How’s this for a manifesto? “Advancing parents’ right to choose their children’s schools while holding schools to account for their students’ academic achievement are the twin turbos of education reform in twenty-first century America.” Does it stir you to hope—or are you already changing the channel? This prescription comes courtesy of Chester E. Finn, Jr. In Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (note the self-flattering title), Finn argues that “standards-based reform” (in other words, standardized testing) is the way to set our schools aright. Once the tests reveal how schools are performing, families ought to be able to use that data to decide where to enroll their children.
Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik
Princeton University Press
368 pages
$6.32
Nearly all educational bureaucracies—from teachers unions to graduate schools of education—resist such changes. Finn’s recommendations would significantly loosen their grip over our nation’s fifty million pupils and six million education employees, not to mention half a trillion budgetary dollars. Who would willingly relinquish that kind of control? For someone who cut his teeth in the educational field while serving as an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Finn seems remarkably naïve about the political viability of his recommendations. But suppose we could put Finn’s proposals into practice. Should we?
What our schools need more than anything, Finn argues, is accountability. But how do we accomplish that? The irony of all the hand-wringing about our nation’s educational system is that we are home to the world’s finest institutions of higher learning. No country can boast as many spectacular universities as the United States. And yet, our primary and secondary schools lag behind dozens of other nations. If Finn had his way, we would expand standardized testing, but that can hardly be best for our students. Take, for example, Houston—one of the best large public school systems. The current school calendar tracks nineteen different standardized tests being administered over the course of this year—that’s considerably more than one per grade, and the tests begin as early as kindergarten. And because district-wide test scores are linked to everything from school funding to neighborhood housing prices, our nation’s K-12 curriculum is already dominated by such tests. In many places I know, teachers are discouraged from exploring topics that do not appear on the test. Student creativity and independent inquiry are often curtailed in our schools as a result.
Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, decries this development. “Teaching to the test is the only curriculum—not for a month, but for the entire year,” Wagner laments in The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It. Wagner says standardized testing is not the cure for America’s failing schools; it’s the cause. Calling for a halt to standardized testing as we now know it, he argues instead that schools must focus on teaching critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which cannot be reduced to simple formulae or multiple choice answers. This, along with his six other recommendations, Wagner claims, may allow us to close the achievement gap between American students and those in Denmark, Japan, and Poland.
Wagner, who advises the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on educational issues, underestimates the importance of mastering—which often entails memorizing—core bases of knowledge. A student cannot be a creative writer, playing with language like a poet, until she knows the conventions of punctuation and usage. Still, Wagner’s indictment of the status quo in K-12 education is compelling.
Nowhere is the need for change more evident than in the inner-city schools of our leading metropolitan centers. I earned a graduate degree from Teachers College at Columbia University, just blocks from the setting of Patrick McCloskey’s riveting ethnography, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem. McCloskey takes the reader along on a journey into the lives of students and educators at Rice High School in Central Harlem. Principal Orlando Gober, a former Black Panther, dominates the narrative. His pumpkin-colored pantsuits (c. 1974) mirror the principal’s fiery and colorful personality. Gober sees himself as a martyr, who quite literally (after ignoring his severe diabetes) gives his life to empowering young African American men to graduate from high school and make a life for themselves. McCloskey captures Gober’s strength of character as well as his foibles; the result is a rich story, full of texture and depth.
But The Street Stops Here is not only an engaging read; it actually provides a model for reforming a segment of our nation’s schools. Rice High School, founded by the Congregation of Christian Brothers in 1938, has refused to abandon its inner-city constituency. Compared to pupils at neighboring public schools, Rice students excel in terms of graduation rates and college admissions and achieve parity on standardized test scores. This mirrors wider research from Professor Derek Neal at the University of Chicago, who has shown that graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics at urban Catholic high schools are higher than those of urban whites at Catholic or public schools. As McCloskey argues, “Catholic schools destroy the unholy trinity of poverty, race, and academic failure that has become axiomatic in much of the public system.”
We can learn much from the example of Rice School. Remarkably, all three of these books cite with approval the success of such faith-based schools in urban centers across the country. Engaged teachers and administrators, many of whom feel called to the work they are doing, play significant roles in the lives of their students—teaching them as much about life as about their assigned subjects. The “tough love” of principals like Orlando Gober works well with students from these rougher neighborhoods, and everyone involved realizes that the stakes can’t be measured on any standardized test. Schools like Rice are giving kids a life-changing (sometimes life-saving) opportunity. They are doing this more consistently than neighboring public schools—and with fewer resources. And yet, these urban Catholic schools—despite the great value they provide their communities—are closing every year. People of faith and of no faith at all would be wise to invest in these schools and persuade legislators to reverse course, either by providing school vouchers (as Finn advocates) or by some other means.
Education is a field especially susceptible to pendulum swings. We throw out phonics and insist on teaching whole language. Years later we find that students do not understand the conventions of how words and sentences go together, so we repudiate whole language for another model. Maybe what our schools most need is not (another) new model but simply a large dose of common sense. Yes, it is helpful to evaluate what currently works and then tweak it for the better. But scores of studies have already shown promising leads. Experts agree that Catholic urban schools succeed, and they do so on shoestring budgets. Why aren’t we opening more of them instead of letting them wither and die? And sure, standardized testing has its place in the curriculum, but it shouldn’t be the curriculum. Instead of students and teachers being evaluated by standardized tests annually (or in some cases, even more often), why not choose a random sample of students to be tested each year and vary the group so that no student is tested more often than every four years? It’s a small, sensible step, but one in the right direction. In schooling philosophies and practices, we too often throw out the baby with the bathwater, but that must stop, lest our children’s future go down the educational drain.
Rebecca Ward Lindsay, after a decade of teaching middle school literature, now works with elementary students, but her favorite teaching assignment involves a class of one—her daughter, Elizabeth.
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