CURMUDGUCATION: Help for the Failing Schools

CURMUDGUCATION: Help for the Failing Schools:

Help for the Failing Schools

 This is newest reformster talking point-- the Big Standardized Test is a big boon to poor and minority students, and to ask them to opt out is to ask them is to ask them to become invisible. Robert Pondiscio was pushing it again at the Fordham's blog this week. It's a nice rhetorical move, but it's limited by the degree to which it doesn't actually reflect reality.


Pondiscio makes a few side points before he gets to the main event, suggesting that the New Jersey numbers on how many actual opt-outs are perhaps somewhere between fuzzy and wrong. But then he breaks down the numbers and the opt-out sales pitch to make another point-- as a battleground, Opt Out is shaping up as rich white suburbanites vs. poor brown and black urban dwellers.

I'm going to leave that point alone. Sarah Blaine turned over her blog space to Belinda Edmondson, a mom in Montclair, NJ, who is surprised to discover that she's white and pleased to inform her family that they're wealthy. Edmondson deals with that part of Pondiscio's point pretty well. 

Instead, let's move on to Pondiscio's larger point, which is that BS Tests have been a force for positive change in "non-affluent non-white" communities.

Blacks, Latinos, and low-income kids have generally benefitted from test-driven accountability, particularly in the increased number of charters and school choice options...

Okay, if you think charters have actually benefited those students over and above any benefits they would have experienced from public school, I can see believing this point is valid. But first, the case that charters have benefits greater than public schools is a case that has not been effectively made. What we do know is that charters accept only a portion of the students in a community, stripping resources from the schools where all of the rest of the students remain. Are the gains (ranging from arguable to non-existent) for the few charter-accepted students worth the costs to all the other students?

Nor is it clear that BS Tests really had anything to do with these "benefits." Are there really pockets of bad, run-down, under-resourced schools out there that existed in some sort of unseen, unheard reverse Shangri-La and not a soul knew about them until test results came out? Because I haven't heard a convincing story of that yet.

“Kids who are not tested end up not counting,” observed Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust

This is one of those lines that sounds good, but what are we really saying here. Specifically, those untested kids end up not counting to whom? Surely not their parents. To their schools? To their state and federal representatives? If that's the case, are we really saying that in the face of poverty and want and crumbling buildings and lack of resources and students crying out for dignity, support and education that it's a score on a standardized test that's our best idea of how to move the needle?


"It could be a race problem but it's definitely a respect problem,” says Derrell Bradford, the African American executive director of NYCAN. “There is a pretty strong undertow beneath the opt-out CURMUDGUCATION: Help for the Failing Schools: