3 Hacks for Killing Critical Conversations

Anything to justify ‘school choice’

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right-wing think tank backed by the Koch brothers, has recently discovered that when it comes to education, “Test scores are not giving us the whole picture.” In their study Do Test Impacts Even Matter? (March, 2018), they argue that we need to rethink “regulatory regimes” and “policymakers need to be much more humble” and sensitive to “parental demand and satisfaction.” I’m sure many teachers in the U.S. would be ecstatic to find out they were no longer evaluated through the narrow lens of test scores, as would communities that have had no say in the closure of public schools. Communities have long known that test scores don’t tell the whole picture. For example, Mission High, a public school in California beloved by the community but ‘failing’ by test score measures, decreased their dropout rates from 32% to 8% and “84 % of the graduating class went on to college.” However, the AEI’s call to rethink regulatory regimes isn’t about taking a more holistic approach to evaluating teachers or schools like Mission High, but reducing the regulation of ‘school choice’, a euphemism for school closure, privatization, and tax-funded segregation.Kristina Rizga writes: “Yet despite a mountain of evidence that standardized tests reveal a very narrow slice of information, in most states they still determine a school’s fate. In some, such as New York, students’ scores on the standardized tests also play a major role in grade promotion and high school placement. And in several states, up to 50 percent of the evaluations that determine teachers’ job security and sometimes pay are based on a week’s worth of tests rather than a year’s worth of learning.”

The AEI report aims to create a different – more contextualized and forgiving standard – for the evaluation of privatized education, but this does nothing to make schools more responsive to the public and democracy more broadly. Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that the U.S. “began moving away from the ‘public’ in public education a long time ago”:

The very voucher movement that is at the heart of DeVos’s educational ideas was born of white opposition to school desegregation as state and local governments offered white children vouchers to pay for private schools — known as segregation academies — that sprouted across the South after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in 1954.

Even by measures such as graduation rates, ‘school choice’ hasn’t addressed the fundamental problems of inequality: “while New York City’s overall four-year graduation rate reached 70 percent in January, the graduation rates for students who live in low-income neighborhoods lag behind those of their wealthier peers by as much as 34 percentage points.”

Given that the AEI housed The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray, it’s no surprise the institution is well-known for it’s racist views against Black people. It likens a professor who intentionally called on Black women first in class to the historical racism the school system perpetrated against Black people, claiming that calling on Black women first “represents a profound parody of the American creed when ‘anti-bias’ educators start employing race-based distinctions as an instructional tactic.” The AEI argues that there is a real problem with racism in the U.S., but it’s not the white supremacy that marched and killed in Charlottesville, but the universities who teach about white privilege and white supremacy:

“For civil rights to matter, standards and justice should be blind regardless of politics, ethnicity, or any other variable to identity. Alas, that notion has been lost in universities, and it is becoming foreign to many in the media as prominent outlets and broadcasters are populated by a generation indoctrinated in elite universities by spurious but politically-correct racial theories. … What universities and so many in the media miss is that there was a reason why the Founding Fathers prioritized individual liberty. Yes, there were flaws. While it’s trendy to blame America for original sin, hundreds of thousands of Americans sacrificed their lives in the Civil War to end slavery and begin to rectify racial disparity.”

When it comes to test scores, the AEI happily uses them when they seem to confirm ‘inherent gender differences‘ in ability:

“By all objective measures, girls have essentially all of the necessary ingredients that should result in greater representation in STEM fields like engineering and computer science except perhaps for one: a huge, statistically significant and persistent 30-point gender gap on the SAT math test in favor of boys that has persisted for more than 40 years. If there are some inherent gender differences for mathematical ability, as the huge and persistent gender differences for the math SAT test suggests, closing the STEM gender degree and job gaps may be a futile attempt in socially engineering an unnatural and unachievable outcome.”

And the AEI is happy to use test scores when they seem to show that the U.S. shouldn’t be spending on public education:

“Since 1970, inflation adjusted public school spending has more than doubled. Over the same period, achievement of students at the end of high school has stagnated according to the Department of Education’s own long term National Assessment of Educational Progress … So the only thing higher public school spending has accomplished is to raise taxes by about $300 billion annually, without improving outcomes.”

“I have a goal that we should magnify the impact of genetic effects on IQ because if we give all students a rich environment, then the only difference would be in genetics.” (2013)

“Perhaps paradoxically, then, the best way to make our students smarter, may be to strengthen the link between school achievement and intelligence . Doing so will also increase the heritability of IQ, since we would be minimizing the effects of environment, but the achievement gaps would be reduced to the minimum determined by genetic factors.” (2005, when Wiliam worked for ETS)

Indeed, this is Herrnstein’s argument from 1971: “If we make the relevant environment much more uniform (by making it as good as we can for everyone), then an even larger portion of the variation in I.Q. will be attributable to the genes.” Of course, if the environment is made uniform, then heritability increases because of the mathematics of the calculation. We could also minimize the effects of the environment by making it uniformly austere. In other words, the heritability of IQ tells us nothing about how socially just our education system is. Ned Block (1996) illustrates the problem with assuming that a high rate of heritability means that we have improved outcomes:

“Grow one handful of it in a carefully controlled environment in which the seeds get uniform illumination and uniform nutrient solution. The corn plants will vary in height, and because the environment is uniform, the heritability of height will be 100 percent. Now take another handful of corn from the same bag, and grow it in a similarly uniform environment but with a uniformly poor nutrient solution. Again, the plants will vary in height, but all will be stunted. Once more the heritability of height is 100 percent.”

We ought not to make environments uniform to magnify the genetic impact, but as Ned Block and Gerald Dworkin (1974) argue,

“There is another possibility for reducing differences which does not require making environments more uniform. If we could tailor environments for individuals – on the assumption that different people require different environments to perform best – we might reduce differences greatly. And the heritability of IQ might remain constant or even decrease since difference in environment might play an even larger role than they do now.”

I believe that Wiliam wants good schools for all students, but I think he’s simply wrong about magnifying the impact of genetic factors on IQ and heritably being a good metric of a socially just education system since the genetics of IQ are often used to locate deficits in the students rather than in a school system that doesn’t serve them. But isn’t ‘school choice’ a way to ‘tailor environments to individuals’ through the market? This strategy has served to increase segregation, mostly benefiting those who have been traditionally well-served by the education system, and there’s no evidence that ‘school choice’ has proliferated the kinds of culturally sustaining pedagogies that children need. Paul Thomas has argued that advocating ‘school choice’ as a free-market solution to the many problems that the U.S. public school system faces in a act of political cowardice:

“Instead of hoping that market forces create equity (and they will not), new direct policy should confront the following: vulnerable populations of students are assigned disproportionately new and un-/under-certified teachers, tracking and selective programs (Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate) benefit advantaged students while vulnerable students are often barred, discipline practices and consequences perpetuate inequity, and too often school facilities and materials reflect the socioeconomic status of the community.”

In other words, the market works as designed, against the interests of democracy and people who are marginalized by larger systems. Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that “Even when they fail, the guiding values of public institutions, of the public good, are equality and justice. The guiding value of the free market is profit.” The AEI has a real agenda to discount structural racism or sexism as a source of inequality, and to push a privatized education system as a solution that will leave the most vulnerable behind. We need to be awake to that

 

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