Don't Confuse High Stakes Testing With High Expectations

Frank Bruni recently expressed concern, in the usual hackneyed terms, that kids these days are "coddled". Some sports give trophies for participation, or end games early when the difference in score reaches a defined threshold. A middle school near Boston is concerned that kids' feelings might get hurt if they find out that they weren't invited to parties. Some kids get stressed by tests. Bruni complains that "Many kids at all grade levels are Bubble-Wrapped in a culture that praises effort nearly as much as it does accomplishment." As anybody, including Bruni, should know, people like Bruni have been writing this sort of column for generations.

All of Bruni's complaints are to set a context for his criticism of people who object to the high stakes standardized testing model imposed upon the nation's schools. Bruni conflates high stakes standardized tests with "tougher instruction [that should] not be rejected simply because it makes children feel inadequate, and that the impulse to coddle kids not eclipse the imperative to challenge them." While Bruni insists, that Common Core is "a laudable set of guidelines that emphasize analytical thinking over rote memorization", even he admits that "n instances its implementation has been flawed, and its accompanying emphasis on testing certainly warrants debate." Yet here he is, calling those who want to engage in the debate paranoiacs and whiners.

Then there’s the outcry, equally reflective of the times, from adults who assert that kids aren’t enjoying school as much; feel a level of stress that they shouldn’t have to; are being judged too narrowly; and doubt their own mettle.

Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless? Isn’t stress an acceptable byproduct of reaching higher and digging deeper? Aren’t certain fixed judgments inevitable? And isn’t mettle established through hard work?

I don't mind at all the notion that school should be challenging. But what Bruni is overlooking is how standardized testing has displaced a lot of traditional classroom teaching and learning, or that the insistence that children master skills at earlier ages is not necessarily consistent with the students' cognitive development. After pushing more and more traditional first grade material into kindergarten, we're now hearing proposals to raise the age for kindergarten enrollment. If you end up with a kindergarten full of kids who, under the former system, would largely have been in first grade, what are you actually accomplishing?

Here's something it shouldn't take very long to figure out: When you tell a teacher, "Your ranking as a teacher, your ability to keep your job and the amount you are paid depends on how your students do on a series of standardized tests," the odds are that the teacher is going to devote a great deal of effort and classroom time to improving student performance on the test. Bruni ridicules a parent's complaint that as a result of that sort of focus on testing, his eight year old's class was left with "no room for imagination or play". Does Bruni not understand that children can be challenged academically, yet be encouraged in their imagination? Does Bruni not understand that children need breaks in their lessons during the course of a school day? That children can learn from play activities? It would seem not.

Bruni references David Coleman, "noe of the principal architects of the Common Core" as asserting that he favors self-esteem, but wants to "redefine self-esteem as something achieved through hard work". It's not that self-esteem cannot be derived from hard work, but that's not really what Coleman is talking about. In the schoolyard, self esteem is on the whole negatively correlated with academic performance. Bruni's ridicule of parents who are concerned about their parents feelings is, in a sense, more relevant than Coleman's goal, because Bruni's approach does not involve somehow changing human nature. When Coleman talks about how students "will not enjoy every step of it" but "if it takes them somewhere big and real, they’ll discover a satisfaction that redeems the sweat", he seems to be talking about the end of a very long process. If you don't find a way to let kids learn on an incremental basis that their hard work will be rewarded, you're not going to create an effective learning environment for most kids.

Bruni also references Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, who has stated, "ile American parents are pulling their kids out of tests because the results make the kids feel bad, parents in other countries are looking at the results and asking themselves how they can help their children do better." But that's not the actual issue. Although certain factions of school reformers like to point to nations that obsess over test scores, holding them out as a model for the nation, it's very clear that we don't have the sort of culture that will cause us to follow the lead of South Korea, with kids leaving school to head over to private academies where they spend additional hours being prepped for tests, and we don't really want to follow the lead of nations that produce kids who are very good at taking tests but not much good at thinking outside the margins of a carefully darkened oval.

