Rick Hess’s Mistake: Failure of Test-and-Punish Is Not Limited to a Few Districts That Have Disappointed
Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has always been a corporate education reform kind of guy. That is why Hess’s honest analysis this week of the ultimate fraud of a succession of school district miracles—Washington, D.C.’s test score and graduation rate miracle under Michelle Rhee and those who followed her, Alonzo Crim’s Atlanta in the 1980s, Houston’s Texas Miracle under Rod Paige, Arne Duncan’s Chicago, and Beverly Hall’s Atlanta—is so refreshingly candid.
In all of these cases, as Hess points out, there was “a remarkable dearth of attention paid to ensuring that the metrics (were) actually valid and reliable.” Second, it was “tempting for civic leaders and national advocates to accept happy success stories at face value—especially when they (were) fronted by a charismatic superintendent.” And finally “reformers and reporters (made) things worse with their lust for ‘celebrity superintendents’ and ‘model systems.’ Their fascination nurtur(ed) an echo chamber in which a handful of leaders (got) exalted, often for too-good-to-be-true results.”
One must give Hess credit for honestly admitting the failure of so much of what his own kind of school reformers have been exalting for the past quarter century—business school accountability for schools, driven by universal standardized testing, and evaluated by two primary outcomes—standardized test scores and graduation rates. But Hess makes a mistake when he attributes the problem to a few “model” school districts that have disappointed.
Hess’s explanation is inadequate. Inadequate because the system itself—the whole idea of school reform based on high stakes testing—cannot work. Daniel Koretz, the Harvard specialist on testing, tells us why in a recent book: The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.
Koretz defines the problem with high-stakes-test-based school accountability by exploring a primary principle of social science research. Forty years ago, Don Campbell, “one of the founders of the science of program evaluation,” articulated a core principle now known as Continue reading: Rick Hess’s Mistake: Failure of Test-and-Punish Is Not Limited to a Few Districts That Have Disappointed | janresseger
