Here And There

The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times has an interesting essay, “Standardizing the Standards,” which discusses the problems in acquiring meaningful data on student learning from the high stakes tests used by various states under NCLB. If the state standardized tests are to be believed, 71% of Florida schools and 4% of Wisconsin schools are failing to make the No Child Left Behind Annual Yearly Progress [AYP] benchmarks. In the face of such incredulous results, author Ann Hulbert invokes Campbell’s Law to explain the manipulations, deliberate and otherwise, of performance data. Campbell, a social psychologist, posited in 1975 that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Hulbert notes that making NAEP into a national high stakes test could eliminate the incredulous differences in reports of student proficiency among the states, but insofar as it too would be subject to Campbell’s law, distortions and corruptions currently absent from that exam would appear. One of the reasons why NAEP data is one of the more accurate measures of learning now available, for example, is that there is no ‘test preparation’ for it, and that would change overnight if it were to become a hig stakes exam.

With Campbell’s Law in mind, we thought that it might be time to fashion a new law — the Education CEO law — to describe what happens when non-educators take over the management of schools and school districts, a phenomenon which is unfortunately on the wax and not the wane. The less actual classroom and school experience a person in school management has, we have learned, the less likely they are to see a need for such experience and the more apt they are to disregard the advice of experienced educators in making policy decisions. The most bone-headed mistakes we have seen invariably come from those with the least educational experience — and no desire to listen to those who do possess such experience.

In the “give credit where credit is due” department, it was refreshing to see Checker Finn relate the virtues of experience working with real teachers in real schools. “It’s been healthy to emerge from the ivory tower,” Finn wrote in his weekly Gadfly on his Fordham Institute’s experience as a charter authorizer in Ohio, “to work closely with real educators trying to do right by real children — almost all of them poor, minority, and ill-served by traditional schools — in real places.” In a piece worth reading, Finn relates a number of things that experience have taught them,  including that

It’s far harder than theorists thought to actually close a mediocre (or even bad) school. I plead guilty to having helped to propagate a naïve doctrine here. Unless its students face imminent danger or someone has fled to Bermuda with the payroll, shuttering a school is a tricky business. Parents and kids usually like their school, no matter its low test scores and torpid curriculum, and don’t want it closed any more than do the clients of a surplus district school.

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