If you want good public schools, you don't need to do much. You need to make the profession of teaching sufficiently well respected and remunerated that you attract above average students into the profession, you want to make the task of classroom teaching rewarding, and you want parents who will reinforce the need for their kids to attend school, study and do their homework, behave in class, and achieve academically. When you do that you don't need to obsess over test stores - you can use standardized tests in their traditional manner, to assess individual and group performance with an eye toward improvement, and with no need for teachers to "teach to the test" because the goal is to obtain an accurate assessment as opposed to an artificially inflated score that reflects intensive teaching to the test at the expense of a rich classroom experience.

Ah, but high-stakes standardized testing is so much easier for school administrators and politicians, the ones who have positioned themselves to get prizes for "participation" - a large, steady paycheck with no consequences at all for the failure of schools, teachers or students. And it's so much easier to point to a computer-generated list of scores and pretend that you have objectively evaluated a teacher or school than it is to work hard.

Year-Round Schools Are Not a Magic Answer

Recently on Real Time, The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis couldn't resist taking a dig at teachers and unions,

What about the teacher's unions, who wanna... the teacher's unions who insist on this 19th century educational process, I mean, we take summers off because that's when people used to farm and stuff, 'cause they, 'cause the teachers want to go on vacation.

The statement itself is far from a monument to good logic, but more than that, given how short the statement is, it's remarkable for its inaccuracy.

What about the teacher's unions, who wanna... the teacher's unions who insist on this 19th century educational process...

Teacher's unions? As Lewis should know, not every state has teacher's unions, and the states that ban teacher unions have terrible educational records. Although teacher's unions can complicate some experiments, due to such factors as contractually negotiated rules about the treatment of teachers and assignments to schools, many public schools have experimented with different educational models - open schools, Montessori, extra school hours, year-round school, and the like. It's not the teacher's unions that have been attempting to dictate and micromanage the classroom, or impose more and more standardized tests with higher and higher stakes, the sort of approaches that stifle classroom innovation and entrench the "19th century educational process". If administrators come up with innovations that they believe will move their schools out of the "19th century educational process", they are free to propose those ideas to teacher's unions and, to the extent that a collective bargaining agreement interferes with their proposals, negotiate for changes in the contract. Where would Lewis suggest that I look for these reform ideas that are being stifled by teacher's unions? When I try to find proposed innovations in pedagogy from school administrators, the silence is deafening - and I seem to instead find administrators trying to force schools that aren't following the standard model to get back with the program.

...this 19th century educational process, I mean, we take summers off because that's when people used to farm and stuff...

It's somewhat amazing to me that Lewis can both recognize that what is often referenced as the "factory school" model is a "19th century educational process" and then attribute it to farming - As if we used to be a fully industrialized society until the "agricultural revolution" pushed us into agriculture. Lewis might look at major cities within the United States, where even in the 19th century few to no students would have been involved in agriculture, and ask himself, "Why would those nations and cities have adopted an agricultural calendar?" As for agriculture, does Lewis truly believe that the summers were the busy season for 19th century farms? Plant in the spring, harvest in the fall, and... what am I missing? And why do most other nations, including those with little connection with agriculture, offer summer recesses.

As it turns out, the summer recess is a product of industrialization. Once you move significantly past the one room schoolhouse, schools needed to start standardizing grades and admission dates. Urban schools evolved from a year-round schedule (because factory workers didn't want to have to worry about child care) to one that better facilitated the administration of schools and the standardization of educational materials, textbooks and curricula across a district. As should be no surprise, prior to this "19th century educational process", schools in agricultural areas would often have breaks in spring and fall instead of the summer.

...'cause they, 'cause the teachers want to go on vacation.

