America needs independent education achievement “audit agency”
I’m reminded again and again of America’s need for an independent education-achievement “audit agency” to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance and school achievement and when it has risen and when it has flat-lined or fallen–and why.
In today’s Washington Post, former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, relentlessly defending the No Child Left Behind act over the implementation of which she long presided, tries to attribute NAEP gains since 1999 to the impact of NCLB. She doesn’t exactly remind us that NCLB was proposed in January 2001, signed into law in January 2002, and the first school year on which it could conceivably have had an influence would be 2002-3. The most recent (long-term) NAEP results come from spring 2008, meaning that five years is the longest period for which any student gains could even be ASSOCIATED with NCLB, much less attributed to NCLB. (Because this was no random experiment, any gains could equally have been caused by global warming or whatever.) Unfortunately, the long-term-trend NAEP wasn’t administered in 2003, however (or 2002 for that matter), so one faces a challenge in deciding what to use as the baseline. The assessment was given in 1999, then again in 2004, and again in 2008. Of the gains recorded (for 9 and 13 year olds)–and there were indeed modest gains in math and reading–between 1999 and 2008, the lion’s share occurred between 1999 and 2004, not between 2004 and 2008. One COULD even claim that NCLB slowed the rate of gain. I wouldn’t claim that. But Spellings shouldn’t suggest that NCLB caused the gains, either, since most of them occurred prior to its enactment.
As Diane Ravitch has repeatedly shown (as in this New York Times op-ed and in this response to Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, an official in the New York city Department of Education), Joel Klein’s team in New York has similarly chosen a convenient baseline against which to claim credit for their reforms’ achievement gains even though those reforms hadn’t kicked in at the time when the greatest gains were recorded (in this case, on New York State tests).
Advocates always do this sort of thing–reaching for whichever data they think make the most convincing case for their accomplishments, exertions and assertions (and, of course, making or implying causations that no reputable scientist would accept). This will continue. And usually the advocates get away with it because anybody who disputes their claims is also seen as having his/her own ax to grind. That’s why America would be so much better off with an independent education-performance audit bureau.
Related posts:
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- Tom Loveless: Accountability systems appear to close achievement gaps
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May 4th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Hi Checker,
Wish I’d seen your post before I labored over mine at GothamSchools, as we’re making the same point.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
The sole reason for all the intense political attention, claims and counter-claims, is the multi-million-dollar pot of money at the end of this public education rainbow. For anyone to claim that this isn’t a big business, one of the biggest, is complete non-sense.
This is another area of our society where citizens are willing to blindly throw money down a rat hole because they are afraid if they don’t, their children will grow up to become “Jethro Bodine” of the Beverly Hillbillies with a “six-grade education”. Politicians and the public education industry couldn’t have written a better script. It is like they have their own taxpayer ATM.
As long as millions of dollars of public money is at stake, there will NEVER be a truly independent education performance monitoring organization in this country.
May 4th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
It’s not so much that the citizenry is willing to throw money down a rat hole but inertia, apathy, fear and powerful interests make doing much else besides throwing money down a rat hole impossible. Fortunately, that’s in the process of changing as the the bite public education has increased to the point that it’s the single, largest expenditure in many state budgets with no slackening of demand and, in some cases, an actual reduction in the number of kids.
To get back to the posting, Spellings is right, America does need some means of auditing/measuring education that’s independent of the various interests and that’ll never happen as national policy although a political deal may create something the purpose of which is to appear as if there’s some independent audit/measurement function. But it’ll be a measurement function in appearance only since political considerations will dictate that independence and objectivity must be subordinated to political reality.
Charter schools may, as a means of competing with each other, create a measurement function but the district system has existed for better then a hundred years with no distinct and generally agreed upon measure of educational value and they’re not about to start now.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:25 am
You might want to search for a unicorn as you go about looking for an ‘independent auditor’ of education data.
Wasn’t it Wall Street’s ‘objective’ rating agenices that told investors that mortgage backed securities were sound?
Didn’t auditor Arthur Anderson attest to the soundness of Enron’s balance sheet?
Not to say that sound anaylysis of educational data is not possible or desirable; just that the best way to evaluate competing claims is not to deputize an authority to do this. Instead we have to do the hard work of slogging through the data and forming a conclusion in the free market of ideas. Isn’t that what Flypaper is all about? Informing that debate? Isn’t that what Mr. Finn did with Ms. Spellings’ claims about NAEP? From that debate comes a consensus that informs policy….I don’t see any short cuts via an Independent Education Performance Audit Bureau, the symbol of which should be the elusive unicorn.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Michael Thomas Duffy–
You hit the nail squarely on the head. We, every single individual, needs to become more informed and more involved in the process. We need to stop relying on other “authorities” to dictate the outcomes and control the processes that are molding our children. Those “authorities” will act in their own self-interests. So should we.
Once someone completely abdicates responsibility and control for anything in their lives, they will receive results that don’t fit their needs, but the needs of those in control.
We already have an independent process for evaluating all forms of products and services. It is called the buyer; choosing to spend their own money. Better than another bloated bureaucracy to evaluate the existing bloated bureaucracy, make the money follow the child and the parent directs the money. A bureaucracy of one.