Best in the World
American schools are not failing: They are the best in the world. The United States successfully develops students with the skills needed to succeed in the 21st-century world. Likewise, American teachers are the best in the world. Though constrained by federal, state, and local mandates to focus on improving achievement test scores in language arts and math, they also manage to teach their students creativity, entrepreneurship, independence, ownership, commitment, social responsibility, and an awareness of equity issues. They help their students develop a mindset that is ready to take on any challenge.
You don’t have to look far to see the success of American schools. It is reflected in the dominance of the United States in virtually every metric used to compare countries. The United States is the country with the world’s strongest economy, the world’s leading businesses, the best doctors, the most technologically advanced companies, the world’s top military, the most patents, the most Nobel Prize winners, and the world’s greatest innovation. Furthermore, the United States has the great majority of the world’s leading universities and colleges where mostly American professors teach mostly American students. This tremendous success rests on a foundation built by America’s teachers and schools.
Other students in other countries may score higher on achievement tests, but they often have what Chinese-American researcher Yong Zhao calls “high-scores low-ability.” It is long past time we stopped looking at achievement tests to assess how American students, teachers, and schools are doing.
Tests, Not Schools, Are Failing
America is not failing as a nation, and American schools are not failing. It is achievement tests that fail. What gets measured in a standardized test does not include critical skills that American students are learning better than students in other countries. America is turning out the top university students worldwide because its schools and colleges are succeeding in teaching skills associated with problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, conscientiousness, and entrepreneurship.
These top American students graduate and lead the world in building innovative companies, winning Nobel prizes (the United States has more than the following five countries combined,) and building the world’s leading economy. In science, engineering, medicine, mathematics, technology, business, communications, entertainment, computer science, and the military, the United States is preeminent. The knowledge and skills that lead to America’s world leadership begin in America’s schools.
Tests Can’t Predict Life Success
According to research by William Bowen of Princeton University, grades are eight times better at predicting college graduation than achievement test scores because achievement tests miss the most important things students learn in school.
One of the most critical things Bowen found is that grades predict college graduation regardless of the location or quality of a child’s school. Students who get high grades in low-performing schools graduate from college at a high rate, while students with low grades at high-performing schools graduate from college at a low rate. As Bowen put it, “A grade is a grade is a grade.” What this makes clear is that for forty years, American schools have focused on the wrong thing. Schools should focus on improving students’ grades and stop giving achievement tests.
High-Stakes Tests Yield Unusable Data
When serious consequences are attached to student test scores, it leads to fatal data distortions called score inflation. Score inflation occurs when test scores go up for reasons unrelated to learning. Causes of score inflation include teaching to the test, test-taking tips, focusing on “bubble kids,” coaching, and cheating. All artificially raise test scores without increasing overall class learning. Research has shown that almost all of the test improvement comes from score inflation. For example, when Harvard professor Daniel Koretz compared student gains in New York on their high-stakes No Child Left Behind state tests with gains on the NAEP, he found that score inflation accounted for almost 90% of the gains. In the chart on the right, the area shaded orange represents score inflation; the blue area represents real gains.
Tests Measure SES Level - Not Learning
Research by PISA shows that every country in the world has a virtually identical achievement gap on test scores, with students in the 90th percentile of SES scoring highest and students in the 10th percentile scoring lowest. The scores are a reflection of SES - not the quality of a country’s schools.
The United States has neither a smaller nor a larger achievement gap than other countries. The SES achievement gap exists across all the different kinds of schools, educational programs, cultures, and types of governments in countries around the world. It is, therefore, unlikely that schools can be either its cause or its cure – instead, the achievement gap results from some aspect of the underlying dynamics of income inequality.
Furthermore, the size of the achievement gap between low-SES and middle-SES students is almost exactly the same as the gap between middle-SES and high-SES students. This also is true in every country in the world.
Achievement tests are so biased in favor of higher-SES students that they are excellent at detecting the SES levels of students. However, they are very poor at capturing most of what students learn at school.
Standardized Tests Have Racist Roots
Standardized tests have a long history of being used to support racist ideologies. They were first brought to the United States to justify the superiority of White Northern Europeans. The American IQ test and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were both developed to build a set of questions that White Americans would do well on. Although there is no evidence of any difference in intelligence between races, racist academic scholars continue to use test scores in an attempt to prove the superiority of White Americans. During No Child Left Behind, they were also used as a basis for firing thousands of Black and Hispanic teachers. Research has shown that state achievement tests are strongly biased in favor of more affluent students from the dominant culture.
The IQ Test and the SAT Were Developed to Justify Racism
The IQ test was brought to the United States by people who believed in eugenics - the belief that some races are superior to others. Both the American IQ test and the SAT were created by eugenicists such as Henry Goddard (seen in picture) and Lewis Terman, who wanted to use the test to separate “fit” people from “unfit” people. Eugenicists believe that “unfit” people should be sterilized. The Eugenics movement in the United States, which was closely aligned with the eugenics movement in Hitler’s Germany, was very popular, with prominent supporters including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Margret Sanger, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Herbert Hoover, Linus Pauling, and Helen Keller.
The Racist Firing of Teachers
During No Child Left Behind, thousands of teachers in low-SES and minority schools were fired for no other reason than the students they taught had low test scores. There is no evidence that students’ test scores reflect a teacher’s teaching abilities. Low-SES students score lower on test scores in every country in the world, but other countries don’t fire the teachers who teach low-SES children - they celebrate them.
Michelle Rhee became famous as the head of Washington DC schools for promising to sweep away “bad teachers and principals.” She closed schools and unfairly fired countless teachers and principals for the crime of teaching at low-SES schools. She ended up being fired after a major cheating scandal.
