The discussion about education in the United States must go to a higher level
Public education was created in part to be one of the mediating institutions that would shape the American character, one citizen at a time. It is critical to creating responsible citizens capable of making informed decisions to produce and maintain a functioning system of government. For at least a generation, public education has abandoned the noble purpose of helping our young people understand who we are, where we come from, what we stand for, and how to pass it on to our successors. Instead, it has embraced the goal of making sure young men and women are competent at whatever they choose to do in life. Competition is important, but it does little to prepare the next generation for the job of deciding what the future of this nation will be.
If citizens have to continue being citizens, and not mere consumers; if individual happiness is to be the product of something more than the mere satisfaction of individual needs and desires; then the discussion about education in the United States must move to a higher level. It must touch the greater purposes that animate the nation. The advent of dotcom democracy brings with it a greater sense of both the importance and urgency of that discussion. We live in an age where it is possible to be everywhere all the time; communicate immediately anywhere in the world; to make decisions on anything from holiday gifts to competing candidates with the click of a mouse; to create a mass democracy like never before in the history of the world. Ironically, because we have the technology to communicate with each other more efficiently than ever, we risk becoming a nation of strangers, each alone in front of a computer screen, talking in chat rooms, by email, through of the website.
We have the tools to transform the nature of democratic government, to make sure that democratic government is responsive to the wishes of the people, expressed directly by the people. The question then is: Do we have the wisdom as a people to step back and ask ourselves if this is really a good idea?
In an age of instant access, instant information, and instant gratification, do we have the wisdom to distinguish between the desire to satisfy the momentary urge to serve popular opinion and the discipline, foresight, and insight required to pursue long-term interests? of a nation? ?
These are the most fundamental questions that the American republic has always faced. For generations, the educated citizens of that republic have found answers to these questions, sometimes through deliberation, sometimes through sheer luck. But the global context in which these questions are asked today is unlike any other in the history of the world, which makes our ability to find the right answers even more important. And that means that the quality and character of the education provided to current and future generations of young minds in a democracy will be even more critical to ensuring the future of that democracy.
While accountability for results has been an education reform catchphrase for some time, it is increasingly becoming a reality for schools across the country. When states and districts create accountability systems, the first problem policymakers face is how to know which schools and classrooms are succeeding, which are failing, and which are somewhere in between, perhaps succeeding in some ways. things and lag behind in others. This turns out to be really tricky. Choosing schools with high or low overall average test scores is an obvious way to proceed, but the strong correlation between test scores and students’ socioeconomic background makes this problematic. This approach will tend to reward schools with prosperous students and punish those with disadvantaged students.
Most states are interested in rewarding schools where teachers are most effective in producing student learning—that is, schools that add the most value to their students, no matter where those students start or what they do. advantages and disadvantages accompany them to school. In its simplest form, value-added assessment means judging schools and sometimes individual teachers based on the gains in student learning they produce rather than the absolute level of achievement their students achieve. It turns out, however, that just as students begin at different levels of achievement, they also progress at different rates, sometimes for reasons unrelated to the quality of the instruction they receive. For example, middle-class children are more likely to have more parents to help them with homework. To identify how much value a school adds to a student, the school’s effect on student achievement must be isolated from the effects of a host of other factors, such as poverty, race, and student mobility. Several states and school districts are turning to sophisticated statistical models that seek to do just that. These “value-added” models come in two basic flavors: those that include variables representing students’ socioeconomic characteristics as well as a student’s previous years’ test scores, and those that use only a student’s previous test scores. a student as a way to control for confounding factors. .
The question of whether to incorporate student background measures into the model is a loaded and complicated one. Those who use the first type of analytical model (which includes measures of student poverty, race, etc., in addition to previous test scores) do so because they find that socioeconomic characteristics affect not only where students start but also how far they progress from there. moment. every year. Given the same quality of instruction, minority and low-income students will make less progress over time, their research shows. If background variables are not included, the model may underestimate how much value these schools add to students. A student’s background is not strongly correlated with the progress a student will make, once the student’s test scores in previous years are taken into account. If socioeconomic status does influence student achievement, as much research suggests, this raises thorny political questions for value-added assessment. Omitting such variables from the model may be unfair to schools (or teachers) with a high percentage of disadvantaged students.
Public education is undergoing reform. The future of education means transforming our static industrial-age educational model into a system that can capture the diversity and opportunities of the information age. That means public education must reconnect with the public: the children it is meant to serve.
Effective education is not about programs and processes; it’s about what’s best for your child. Some districts may grapple with this dilemma by using both achievement level and value-added analysis results to identify effective schools. Another response is to assign rewards and sanctions based on value-added analysis as a stopgap measure until all students are in a position where they can reasonably be expected to achieve high standards. No doubt other variations and hybrids are waiting to be developed and tested.
The discussion about including the characteristics of the students’ backgrounds in the model is important. More research is needed on how the various models work. Today, for example, we don’t even know if different analytical models will identify the same schools as successful and unsuccessful. However, either approach gives us a more accurate measure of a school’s contribution to student learning than we would if we looked simply at average test scores or simpler measures of gain.
It is less clear that the models can be used with confidence to identify effective and ineffective teachers. Researchers have found that teacher effectiveness (measured by any kind of model) can change a lot from year to year. This means that teachers often make significant changes in their effectiveness or that teacher effectiveness statistics are not accurate. (It could be that the model does not adequately fit the presence of disruptive students in a class, for example).
Because value-added assessment for individual teachers is imperfect, many believe it is better used as a diagnostic tool, to identify teachers who need the most help, than as the “high risk” basis for rewards and punishments. Others argue that complicated analytical methods that leave so much to statisticians should be abandoned for both schools and teachers in favor of simpler calculations that can be more easily understood by policymakers, educators, and citizens. Others are content to let the market decide which schools are effective. It remains to be seen whether these diverse audiences will prefer a fairer or more transparent form of analysis. However, as statistical techniques improve and we learn more about the accuracy of different models, value-added analysis is sure to become more attractive to states and districts. They can prepare to take advantage of these advances by beginning to collect the data needed to make the models work, including regular test scores for all students in core subjects, and creating longitudinal databases that link test scores of students over time.