I can almost imagine young Matt Lewis, teary-eyed at the thought of leaving his school for a couple of months, and absolutely perplexed by the joy of his peers at having the summer off. I nonetheless suspect that he may have noticed that it was not only teachers who were happy to get a couple of months off during the summer. As much as parents can find it difficult to arrange for day camps during the summer break, it's also nice to have a period of time when you can schedule a vacation without having to worry about the kids missing school.

Lewis is implying that the biggest problem with our (non-)farm based school calendar is the summer vacation, and that year-round schooling would be a miracle cure for all that ails public education but for those pesky teacher's unions. (He is apparently not aware that the summer camp industry has lobbied hard, for decades, against year-round schooling.) But look around: Where can I find any people or groups who are actively trying to make schools run year-round? When I look at charter schools, I see some that have expanded the number of classroom hours, but even KIPP schools take a summer recess. When I look at private schools, those who are most beholden to the wishes of parents, I again see them offering a summer recess. When I look at international schools in the southern hemisphere, where the public schools have a summer recess over our winter months, I find that many follow the schedule of the northern nations from which their students hail. As previously mentioned, states that ban teacher's unions have summer vacations. Very few people are actively seeking to change the status quo, so there's virtually nothing for teacher's unions to oppose.

Why don't more schools follow a year-round calendar? From an educational standpoint, the first question is whether that "year-round calendar" will involve more days of classroom instruction or if it will instead mean having more frequent, longer holidays during non-summer months and a shorter recess in the summer. As it turns out, kids backslide over any holiday. While there's going to be more backsliding over a long holiday than over a short holiday, the important consideration is the cumulative effect, as well as how much classroom time it takes to bring students back up to speed after a holiday. Were Lewis to investigate, he would find that experiments with year-round schooling have not improved student performance, with the most likely explanation being that the cumulative effect of longer vacations spread throughout the year roughly equals the impact of the longer summer break. Year-round schools also report higher problems with absenteeism - a problem that echoes some of the concerns that led to the "19th century educational process" in the first place, as absenteeism was higher prior to the standardization of the school year.

If you shift the subject to "more classroom hours", that's really not a discussion of summer vacations - it's a discussion of how many days per year and hours per day a student should spend in school. Programs like KIPP and similar experiments by public schools suggest that, particularly with a vulnerable student population, more hours in school will boost performance. The picture gets more complicated, though, when you start looking at pedagogy, or looking beyond those disadvantaged populations, and you find that there are nations with high performing students who receive no more hours of classroom instruction, and perhaps less classroom instruction, than students in a typical U.S. school.

When you increase the number of hours of classroom instruction, or expand the number of days in the school year, costs go up. And no, contrary to Lewis's suggestion it's not about greedy teachers who insist upon getting a pay increase merely because we want them to work more days and hours (can you imagine such a thing?), but it also means that you must provide support staff, transportation, utilities and supplies, and administration for those extra hours and days of education. If you want to expand school into the summer months you may have to add air conditioning, as well as construct shaded areas in playgrounds while installing additional water fountains. School administrators often schedule building maintenance over the summer, and having students present complicates scheduling as well as creating issues with exposure to construction areas, building materials, paint fumes, and the like.

In short, Lewis is wrong that the primary impediment to year-round schooling is teacher's unions, is wrong that we have summer holidays because of an agricultural calendar, and is wrong in his implication that year-round schooling would remedy the problems with our nation's schools. He's correct that teachers like their summer vacations, but... who doesn't? At the end, is that what we're really talking about - jealousy that teaching is one of the few professions in this nation that enjoys a significant amount of vacation time? If not, assuming that they see their public role as involving more than just teacher-bashing, people like Lewis should learn the facts before they attempt to influence the debate.

U.S. Schools Have Always Kinda... Sucked

Thomas Friedman has noticed that, based upon international tests, U.S. students lag behind their international peers. I don't want to diminish the importance of education, improved schools, improved pedagogy, universal education and the like. I don't want to assume that the factors that have helped the U.S. succeed in the past, despite problems with public education, will continue into the future. But....

