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 "As it happens, the more time you spend working with real students in a real classroom, the less likely you are to be considered an [education] expert."...  ...Peter Berger.

The Irascible Professor

Guest commentary by Poor Elijah (Peter Berger).

It may get crowded out by super-delegates and candidate gaffes, but public education still makes it into the news cycle once in awhile.  Sometimes it's when test results are released.  Other times it's when politicians announce that that they have a plan to save our schools.

 

It's a toss-up as to whether the numbers or the candidates' sound bites ring more hollowly.  Let's start with the numbers.  From coast to coast the tests mandated by and produced for No Child Left Behind have proven so embarrassingly unreliable, unenlightening, and expensive that the miracle of modern testing is that any public officials are willing to admit they're responsible for them.  Modern assessment is the bastard child conceived by conservatives and businessmen who demanded numbers, and liberals and educators who favored squishy, subjectively scored pseudo-tests.  The result has been a discredited heap of data, an assessment system that, according to a RAND study, identifies not "good" and "bad" schools, but "lucky" and "unlucky" schools, an epidemic of inconsistencies within districts, across districts, and from state to state, and pervasive variations in the difficulty of scoring standards from one grade to the next on the same test in the same state.

 

Naturally, when the data are released, no public official stands up and admits, "My God, these numbers are worthless.  We wasted a helluva lot of money."  Instead, they issue press releases about the need to prepare students for the twenty-first century, and how they stand ready to take action.

 

Yes, armed with meaningless numbers and virtually no experience teaching actual children, the experts and your government are on the case.

 

Why doesn't that make me feel better?

 

Consider the example of one high school here in the Green Mountain State.  Whether it's good, bad, lucky, or unlucky is anybody's guess, but the school in question hasn't fared well on our state's annual assessment sweepstakes.  In an arrangement worked out with the state education department, the school has announced plans to "boost academic outcomes" by hiring a $95,000 a year "director of school improvement."  Although the principal has already written "nineteen school improvement reports," officials felt an additional administrator was needed "to concentrate full time on the school improvement process."

 

Unfortunately, what schools need more are students who concentrate full time on the school improvement process.

 

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