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How's this for a manifesto? "Advancing parents' right to choose their children's schools while holding schools to account for their students' academic achievement are the twin turbos of education reform in twenty-first century America." Does it stir you to hope—or are you already changing the channel? This prescription comes courtesy of Chester E. Finn, Jr. In Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (note the self-flattering title), Finn argues that "standards-based reform" (in other words, standardized testing) is the way to set our schools aright. Once the tests reveal how schools are performing, families ought to be able to use that data to decide where to enroll their children.
Nearly all educational bureaucracies—from teachers unions to graduate schools of education—resist such changes. Finn's recommendations would significantly loosen their grip over our nation's fifty million pupils and six million education employees, not to mention half a trillion budgetary dollars. Who would willingly relinquish that kind of control? For someone who cut his teeth in the educational field while serving as an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Finn seems remarkably naïve about the political viability of his recommendations. But suppose we could put Finn's proposals into practice. Should we?
What our schools need more than anything, Finn argues, is accountability. But how do we accomplish that? The irony of all the hand-wringing about our nation's educational system is that we are home to the world's finest institutions of higher learning. No country can boast as many spectacular universities as the United States. And yet, our primary and secondary schools lag behind dozens of other nations. If Finn had his way, we would expand standardized testing, but that can hardly be best for our students. Take, for example, Houston—one of the best large public school systems. The current school calendar tracks nineteen different standardized tests being administered over the course of this year—that's considerably more than one per grade, and the tests begin as early as kindergarten. And because district-wide test scores are linked to everything from school funding to neighborhood housing prices, our nation's K-12 curriculum is already dominated by such tests. In many places I know, teachers are discouraged from exploring topics that do not appear on the test. Student creativity and independent inquiry are often curtailed in our schools as a result.
Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, decries this development. "Teaching to the test is the only curriculum—not for a month, but for the entire year," Wagner laments in The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It. Wagner says standardized testing is not the cure for America's failing schools; it's the cause. Calling for a halt to standardized testing as we now know it, he argues instead that schools must focus on teaching critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which cannot be reduced to simple formulae or multiple choice answers. This, along with his six other recommendations, Wagner claims, may allow us to close the achievement gap between American students and those in Denmark, Japan, and Poland.
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