The bad news is that U.S. middle-class students are badly lagging their peers globally. "Many assume that poverty in America is pulling down the overall U.S. scores," the report said, "but when you divide each nation into socioeconomic quarters, you can see that even America’s middle-class students are falling behind not only students of comparable advantage, but also more disadvantaged students in several other countries."

That's not new. That's "same as it ever was".

Part of the problem, at least to me, is obvious: On the whole, our nation does not value education. We give it a great deal of lip service, but at the end of the day we're not willing to open our pocketbooks to better fund public schools, we're more interested in cutting teacher pay, autonomy and benefits than in creating an environment that will attract the best candidates to teaching as a profession, and we get much more excited when Johnny makes it onto a varsity sports team than when he enters the science fair - and while the football team gets equipment, coaches, dedicated facilities, the science fair gets one day with the gym filled with folding tables. We have a range of taunts and epithets to direct at kids who excel academically. If you control for parental focus on academics, as opposed to parental income, you'll find a lot of academic achievers in this country.

Part of the problem, though, may be that there's not actually a problem. At least insofar as the middle class is concerned. We, as a nation, are presently obsessed over early childhood education - how much academic material can we cram into kindergarten and first grade. But kids who go to schools that follow the Waldorf method don't get much exposure to academics before the age of seven, and they do fine. It is reasonable to infer that when kids come from families that value education, that read, they catch up. And while I think it would be better to offer a more rigorous high school education than what we see in a lot of U.S. schools, to allow kids to push themselves without taking A.P. courses or taking classes at the local community college, the kids who aren't pushed into getting top PISA scores go on to college and catch up.

The focus on PISA reminds me of the talk about how not enough students are pursuing STEM degrees, even though the evidence suggests a significant surplus of STEM graduates as compared to job openings. By way of example, my brothers both went out of their way to avoid math in high school, and again in college. Their PISA scores would have been pretty awful. One is now a lawyer (a profession in which it is easy to avoid even the most basic math), and the other is doing very well working for a Fortune 50 company. That should come as no big surprise to Friedman - I doubt that the math requirements of his job often exceed having his word processor tabulate the word count of a draft column.

Something else that's interesting about PISA, particularly given Friedman's emphasis on China, is Professor Yong Zhao's observation that nations with the highest PISA scores tend to have low scores on measures of "perceived entrepreneurial capabilities". That is to say, if you put too much emphasis on having students score well on PISA mathematics, you may do so at the expense of giving them the opportunity to learn the real world skills necessary to drive business success. I'm not advocating that we choose - I would like to find a way to do both - but there's a price to chasing the highest test scores, while the reward may turn out not to be improved business competitiveness. Professor Zhao is also not enamored with the notion of chasing after China's test-driven model of education, a system from which he graduated.

There's another cost to high stakes testing, one that was revealed in the D.C. schools under the Leadership of Michelle Rhee: If you put enough emphasis on testing, you create a huge incentive to cheat. I once followed a link to a Chinese website that sold aids for cheating on exams - and some of the stuff would inspire jealousy even in the James Bond character, Q. Chinese students are reported to have a relatively cavalier attitude toward cheating. Everybody does it, right? But hey - it does inspire a certain form of entrepreneurship....

So what’s the secret of the best-performing schools? It’s that there is no secret. The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They "work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement." They are "data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality." And they promote "the active engagement of our parents and families."

Another trip to the mission statement generator? Oddly, no mention of start times, but then the mission statement says nothing about choosing the correct data.

So yes, let's take Friedman's suggestion and "raise the bar". I expect Friedman will be telling us where we will get the money for the type of teachers and schools he envisions in... well, probably not his next column, but we can hope it won't take more than a Friedman Unit or two. While we wait we should consider which bars we should be raising - as we don't want an effort to improve the nation's schools to turn into a trip hazard.

