goofiness

["GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>]

Mr. Alter        

Back in April, I wrote NYTimes columnist Bob Herbert an email that began, "I am still amazed after all these years that people who can be rational and insightful about virtually every topic under the sun go all goofy when it comes to education.  Goofy is you in today's column."  

Now it's your turn.  Goofy is you.  It so happens that Bob had also been visited by professional fear monger, Bob Wise.  I guess there's good money in fear.  Don't know if Roy Romer turned up in your office, but Roy, who was pretty smart when I knew him in Colorado, is the worst of the anxiety peddlers.  He gets $60 million from Bill and Eli to make people afraid, very afraid.  For an octogenarian, he's very energetic about it. 

You guys don't seem to get it.  "A Nation at Risk" (ANAR) said we were doomed if we didn't completely reform our schools.  You point out that today we're #25 among 30 industrialized nations in math.  So we didn't shape up as ANAR demanded.  Yet the World Economic Forum ranks us the most competitive economy in the world.  So does the Institute for Management Development.  

The IMD had us replacing Japan as #1 in 1994 and remaining in that position.  

You remember Japan.  It had a great economy and the people who wrote ANAR thought that that was due to Japanese kids' high test scores.  After ANAR appeared, Secretary of Education Ted Bell dispatched assistant secretary Checker Finn and a group of policy wonks to Japan to see if we could import their schools.  They said they thought it was possible.  But 7 years later, Japan's economy sank into the Pacific and took the rest of the Asian Tiger nations with it.  But Japanese kids continued to ace tests.  Get it through your head: tests don't count.  As Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be measured and not everything that can be measured counts."

Ask your fellow Newsweek pundit, Fareed Zakariya.  He noticed that those high flying 8th graders in Singapore compared poorly to American kids 10, 20 years down the road.  How come?  He asked the Singapore Minister of Education.  We have a test meritocracy, Mr. Minister said.  You have a talent meritocracy.  There are things we can't test like creativity, ambition and, most of all, the American kids' willingness to challenge conventional wisdom.  This is where Singapore must learn from America.  They're trying--a bunch of Singapore educators visited the adjacent county to mine and were blown away.  The kids were so ENGAGED with school.  Maybe that's why there are 105,000 Korean kids studying here.  Their parents want them to learn English, yes, but they hate the rote learning of Korean schools and the life-determining college entrance test.  But Korean kids do score high on tests.  

Even if tests counted there'd be the fact that among 21 developed nations, the U.S had the highest poverty rate.  If we're #1 in poverty, is it reasonable to expect #1 in test scores?  But, really, tests, don't count.  In fact, if you analyze the test scores by the poverty levels of schools, 30% of American kids score higher than the highest country in reading.  And another 28% score high enough that if they constituted a nation, they'd rank fourth in the world (out of 35).  But the Bob Wises and Roy Romers aren't interested in such analyses.  They've got money to peddle fear.

George Washington University professor Iris Rotberg recently wrote, "The fact is, test score comparisons tell you very little about the quality of schools" (Education Week, June 11).  You say it's fashionable to attack tests.  Yes, and the preceding statement is why.  If you wanted to evaluate schools based on test scores, you'd be a fool.  So would Obama.  

If you wanted to evaluate teachers based on test scores, you would be equally foolish.  The resistance of anyone to teacher evaluation that no one has figured out how to do it. You admit this but say, "we have no way of determining which teachers can actually teach."  It's a bit complicated, this.  How do you separate this year's teacher contribution from last year's?  How do you factor out home, community, lead poisoning, poor nutrition, asthma (which somehow doesn't seem to turn up in affluent neighborhoods), single parenthood, stress (I was just reading some pediatric literature on the devastating impact of stress on the developing brain)?  

By the way, the official 2008 Texas GOP Platform says, and I quote, "The No child Left Behind Act has been a massive failure and should be abolished."  Know what?  They're right.

A second by-the-way and a strong request:  KIPP admissions are anything but random.  If Wise or Romer told you that, they're lying.  And I want to see a citation for your claim that 80 percent of KIPP go to college.  If you look even at KIPP's own annual reports,  you see extremely high attrition rates from grade 5 to grade 8.

Sincerely,

Gerald W. Bracey
1797 Duffield Lane
Alexandria, VA 22307
703-317-1716