rather, at the heart of each. Schools serve societies; societies shape schools. Schools, then, are both mirror and window—they tell us who we are and who we want to become, and they show us what we value and what we ignore, what is precious and what is venal.”  (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

In his new essay, Reimers explores the interdependence of the public schools and American democracy. The threats he names today are all part of the long battle we’ve been fighting for generations to expand the right for every child to be seen and nurtured. In the midst of today’s attack on democracy and public education, it is worth taking the time consider the values which are the foundation of our nation’s unique commitment to universal public schooling. Holding on to these principles will help us keep on keeping on.

Research Shows State School District Report Cards Do Not Measure the Quality of Public Schools

The state of Ohio released 2023 public school district report cards last week.  As usual, the press has reported that the state’s wealthy exurban school districts are the champions, and poor rural and urban districts are the losers. The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s current data reporter, Zachary Smith, explains:

“A third of the school districts receiving top-level five-star scores in Ohio’s revamped school report card system are in Greater Cleveland, including a dozen districts in Cuyahoga County. Overall 25 of the 75 public districts statewide receiving five stars in the report cards released Thursday are from Cuyahoga and the surrounding counties—signifying that according to state guidelines, each ‘significantly exceeds state standards.’ While 12% of Ohio’s 607 districts received five stars, it was double that rate in Greater Cleveland and more than triple that rate in Cuyahoga County.”

You can see that, despite that this year the state stopped awarding A-F grades to the school districts and awarded up to five stars in each of a number of categories (with points adding up to an overall summative rating), the Cleveland Plain Dealer again reported the new school district report cards as a race with winners and losers.  And as usual in the state school report card race, the rich are the winners and the poor are the losers.

The five categories this year that add up to an overall school district rating are: Achievement, Early Literacy, Graduation Rate, Progress, and Gap Closing.  Except for the graduation rates, all the other categories are based on a comparison of the standardized test scores in each of the state’s school districts.

Experts will tell you that there is a long and comprehensive compendium of research demonstrating that standardized test scores DO NOT primarily reflect the quality of a district’s public schools. And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students. Neither do they describe the schools’ strategies for school discipline; nor do they reflect the richness of the curriculum, the music and art program, the extracurricular offerings for enrichment, or whether students come to love learning.

Years of research instead clearly show that, when individual students’ standardized test scores are aggregated by school district, the rankings correlate with the family and neighborhood income of the community itself. A school district’s test scores are primarily a measure of privilege. Educators and sociologists have stopped using the term “achievement gaps”and have begun discussing the causes of “opportunity gaps.” We have known for years that No Child Left Behind’s focus on test score achievement gaps embodies an inaccurate understanding the factors that shape opportunity in children’s lives.

Here is just some of the research that has shifted the discussion to opportunity gaps in children’s lives. First there was Stanford University educational sociologist, Sean Reardon’s 2011 report on growing residential segregation by income—which correlates with segregation by race. Reardon used a massive data set to document the consequences of widening economic inequality for children’s outcomes at school. Reardon showed that while in 1970, only 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods classified as affluent or poor, by 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods. By 2007, fewer families across America lived in mixed income communities. Reardon also demonstrated that along with growing residential inequality and residential segregation by income is a simultaneous jump in an income-inequality school test score gap. The gap between the children with income in the top ten percent and the children with income in the bottom ten percent, was 30-40 percent wider among children born in 2001 than those born in 1975, and twice as large as the black-white test score gap.

Then in 2016, Reardon documented: “The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district.” “The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. Average test scores of black students are, on average, roughly two grade levels lower than those of white students in the same district; the Hispanic-white difference is roughly one-and-a-half grade levels. Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers… and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment.  The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.”

In 2022, Reardon commented on the factors that contribute to opportunity gaps: “We examine… test score gaps because they reflect… differences in access to educational opportunities. By ‘educational opportunities,’ we mean all experiences in a child’s life, from birth onward, that provide opportunities for her to learn, including experiences in children’s homes, child care settings, neighborhoods, peer groups, and their schools. This implies that test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience. Moreover, in saying that test score gaps reflect differences in opportunities, we also mean that they are not the result of innate group differences in cognitive skills or other genetic endowments… (D)ifferences in average scores should be understood as reflecting opportunity gaps….”

