Beyond Doing the Wrong Thing the Right Way

My nephew is in elementary school, and my parents drive him to school each morning and arrive at his school an hour or two before school lets out each afternoon. This is a rural community in the South where many family members do the same—surrounding the school well before dismissal and often socializing.

Recently, my mother told me about parents of a child at that school who are refusing to allow their son to be placed in a test-prep class (and removed from his normal class) because of his low score on a MAP test. The parents are adamant that his test grades in class are high 90s, and they see no reason for his being out of that class to prepare for a test. [1]

Over the past year, I have also been a part of or observed two situations with education policy: one involving a compromise about reading legislation linked to retaining 3rd graders and another about language in the state’s science standards.

In both cases, good pedagogy and foundational aspects of the fields have been sacrificed for political expediency.

The situation at my nephew’s school and both of these education policy developments represent for me the central problem with the Common Core and high-stakes testing arguments: We are content to find the right ways to do the wrong things.

For example, a new report Data-Driven Improvement and Accountability by Andy Hargreaves, Henry Braun, and Kathleen Gebhardt for NEPC is excellent work that confronts how accountability has failed as well as how data should be used more effectively.

However, despite the high quality of this report, it doesn’t allow us to move a few steps further back and consider not using the accountability paradigm at all.

While there are certainly some outrageous claims made against the Common Core (the Tea Party railings against Obama and big government that often play loose with facts) and some passionate arguments against CC that are credible but tarnished by that passion (concerns about Gates money and its influence as well as the role of David Coleman), the dominant narratives about CC and the high-stakes testing connected with the new standards are about how critics are focusing on bad implementation, and not flaws in the standards or the tests. From that, the arguments are how to implement CC and the tests right.

And here is where we are failing.

Setting aside the impassioned arguments against CC and more high-stakes testing, a good deal of evidence shows that most of our educational problems have nothing to do with either the presence or quality of standards or tests (see Mathis, 2012, for example).

As well, we have considerable reason to be concerned about accountability based on high-stakes tests—Campbell’s Law and Gerald Bracey’s caution about what is tested is what is taught.

Simply put, there is no right way to implement standards and high-stakes tests in an accountability framework because neither the goals/purposes nor problems of U.S. public education call for that paradigm; schools are not failing due to a lack or poor quality of accountability.

And that leads to the next typical response: All critics do is criticize. Where is your alternative?

Let’s consider that, then.

Is there any value in a cohesive body of knowledge associated with the major disciplines (what we typically call standards)? Yes.

So what is wrong with Common Core? CC is a bureaucratic, top-down mandate. In all fields, there exists a cohesive body of agreed upon knowledge, a set of contemporary debates, and a set of enduring debates. Public school standards fail because they are primarily bureaucratic and essentially partisan political documents.

Building on that essential problem, then, a cohesive body of knowledge identified for a field of study that is a resource for an autonomous teacher—this should be the starting point of education reform.

However, even if we address re-tooling how we view standards, even if we drop high-stakes testing (and we should), and even if we afford teachers the professional autonomy they deserve, schools will still ultimately fail unless we address equity and opportunity both in the lives and in the education of all children.

We now face a tremendous wake-up call since—despite the increasingly influential and pervasive accountability movement in our schools—the majority of students in U.S. public schools in the South and urban schools live in poverty.

That fact itself calls into question our social policy and the likelihood that schools alone can overcome social dynamics.

There are no right ways to do the wrong things. CC, new high-stakes testing, and more accountability are simply the wrong things.

[1] Evidence from the SAT seems to support these parents’ wishes since GPA remains a better predictor of college success than SAT scores. Despite claims to the contrary, teachers’ subjective grading is quite powerful, and more powerful than a so-called objective measure.