Rebirth (or 'What Rough Beast')

I spent a couple of days reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. It's a very interesting book, written by a solid academic who actually used to be pro-testing and pro-choice. I'm going to be mentioning a few of her points. (It's also an interesting kind of book to read on the Easter weekend.)

In order to appreciate what Ravitch is saying, one has to have had a quick run-through on the subject of US education systems. Traditionally, each political sub-unit of the USA has had a lot of latitude in deciding what should be taught, how, and to whom. David Tyack's The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974) is a good study of the drive towards mega-systems at a state and national level, as people moved from the agricultural hinterland to the cities. Subsequently, Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (1995) is an excellent crash-course that brings the account up to date towards the end of the last millennium. At that point, things looked pretty optimistic.

The millennial presidency, of course, went to George W Bush. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, President Bush managed to come up with the 'No Child Left Behind' reforms. The intent was laudable, but the details were appalling. NCLB left it to states to set tests and then mandated action based on the percentage of students doing well in those tests. Not surprisingly, the temptation to lower test standards hit almost all the states, as subsequent research showed.

Students did better, test-wise, and proficiency levels fell. Mandatory tests covered reading and mathematics, and nothing else. In the famed New York 'Regents' exams, it was found that you could score 65 by obtaining 34.5% of the possible points. The graduation rate soared. This happened in Chicago as well; pass rates doubled and performance levels remained horribly flat from 2001 to 2008.

Meanwhile, tuition centres (test-preparation farms and suchlike) flourished. Students learned to game the steadily less rigorous tests at state level. Essentially, students were cheated of a good education while the administrators took credit for better results.

Thus Campbell's Law kicked in. In 1975, Donald T Campbell formulated this social science principle: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decison-making, the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." In this case, teachers and administrators were held accountable for better results, so they learned how to produce better results without producing better education — 'by coaching, cheating, or manipulating the pool of test-takers' as Ravitch puts it.

She continues, 'As long as the state or district superintendent continues to report good news about student performance, the public seems satisfied, and the media usually sees no reason to investigate whether the gains are real. State and local leaders want to claim credit for improvement, rather than determine whether the improvement was meaningful.'

It is instructive to read all those books and then compare and contrast the unfolding of such events with the considerably more controlled and politically well-directed development of the Atlantean education system. The Atlantean system makes no bones about its origin as a way to boost economic growth. The Gnome, who masterminded the economic expansion of modern Atlantis, was very clear about that.

The Gnome also said many things about the non-material aspects of education. They are very altruistic, very laudable things, these other things are. Unfortunately, these non-material ideals proved less robust than the drive for quantitative measures. It was as if the Gnome's architectural and cultural heirs lost to the Gnome's engineering and accounting heirs.

The resultant education system is fantastic. Local test scores are as high as the highest American test scores (normally from the state of Massachusetts). Actually, local test scores are often the highest in the world. This is a good thing, with the only caveat being that these performances are mostly in the quantitative disciplines — mathematics and science. I say 'mostly' because many detractors somehow fail to remember that local students also top the Commonwealth in English Literature and win numerous international debating and legal awards.

But that one caveat is a pretty serious one. It is a symptom that mechanistic learning is the main operating mode in Atlantean society. The country is riddled with the equivalent of American test-preparation centres. The situation has reached the point at which people are giving private tuition to university undergraduates. Most of these centres are cramming stations for the sciences, mathematics and economics, with basic language skills thrown in. Students are also taught mechanical ways of framing and writing essays.

All this means that Atlantean basic education is extremely solid. But it is also resistant to creativity. Since performance is primarily evaluated by test scores, most people get good at producing test scores in the most efficient possible way, not the most interesting, flexible, or adventurous possible way.

Nevertheless, the Atlantean system hasn't had the same kind of problems with testing or choice that the American system has. In the case of testing, this has been because the Atlantean test regime has a strongly centralised and rigorous testing bureau which tries very hard to measure process skills as well as product. It has its weaknesses, but not so many, overall.

But what about 'choice'? In the American system, this refers to students being able to change schools and courses at will. Private education service providers can compete with public schools in a free-market system. At this point in time, the jury is still out; no statistically-solid gains can be seen as an overall trend — although some of these providers have posted sterling results, some have crashed and burned with alarming alacrity.

In Atlantis, choice depends on your academic prowess (test-taking skill?) at the age of 12 or so. This allows you to pick a secondary school, which mostly admits on the basis of that score. The fundamental flaw in the system is of course that in the last 30 years, the best secondary schools have built their reputations on having had the best students and hence having posted the best results.

The market has failed because we can't determine how effective these schools really are except by a spurious measure known as 'rolling value-added score', which measures efficiency as a function of test scores (again). The market has failed even more drastically because the better schools are now allowed to admit talent even without looking at the test scores — and there is no public disclosure as to how this talent is selected or how much is thus absorbed.

Even worse, since test scores correlate well to socioeconomic status (SES), the better schools have developed an elite demographic character in which top earners predominate. The schools can of course disguise this by taking in foreign students without declared antecedents, or by reclassification (or secure classification) of parental SES. But it is pretty clear that the per capita cost of education in the elite schools is much higher than that in the neighbourhood schools.

Principals of such schools are now major fund-raisers and scourers of the hinterland for academic talent. They administer a test designed to discover proficiency in mathematics and language, skim off the cream from nearby countries and big states like China and India, and bring them to Atlantis for conversion education. Then they bask in the academic successes which such talented young people will inevitably produce.

In a sense, the Atlantean system has already had the rebirth that the American system needs. However, what has been birthed is not necessarily a paragon of educational virtue. Whatever it is, though, is pretty efficient at producing test scores. Scorers, not scholars, are the output of the system. Aficionados of W B Yeats might be right to wonder what rough beast slouches towards Atlantis to be born.