Jason Stanford: Is a Wall Street crash coming to public schools?
Just like AAA ratings on mortgage-backed securities led to Wall Street’s 2008 disaster, a rash of accountability scandals might be precursors to a similar public school crash. After years of promises that test-driven accountability would yield miracles, scandals with school ratings are popping up all over the country. Unless we hold reformers as accountable as they hold students, these scandals could bring down our public school system the same way Wall Street almost innovated our economy back into the Stone Age.
In New York, a new rating system resulted in 70 percent of city students failing the new tests, earning the kind of tabloid headlines usually reserved for a politician’s sex scandal or a natural disaster. “Rotten to the score,” blared the New York Daily News. Fans of corporate education reform hail this as the tough love needed to force even tougher changes to the public school system despite the fact that privately owned charter schools fared just as badly.
But Diane Ravitch, author of the upcoming Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, calls the new scores “invalid” because officials set the kids up to fail.
“The state didn’t just ‘raise the bar.’ It aligned its passing mark to a completely inappropriate model,” Ravitch wrote. She pointed out that getting a “proficient” rating on the new test was the equivalent of acing the National Assessment for Educational Progress,