There are many other studies.  Here are just some examples.

In 2017, Katherine Michelmore of Syracuse University and Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan studied data from Michigan to identify the role of economic disadvantage in achievement gaps as measured by test scores: “We use administrative data from Michigan to develop a… detailed measure of economic disadvantage… Children who spend all of their school years eligible for subsidized meals have the lowest scores, whereas those who are never eligible have the highest. In eighth grade, the score gap between these two groups is nearly a standard deviation.” “Sixty percent of Michigan’s eighth graders were eligible for subsidized lunch at least once during their time in public schools. But just a quarter of these children (14% of all eighth graders) were economically disadvantaged in every year between kindergarten and eighth grade… Ninety percent of the test score gap we observe in eighth grade between the persistently disadvantaged and the never disadvantaged is present by third grade.

In 2017, Harvard University professor Daniel Koretz published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better,  an authoritative book about the danger of depending on standardized testing to try to drive school improvement: “(E)ducation has many other goals beyond achievement in a few tested subjects. But even if one looks only at achievement in those subjects, tests are not fully representative of the domains they are intended to represent… The bottom line: the information yielded by tests, while very useful, is never by itself adequate for evaluating programs, schools, or educators.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 14-17. emphasis in the original)   Koretz continues: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. Ty.” ( The Testing Charade, p. 129)

In September of  2022, Jack Schneider, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Joel Boyd, the superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools, wrote an article for Commonwealth Magazine explaining that the correlation of standardized test scores with family income has been an issue in Massachusetts as it has in other states through the past two decades since No Child Left Behind thrust us into school accountability based on standardized test scores: “As research indicates, test scores are highly indicative of the inequalities that afflict our communities, and are not a valid basis for determinations about overall school performance… Scholars have repeatedly shown (that) the leading predictors of student standardized test scores are demographic variables like family income and parental educational attainment.”

That same month, The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss published a piece written by two Northwestern University researchers, both sociologists, who have been evaluating our society’s obsession with ranking and rating. They describe their concerns about how the race for higher test scores in state school rankings undermines schools by shaping a narrow, test-driven curriculum that too often undermines students’ emotional well-being. Simone Ispa-Landa and Wendy Espeland declare: “We are a nation obsessed with lists and rankings, not just for dishwashers and other consumer products. We track our steps, rate our sleep, and go to hospitals with the ‘best ratings.’… In our research, we find that, across institutions, school leaders are pressured to devote enormous time and energy to ‘improving the numbers,’ even when this comes at the expense of making changes that, in private, they acknowledge would be far more impactful for students. Because rankings and other measures change how school leaders do their work and make decisions, current accountability policies have far-reaching implications for school discipline and student mental health at a moment of intense national crisis in child and youth well-being… We should acknowledge that one-size-fits-all metrics do not fairly measure what matters most in many schools…. We should reward schools for innovation, for creating programs that will take time to evaluate. Simple numbers promote simple solutions and can prevent promising programs with long-term positive implications from taking root.”

In Ohio Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

Finally, there is the simple correlation data published in 2019 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s previous data wonk, Rich Exner.  Exner examined the almost perfect correlation of the 2019 Ohio school district report cards with the school districts’ median household income.  Exner’s is not academic, peer-reviewed research, but his graphs nonetheless expose the injustice of claiming—as our state continues to do in the 2023 state report card race—that Beachwood’s public schools are excellent and East Cleveland’s are failing.  Beachwood is one of Ohio’s wealthiest Cleveland suburbs, and East Cleveland is another Cleveland suburb, one of the very poorest communities in the United States.

Over the years, the massive attention to the annual school district report card ratings in Ohio has constituted a form of educational redlining that has accelerated economic and racial segregation by encouraging wealthy white flight to the top ranked suburbs.