Close public schools if test scores are bad...or if they're good.

[Hannah Bell]

When Test Scores No Longer Matter
Jim Horn

When standardized test scores these days don’t conform to the demands of the official political playbook written by the bold reformers (as they like to be known), such test scores may be summarily denounced in the press as meaningless. On May 9, for example, New Jersey’s Education Commissioner Bret Schundler, who is leading a charge with Governor Christie to remake the state’s public schools in the corporate education reform image, denounced New Jersey Public Schools as a “wretched system” and the state’s #1 national rankings on the NAEP in both 4th and 8th grade reading and math as “irrelevant..."

The CREDO National Charter School Study by Margaret Raymond and her colleagues at Stanford last June showed that twice as many charters nationwide have worse scores (37%) than those with higher scores (17%), when compared to public schools with similar demographics. Forty-six percent of charters showed no significant difference in test scores when compared to the public schools. Now name me a drug that would ever be approved by the FDA with those kinds of results for patients in need of relief. And yet these previously untested charter pills, just like the teacher performance pay potion we are now being asked to swallow, continue to be sold to an unsuspecting public with no labeling and no warning about what this latest research shows or what the best scientific opinion advises (see National Research Council’s Letter Report to the U.S. Department of Education on the Race to the Top Fund)...

So with such consistently bad test score news coming down the pike for these perennial reformers and corporate solutionists, there is only thing left to do, it seems: as did New Jersey’s Education Commissioner... one need simply to announce that test scores no longer matter. Which is what happened on May 5, as the New York Times published an op-ed by racialist charter advocate and co-author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, who now declares that the real reason that parents should advocate for charters and vouchers should have nothing to do with test scores anymore, test scores that are made irrelevant by the facts based on factors beyond the school—and, no, he’s not talking about poverty:

"Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school."

So, then, if the good voucher schools of Milwaukee or the good charter schools of the U.S. are made bad by “cognitive ability, personality, and motivation come mostly from home,” then it is not the fault of the good voucher and charter schools, which remain good, according to Murray, even as we stock them with urban students of defective cognitive ability, personality, and motivation. Apparently it is not the fault of perfectly good medicine that the unresponsive patients remain ill..."

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/


Need more evidence that it's not about "the children"?

And do you detect the sweet smell of fascism & racism in "Bell Curve" Murray's apologetics?

[amborin]

1. K&R

[snot]

2. K&R'd