Earlier this week I had a phone interview with a charter school, where I will hopefully be working for the summer. So I got to thinking…what’s the best way to fix our schools? Should we be working on reducing the achievement gap by opening new, more rigorous schools, or fixing the ones we have?
The bigger problem I came to, as I considered how to approach this interview, is how we even measure achievement and progress in fixing schools. Are standardized test scores a reliable indicator of performance? If we cant rely on No Child Left Behind to hold schools accountable, what else is there? My own point of view is that multiple choice tests are pretty much worthless in terms of measuring achievement and in terms of actually teaching kids. But if we try to measure essay responses across schools and even across the country, are grades comparable? I would argue no.
This is probably hard to hear for students coming out of high school with sky-high SAT scores and who aced the Regents’ exam or the MCAS or whatever your state test is. It took me awhile to balance my own skill at standardized tests with the unfairness they engender in students’ who don’t have all the benefits I had growing up. Just because I did well on the SAT’s doesn’t mean they can be considered a reliable indicator of college success–although I’m doing pretty well in college, so there’s a bit of a correlation there. But, as you will soon learn if you haven’t already, correlation does not equal causation.
So what’s the next step? It seems like there are so many problems facing public education, especially in urban areas, that the path to fairness and equality is unreachable. For a lot of successful people, especially those with decision-making power over schools, the suggestion that schools are failing is anathema to their own experiences and backgrounds. There’s no chance that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Arne Duncan (Sec. of Education) ever attended a school that was subpar in the way that millions of students do every day in places like Boston, Hartford, the Bronx, Compton, and all over the country. But the reality is that many public school students are struggling without access to the resources that the vast majority of Tufts students have always had. Don’t believe me? Pick up a Jonathan Kozol book; I recommend “Shame of the Nation”.
Like I said, solutions have been widely debated and it seems like at this point, everyone has agreed that fixing the school system will be too hard and should be postponed indefinitely. I hope that changes soon, and along with the rest of the world, I have a great deal of hope in Pres. Obama. I don’t have the answers, but if there is going to be a debate on here like I hope there will be, I want to set out groundrules.
1. Don’t recite tired party rhetoric. School vouchers won’t fix anything and everybody knows it. The Democrats barely have a policy, so I’m not criticizing the Republicans…but it doesn’t work. Vouchers would steal money away from the failing school districts and create a vicious cycle of diminishing funds from poorly-performing schools which would eventually lead to massive school closings and a lack of access to quality education.
2. Be creative. Right now there aren’t a lot of ideas on the table, at least in mainstream discussions. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box in terms of potential fixes or adjustments you could make. The problems are vast, so don’t limit your thinking to testing reform or isssues related to specific schools.
3. Don’t be a fatalist. Public schools aren’t all bad (your classmates at Tufts have gone to the best public schools in the country). Look to the good things you might know of from your own experience and think about how they might be transferrable to schools with less money available and fewer resources.
I’m looking forward to hearing from people about this topic. And, like one of my professors here says often, everyone is an expert on education because you’ve all been there; everyone goes to high school so everyone has a perspective on it. What’s yours?