Nicholas Kristof on Public Schools and Teachers' Unions

Kristof is one of those guys about whom you can often say, "His heart is in the right place." (And you know what word comes next.)

Kristof attempts to compare today's inner city schools to the era of "separate but equal", premising that argument on the fact that the inner cities (and thus their schools) are dominated by minorities. There are only a few differences... such as the fact that the schools are not actually segregated, there's no parallel set of schools for non-minority children, and for all of their faults many inner city school districts are now generously funded, but why let the facts get in the way of perfectly good hyperbole. In fact, why not kick it up a notch?

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

Really? Well, no, not really.

In fairness, it’s true that the main reason inner-city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty. Southern states without strong teachers’ unions have schools at least as lousy as those in union states. The single most important step we could take has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids.

So Kristof understands that schools are not "a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next", but are an inadequate tool for consistently breaking children out of a cycle of poverty. (Nor is "providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids" the solution it has at times been hyped to be, at least not as implemented to date, but it sounds good.)

Kristof complains,

I’d be sympathetic if the union focused solely on higher compensation. Teachers need to be much better paid to attract the best college graduates to the nation’s worst schools. But, instead, the Chicago union seems to be using its political capital primarily to protect weak performers....

Unfortunately, the union in Chicago is insisting that teachers who are laid off — often for being ineffective — should get priority in new hiring.

That would be a concern if it were true. Except when I follow either of Kristof's links I find that the union's actual concern relates to rehiring teachers who are laid off for reasons outside of their control ("because of school closings, consolidations and turnarounds"). The union's position is not about protecting "weak performers". If Kristof wants to make the case that most or all teachers who are laid off are "weak performers", he is free to try - but it seems reasonable to infer that if he could substantiate his claim he would provide a relevant link.

At the heart of his argument, it appears that Kristof is fundamentally disturbed by the idea that unions would negotiate contracts that benefit workers not only in terms of wages, but also in terms of their working conditions. He wants to get rid of the weakest teachers, spinning glorious outcomes that might be achieved if inner city schools got rid of the bottom 1% or bottom 5% of teachers. I don't think that anybody would deny that job protections negotiated by unions do help some number of people stay in jobs that they're not fit to perform. Within the context of public schools, if administrators are disinterested or are incompetent, teachers who should be terminated instead end up getting tenure and, at that point, it becomes difficult to fire them for their job performance.

Alas, a purge of the type Kristof proposes is not likely to have a significant impact on the performance of schools or students. Even if we get past what Kristof describes as the challenge of figuring out "who is a weak teacher", avoid administrators gaming the system to get rid of teachers they don't like, and overlook the fact that Kristof just told us that ""the main" problem is "poverty", the numbers are too small to have a significant impact.

Fire one teacher in 100 and most kids will proceed through school with the same set of teachers to whom they would have been assigned without the "purge". Eliminate 5%, and you're still having little to no impact on the overall school experience of most children. In early elementary, K-6, most kids have seven teachers. In middle school and high school they may have an aggregate 50 or so teachers. So they're not going to see a huge change in personnel, even if we assume that a teacher at the 94th or 98th percentile of effectiveness is materially superior to the ones who are purged.

Further, if you fire a teacher you need to replace that teacher. While it may be that if you correctly identify the worst teachers, somebody fresh out of a teacher's college who is willing to work in the inner city will be no worse, some will be no better - teachers learn a lot during their first few years on the job, and you're all-but-guaranteeing that you'll have an increased number of new teachers in the system.

It's fair to note also that purging teachers will have no impact on the racial composition of inner city schools. Although Kristof actually repeats the "separate but equal" hyperbole in his conclusion, he does so to be emotionally provocative.

While Kristof opines, "Teaching is so important that it should be like other professions, with high pay and good working conditions", he ignores the push in the opposite direction - to demean teaching as a profession, to strip away benefits, to put downward pressure on compensation. He ignores trends that make teaching less and less attractive to high performing college students, and for that matter less and less attractive to school teachers who have options outside of the profession. When you make teaching less attractive to the best teachers, guess who remains when they leave?

