Testing And Content Aren't Enemies

Camden, NJ

Dana Golstein steps up to the plate and offers a partial answer to my question of how Diane Ravitch would run a school district:

This past Monday, Ravitch tweeted the following: "I wish KIPP would take over a complete urban district so people would stop suspecting them of skimming, attrition." This gives a hint as to what Ravitch would do if she were an urban superintendent. She respects KIPP's focus on providing disadvantaged students with a traditional academic curriculum and a structured day, but she is curious to know if the high achievement that follow are transferable to all poor children, not just the ones whose parents are motivated enough to enroll them in a lottery.

I think that as a superintendent, Ravitch would hire principals who really care about what students learn in a history lesson, which books they read in English class, and whether they learn to play a musical instrument. She'd be less concerned with student test scores than with portfolios of their writing. She would would want children to memorize poetry (Auden is Ravitch's particular favorite), learn to make oral presentations, and internalize the rules of grammar and syntax.

On June 18, she tweeted, "I know many think grammar unimportant, but I think it made me a better writer and has stayed with me always." She also wrote, "I was lucky to go to public school in an age without standardized, multiple choice tests. We were graded by written work and oral reports."

This is interesting stuff. I, too, would be interested to see what would happen if KIPP was allowed to take over an entire school district to manage. Presumably, you'd want to give them a relatively small, low performing, high poverty urban district. Someplace like Camden, New Jersey. Clearly, though, implementing KIPP management practices would violate numerous elements of any existing public school collective bargaining agreement. It seems to me that if Ravitch were to actually become New Jersey Education Commissioner and attempt to implement this idea, she'd no longer be the teacher's unions' favorite education historian.

The point on content versus testing seems to me to be a case of talking past each other. I, too, went to a K-8 school where there was a lot of focus on memorizing poetry, learning to make oral presentations, and drilling on grammar. But I also, as it happened, took a lot of standardized tests. I took the Hunter College High School admissions test in 6th grade, I took the New York Specialized High School Admissions Test, I took the SSAT, and I took various state-mandated assessments. And guess what? I did really well on the language arts portions of these tests just as I continued to do really well on the language arts sections of the PSAT, SAT, AP English Language, AP English Literature, and LSAT tests down the years. Why's that? Well I think it's in part because the kind of content-rich curriculum that Ravitch and I both enjoyed is an effective means of teaching kids to understand the English language.

Obviously standardized tests aren't an infallible guide to assessing student achievement. But this is a big country, and there are a lot of situations in which it's useful to compare across different classrooms, different schools, different cities, etc. The only way to do that is with some assessments that are standardized. There's an interesting and important pedagogical issue about what classroom methods do the best job of teaching kids to read and write competently. But it's going to be very hard to develop any evidence about which methods are sound and which teachers are good at implementing them unless we have standardized data about student achievement.