The Goods on American Education.

Holding schools accountable is in no way dependent on having each child tied to a core curriculum and tested on the same items, Mr. Stake reminds us. A single test for all may be cheaper, but it is not a service to a diverse society. WE DON'T really know the quality of American education. We don't know how good or how bad the teaching is in our schools. Sometimes we think we know, but we don't. Given continuous grading by teachers and almost continuous standardized testing, we do have pretty good measures of student performance on a large selection of academic tasks. But the tasks merely rank the students and tell us who the higher-performing ones are; they don't tell how educated they are.1 These tasks represent quite imperfectly what a child needs to experience in order to mature into an intellectually competent adult. They are also poor indicators of the needs of employers, fellow workers, families, and the citizenry. The reason we do not know these things is partly the complexity of education even for individual youngsters. And it is partly the extraordinary difficulty of aggregating the evidence of personal maturation across a diverse population living in an enormously intricate society. We mislead ourselves primarily about the quality of education by supposing that the quality of student performance is more or less equivalent to the quality of teaching.2 Student assessments fail to give us the goods on the condition of American education. Student test scores are only weakly related to the quality of schooling. What determines the level of student performance is some rich mix of genetic predisposition, infant nurturing, sibling rivalry, early childhood experiences, peer interactivity, exposure to language and word games, television, and schooling. Schools are good for children, but schools cannot overcome deep deficits. For generations, schooling was almost the sole societal force that could help children rise above whatever level of training their parents could provide. Today, schooling is probably less influential than peer experiences or television. The schools, with their varying philosophies and curricular emphases, continue to have unique contributions to make. How well educators are making those contributions is not reflected in the current national efforts to assess educational progress. Achievement tests have never been formally validated as indicators of the provision of educational opportunity. Some schools that have very low scores are doing, within their constraints, a very good job of providing opportunities for children to mature intellectually. Assessment may have been at the heart of schooling for a quarter of a century, but it has neither made reform successful nor provided even a small idea of which teachers, which schools, and which cities are doing a good job of educating children. Volume of Assessment As education in America has passed from teacher-driven recitation to government-driven accountability, the role of formal assessment has grown. The traditional quality controls of schooling i.e., informal management, board oversight, parent compliance, state guidelines, and regional accreditation have continued to be prominent in school operations. But because of the widespread perception that the quality of public education has fallen off, other means have been added to evaluate and attempt to improve teaching and learning. In the last 30 years, formalized student assessment has become the most widely used indicator of school quality. In almost every school, at every grade level, and in every subject, student achievement is being tested. And every year, achievement has been found largely unchanged from the previous testing. The small fluctuations and shallow slopes of trend lines are more attributable to changes in testing than to redirected teaching or increased quality. At the same time, in most places, teaching appears to have changed little. …