One of the reasons that inner city schools, or the "lousy" schools in "Southern states without strong teachers’ unions" (Kristof should be clear that some of those states have no teachers' unions) seem to have more problem teachers is that they attract a weaker candidate pool. Yes, there are teachers who want to make a difference and, despite strong credentials, seek education jobs in the inner city, but most teachers with options choose not to apply. Alas, those who try to make a difference may find that their efforts are unappreciated, if not impeded by structural problems, inadequate resources and incompetent administrators.

Perhaps Kristof should approach these issues from a slightly different angle. If the problems of the inner cities also exist in impoverished schools in states that offer teachers no job protections, the problem cannot be job protections - unless you presuppose that school administrators in the non-union states are either incompetent or indifferent to the quality of their schools. Also, most schools in this nation manage to do pretty well despite teachers' job protections - if the problem does not lie with the pool of candidates, why are those districts so much better than the inner cities and non-union states at identifying and hiring competent teachers? And if the problem is with the pool of candidates, isn't it fair to assume that the schools are already hiring the best candidates they can identify? why does Kristof believe that purges will result in those schools hiring better teachers?

"Have You Drugged Your Kid Today?"

I guess this is what happens when a teacher comes down on the wrong side of the war on... no, make that for drugs. The admonition, "Don't use Adderall or Ritalin" is for DARE officers to give, not teachers.

I have sympathy for parents and teachers dealing with ADHD, but it does seem that the "diagnostic criteria" have devolved in many parts of the country to a school official saying to a parent, "You should consider an ADHD medication," followed by a general practitioner saying, "Let's try this one".

The teacher fired over her bumper sticker worked at a high school. You'll please forgive me, but I think high school students should be regarded as sufficiently capable to participate in a debate over ADHD drugs. But I suspect that the real issue wasn't so much a fear of a loss of order within the school or students refusing to take medication at the nurse's office, so much as it was their parents taking umbrage or fearing having to justify to their kids why the teacher is wrong.

Giving Michelle Rhee Credit Where It's Due (And Only Where It's Due)

I've been thinking about some of the post-mortems on Michelle Rhee's tenure at the D.C. Schools, now that she has decided to quit instead of trying to find a way to work with the incoming mayor. At Tapped, Monica Potts wonders if Michelle Rhee's abrasive style would have been tolerated had she been a man. I don't think the problem was her abrasiveness; I think the problem was that she had a tin ear for politics and didn't know when to soften her approach or bite her tongue. Given that Mayor Adrian Fenty, not Rhee, was the one voted out of office, and that he shared some of the same problematic personality traits, I don't think it's a gender thing. Politicians can have their tempers and their abrasive moments, but they must nonetheless smile for the cameras and kiss the (figurative) babies.

Potts endorses the view that

...it was Rhee's disdain of collaborating with teachers and getting the community on board with school reforms that helped contribute to her abrasive reputation. But on the merits, Rhee's probably right. There's something odd about the idea that parents who aren't trained in education should have equal input in how their children's schools are run. And that's where the divide between Rhee and everyone else really lies. Rhee viewed her job as a technician would, as a CEO might, someone who is charged with getting results, even if doing so is hard.

Yet Rhee's abrasiveness was not contextual. Potts links to an article that recounts an example,

Yet one of her less-famous moments sticks with me. It was tucked inside an Atlantic profile by writer Clay Risen. In the piece, Risen was trying to make the point that Rhee does "not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise." Here's how he supported that contention: "When I asked her how she would characterize her ideal relationship with parents, she replied, 'That’s a great question. So often reporters ask me stupid questions. I had one interview yesterday, and I was like, ‘Okay, you are not smart.’"

Her general attitude appeared Manichean. If you didn't understand what she was doing, you were stupid. Disagreement, no matter how well-placed, seemed to be interpreted as malice.

