David Brooks, Educational Theorist

David Brooks takes on Diane Ravitch in his NYTimes column today:

Ravitch makes some serious points…If you make tests all-important, you give schools an incentive to drop the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports. You may end up with schools that emphasize test-taking, not genuine learning. You may create incentives for schools to game the system by easing out kids who might bring the average scores down, for example.

In sum, Ravitch highlights a core tension. Teaching is humane. Testing is mechanistic.

This is true, but look at which schools are most distorted by testing. As the education blogger Whitney Tilson has pointed out, the schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these schools are also the places where students are most likely to participate in chess and dance. They are the places where they are most likely to read Shakespeare and argue about philosophy and physics.

Let’s quickly run through the testing question. Before starting my PhD, I taught first grade in a charter school in Crown Heights. We shared a building with several traditional public schools. We drew students from similar demographic categories, from the same neighborhoods, and had similar budgets available. As I’ve mentioned before, my school dramatically out-performed these schools on state proficiency tests (67.8% to 40.7% at or above 4th grade Math/ELA proficiency). We even out-performed the public school average for New York state—despite our low-income student population (67.8% to 60.3% at or above 4th grade Math/ELA proficiency). Simply put, with students from the same community (ours were admitted by lottery…no skimming), our school did a much better job preparing our students for academic success.

I can promise you that there isn’t some test-prep trick here that explains the 27% difference between my school’s students and their traditional public school counterparts. This is partly anecdotal, but it’s also basic math. These tests aren’t perfect, but they’re simply not uncertain enough to produce those kinds of results. Not even close.

This is something often lost in education reform debates. When we’re talking about using tests to measure accountability, we’re very rarely talking about shades of gray. Reform opponents often argue that tests are inaccurate, and that they don’t represent the work of students or teachers. To a degree, this is reasonable enough: we don’t want teachers to be victimized by a bad day of testing, or a hard cap on “good enough” test results.

That’s fine. The thing is, reformers aren’t usually worried about test results that are just barely good enough vs almost good enough. They’re not talking about results within the error bars of the test. They’re talking about huge discrepancies, like the results cited above. They’re asking: Why should we continue to pay for schools (public or charter) that are underperforming this dramatically—especially when there are other options?

But this is well-traveled turf, especially if you spend much time reading/thinking/writing on these kinds of issues. More interesting is Brooks’ last claim: He notes that “academic success” isn’t just measured by ability to demonstrate reading ability on a test. Education is also about developing character, and thinking skills, and studying the liberal arts (in the broadest definition of the term). It’s not all measurable.

Why does this matter? Well, opponents (Joanne Barkan, in this case) accuse education reformers of wanting “public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten calls this “market-based reform,” and she DOES NOT LIKE IT. Brooks points out that the caricature of reformers as educational robber barons running joyless factory schools is just rhetoric. He continues (from above):

In these places, tests are not the end. They are a lever to begin the process of change. They are one way of measuring change. But they are only one piece of the larger mission. The mission may involve E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curricula, or character education, or performance arts specialties. But the mission transcends the test. These schools know what kind of graduate they want to produce. The schools that are most accountability-centric are also the most alive.

By definition, there’s no way to conclusively show that one school is better at cultivating un-testable, unmeasurable qualities than any other. We’re back to anecdotes. Perhaps it’s just parochial loyalties, but I promise you that there was no question about which of the schools in our building was working to develop these qualities in its student body. My school was head and shoulders above the others. Our students had the standard music/art/physical education trio outside of the usual classroom subject matter, but they also took dance classes, learned Spanish, and visited local art museums and botanic gardens. My first graders studied Ancient Egypt and Motown, built Rube Goldberg machines, and played around with bugs we grew in the classroom. We built our school culture around the “REACH” values: “Respect, Enthusiasm, Achievement, Citizenship, and Hard Work.”

In other words, while we were committed to developing top-notch math and reading skills in all of our students, we understood as well as anyone that education isn’t only about test performance. Teaching isn’t “mechanistic,” as Brooks put it. It’s both a science and an art. You don’t have successful education without the other. You don’t have great test scores without a holistic approach, and you don’t have a successful holistic approach if you’re not developing strong reading and math skills for your students.

When it comes to urban education, the most reform-oriented schools are out-performing their counterparts by FAR (for an instance of how education reform opponents have gone wrong, see Linda Darling-Hammond’s recent catastrophe here), and by almost all measures. This isn’t about charters vs. public schools—it’s about effective vs. ineffective schools and about schools that make excuses vs. schools that don’t.