<p>Sure, there is way too much standardized testing, and this is adding to it, not rationalizing it. But that’s against a background of way too little effectiveness evaluation going on without mandates. The status quo ante isn’t an option.</p>
<p>The real question is how to improve the education of students who absolutely are not being educated to anyone’s satisfaction now. I find it completely disingenuous on Ravitch’s part to suggest that all of the improvements should come from within teachers’ professional organizations, because they have been failing miserably at this for my entire lifetime. It’s not testing and the Common Core that have pushed the Philadelphia schools to the point of collapse. They have been at the point of collapse for all but the favored few for a long time, and the difference now is that we have to notice it more. (I can also testify from personal observation that Philadelphia offers a completely first-rate public education to students, including many poor and minority students, who want it and who have the capacity to receive it, although it doesn’t necessarily get all of such students. If they are poor and their parents are disconnected, they need some luck.) That doesn’t mean the Common Core is good, but it means that Ravitch’s alternatives are discredited.</p>
<p>Ravitch also complains about replacing expensive teachers with cheap technology. Let’s assume for the moment that it may be possible to achieve the same or better educational results with $x of teaching or $(x-1) of technology. What possible (rational) argument is there for not going with the technology? Was it a bad decision to replace lamplighters with electric streetlights and light sensors or systemwide switches? Technology is not a silver bullet for education, and no one is talking about replacing teachers wholesale with robots, but technology has radically improved productivity in almost every industry, and that’s happening in education, too.</p>
<p>She is right to attack simplistic efforts to evaluate teachers based on test scores relative to averages, but it’s something of a straw man. Only politicians (only really stupid politicians) think that way. Or people with no alternative. Teachers should be evaluated based on whether the children actually in their classes are learning something, based on where they started and what tools they bring to the classroom. To do that, however, we need really granular data – we need student-specific data. And as soon as you start talking about that, many of the same people attacking the Common Core go absolutely ape about privacy.</p>
<p>Here’s a lovely example of how all of this stuff plays out in real life. A charter here that was founded to provide a stable school environment to kids in the foster care system is losing its charter, ostensibly because its test scores and attendance are so abysmal. And its test scores and attendance are abysmal, unless you compare them to the test scores and attendance of foster-care kids in the neighborhood schools to which they are otherwise assigned, in which case this charter looks amazing, a huge improvement. But . . . the teacher’s union and its allies desperately want charter scalps, and low-test charters are great targets. The school authorities want to show that they will get tough with underperforming charters, and not only are low-test charters easy targets, but kids without parents are kids who are not likely to be a political problem. And the charter school isn’t actually contesting the loss of its charter, because its operator has concluded that it can’t possibly do an adequate job in absolute, not relative, terms educating this ultra-high-risk population for the money available, and unlike KIPP or Harlem Children’s Zone it didn’t successfully tap into some motherlode of philanthropic dollars.</p>
<p>So the buck and the bucks are being passed back to the School District, which will bury the problem by diffusing it among dozens of failing neighborhood schools. The foster kids, who were not being educated well, will be educated worse, or often not at all, and no one will particularly notice. And stupid overuse of testing has everything and nothing to do with it.</p>