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Standardized testing isn’t everything: 2 books offer insight into the failings of education reform

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In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report titled “A Nation at Risk” because of a “rising tide of mediocrity” infecting the nation’s schools, kicking off what has now become almost 35 years of education “reform.”

The Reagan administration opened the door to charter schools. If public schools were failing, Reagan argued, it was an injustice to prevent parents from moving their children into better schools.

But it also launched what I now think of as a mania for measuring the performance of schools and students, all in the name of accountability: It all boiled down to how schools and students perform on standardized tests. No Child Left Behind under George W. Bush and then Race to the Top during the Obama years only increased the mania.

And yet, the narrative about schools hasn’t budged since “A Nation at Risk.” The same people who thought schools were failing in 1983 think they’re failing for the same reasons in 2017, even though their policies have dominated school reform for that entire period.

Curious thing, that.

The implosion of the attempted imposition of the Common Core State Standards and the selection of Betsy DeVos as education secretary have chastened at least the center-left reformers who once populated the Obama White House. Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos are at a roughly 80 percent overlap in their views on education, but that last 20 percent appears to be a bridge too far.

This has left a little open space into which some fresh ideas can blow, and two recent books provide important insights we should pay attention to moving forward.

“The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better” by former grade-school teacher and Harvard professor Daniel Koretz takes a comprehensive look at the use of standardized tests in education, which dates to 1930, as well as the misuses of standardized tests as part of the accountability reform movement.

Koretz covers all of the perverse behaviors — teaching to the test, cheating, value-added modeling (which judged teachers on students they’d never met) — that the reform movement has begotten, while also carefully illuminating the limitations of standardized exams to tell us meaningful things about what students are learning. Koretz declares, “Testing simply can’t carry the freight that’s been piled on to it. The failure to understand this, or a willful decision to ignore it, can explain much of what has gone wrong.”

Moving away from measuring schools solely by test scores is a necessity to address the some of the issues present in schools — which is where “Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality” by Jack Schneider, a professor who studies education at College of the Holy Cross, comes in.

Schneider’s book was inspired by frustration over a crude neighborhood evaluation tool published by the Boston Globe and based on test scores, which gave inaccurate bad marks to a grade school in his hometown of Somerville, Mass.

Schneider set out to make a better tool and did so by broadening the discussion about what we should value about schools. Teachers, school culture, approach to character and academics all matter, but they also may matter in different ways for different people. By rooting the discussion in what we value, he creates a true framework for making informed choices, challenging the “failing schools” narrative by putting test scores in their proper, limited place.

Hopefully, these books can help us get past the patterns that have proved fruitless for so long.

John Warner is the author of “Tough Day for the Army.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read next based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

2. “Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War” by Karl Marlantes

3. “Out Of Africa” by Isak Dinesen

4. “H Is For Hawk” by Helen MacDonald

5. “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman

— Lyn M., Warrenville

One of my favorite readerly emotions is not sadness, but melancholy, a sense of the weight of the world pressing down on you but not so hard you’ll buckle. I feel that in this list and think “The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx would be in Lyn’s wheelhouse.

1. “Magruder’s Curiosity Cabinet” by H.P. Wood

2. “A Great Reckoning” by Louise Penny

3. “Odd Hours” by Dean Koontz

4. “Ella Minnow Pea” by Mark Dunn

5. “Magpie Murders” by Anthony Horowitz

— Keely S., Chicago

I just featured this in last week’s Biblio Awards edition, which feels like a bit of a cheat, but I keep thinking about the book in a way that makes me want to read it again: “Anything is Possible” by Elizabeth Strout.

1. “America’s First Daughter” by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie

2. “Origin” by Dan Brown

3. “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving

4. “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” by Neil deGrasse Tyson

5. “Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood” by Trevor Noah

— Lori S., Riverside

For Lori, a meaty story immersed in history: E.L. Doctorow’s “Billy Bathgate.”

Get a reading from the Biblioracle!

Send a list of the last five books you’ve read to books@chicagotribune.com. Write “Biblioracle” in the subject line.