Further, it's the height of arrogance to suggest that parents are not positioned to question, let alone have a say in, how their schools are run. We're supposed to simultaneously praise parents for being concerned about their children, wanting better schools, involving themselves with their children's schools, etc., but they are to be dismissed as know-nothings the second they question the goals of the system's top bureaucrat? In a sense, that's an extension of the "sit down, shut up, do as your told" model that school administrators often seem to view as perfect classroom management, but it's presumptuous and rude when directed at concerned parents.

Further, parents had valid cause to question some of Rhee's methods and priorities. She carelessly fired hundreds of teachers then claimed, "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school." How would you feel if your child's teacher was fired, a teacher you liked, and you knew none of that was true about the teacher? How would you feel about the disappearing, reappearing money trick that was used to justify the firings? How would you feel if your school continued to crumble, but huge amounts of money appeard to be directed at schools that you perceived to be Rhee's pet projects? How would you feel if your school district's funding were so dependent upon corporate contributions, with an associated threat to withdraw money if they didn't approve of the district's management or performance, that you had to ask, "How 'public' is it when Wal-Mart can blackmail D.C. voters?"

Potts argues that it wasn't Rhee's job to "nurture":

It was Rhee's job to hire and fire teachers, to ensure the curriculum would teach students, and to revive D.C.'s beleaguered school system.

If Rhee found being respectful and accountable to parents and others inconsistent with managing D.C.'s schools, perhaps she belongs in the charter movement in which school administrators can insulate themselves from accountability to parents, let alone voters. Or perhaps she can move back to an advocacy group. Because last I checked, public schools are supposed to be accountable to parents and voters.

The aforementioned article lists what it describes as Rhee's accomplishments, and some of them are very real. She made the first day of school (and no doubt, many of the days that followed) much less dramatic and much more efficient. She negotiated a contract with the teacher's union that allows for greater teacher accountability. She took a modest stand on nutrition by banning flavored milk from schools.

The article also praises her for raising "standards, expectations, and test scores", but I think she can be better praised for her effort than for her accomplishment. As the article linked to document a rise in test scores indicates, this past year test scores went down.

Researchers in the field say that it is the nature of standardized tests that they rise from year to year when the same design of a test is given in the same schools. And they go down when a new design is given, or when a different demographic of students takes the test, or a bunch of kids in a class had a cold, or... well, you get the idea.

There are too many variables that can affect the scores of a single test to make the result completely reliable, which is why scores should never be used as a sole measure for any high-stakes decision.

By quitting now, Rhee puts herself in the position of claiming credit for a return to rising scores and blaming her successors if the scores continue to drop, although I would hope she would show more grace than to try to do either.

It's also reasonable to note that at their peak, the test scores remain deeply troubling.

Rhee said she and her team would “dig into the data” to find out why the elementary reading proficiency rate, which had risen 11 percentage points from 2007 to 2009, fell 4.4 points, to 44.4 percent, and why, after rising 20 percentage points from 2007 to 2009, the elementary math proficiency rate dipped 4.6 points this year, to 43.4.

The proficiency rate is essentially a measure of the portion of students who pass the tests.

Those scores indicate how much work remains to be done. They also highlight a problem I have with Rhee's "blame the teachers" approach to school reform. A more mature perspective would be, "Homes and communities make a huge difference in student performance, but we can't control those. All we can control are the schools and classrooms, so we have to proceed as if homes and communities don't matter." Instead she attempted to write children's lives outside of school out of the equation.

When done correctly, raising standards and expectations can be a very good thing. If you can convince a student that she needs to take ownership of her education, that her home life may make it difficult to study and succeed but she can succeed and even excel despite those obstacles, you've taken a strong first step toward making it happen. You then have to provide the necessary resources and support within the school environment (and outside, when possible) to make it happen. In an inner city environment's easy for teachers to become jaded or cynical - it's probably hard not to - and to let kids slide through the system without challenging them to reconsider their expectations for themselves and their understanding of their own capacity. When all you do is blame teachers, you shift the onus away from the students and effectively depict learning as a passive activity.

The article also argues that "Rhee stopped the skid in enrollment", pointing to a 1.6% rise in enrollment following two years of decline. That would be more compelling if the rise weren't associated with a severe recession that appears to have brought about similar rises in many other communities. This argument also seems inconsistent with the conception that it was parents' anger at Rhee that caused them to vote Mayor Fenty out of office.

Finally, the article credits Rhee for her new teacher rating system,

Rhee piloted IMPACT, a new method for evaluating teachers. Some say it's unfair and impossible to implement. But who's going to stand up and applaud the old system, whatever it was? Let's call this a start.

Fair enough, it's a start. But recall, if we're going to be judging teachers by a single year's test scores, why can't we judge Rhee's performance last year by the same measure?

But school administrators aren't to be judged by the same standards as teachers, are they. They negotiate the terms of a contract with the teacher's union, sign on the dotted line, then blame the union for seeking to enforce the terms they agreed to. They fail to monitor newly hired teachers such that issues of performance and classroom management aren't noticed before the teacher gets tenure, and then blame the teachers and their union for it's being difficult to fire teachers for their poor performance. Typically when they contractually agree to give teachers a raise, they happily give themselves the same or a larger raise. When they contractually provide teachers with generous benefits, insurance, sick time, personal days, etc., they typically reward themselves with the same or greater benefits. But how often are they willing to look into the mirror? The problems of our nation's inner city schools did not arise in a vacuum.

Why Don't Kids Walk to School

An editorial in the Washington Post moans that children don't walk or ride their bikes to school any more. True enough, but contrary to the author's thesis (and hyperbole) it's not an issue of hovering parents. I've discussed this phenomenon before:

When I was a kid... we were still able to go to the park alone or with friends, walk to and from school, and engage in a lot of unsupervised activities even as young children. A big part of that was that our friends were doing the same thing - there were kids everywhere. Some of those kids had parents, older siblings or babysitters around, so there were older, more responsible eyes watching the activity. As we've moved our activities indoors, and have restricted kids from unsupervised activities, the odds have again changed. It's not unusual to drive by parks in my town and not see a single person there, or to see one or two families present. If a child goes there alone, the odds are that the child will spend some time with no other adult or child present. That significantly changes the risk to a child.

There's also the fact that as communities have become more dependent upon busing and cars for transportation to school, the "neighborhood school" may be quite far removed from the neighborhood. I'll grant, when I was a kid I rode my bicycle to school across a relatively busy, divided roadway - but that road has nothing on the type of traffic my daughter would face if she rode her bicycle to school. (She's still too young to do that even by historic measure.) The lack of sidewalks along the way would also make it very difficult for her to walk, even if she were old enough to cross that road unsupervised - or even if she were accompanied by a parent. And it's almost three miles away, about an hour to walk.

And that's with her going to a school comparatively close to home. Her "neighborhood" school isn't close to the neighborhood. Yes, there are schools that are closer than the default (including the one she attends), but you can't look at the @4.5 mile, @90 minute walk to school and tell me that the school board was concerned about walkable distances. My childhood school was not my neighborhood school - it was about a third of the distance from my home as my child's "neighborhood" school; triple that distance and I would have been taking the bus (public transportation, not a school bus) as I had to do during the winter. (My neighborhood school was less than half a mile away, an easy walk or bike ride down quiet, residential streets.)

So let's not pretend this is about individual choices, helicopter parents, smothering, etc. - and let's recognize that if we want to shift back to a culture in which kids play outside with minimal supervision, walk to school, etc., we're going to have to make a serious investment in recreating actual neighborhood schools and in providing a safe level of supervision while the numbers of children increase. Let's not blame individuals for societal changes that are well outside of individual control.