For years, for decades, we have been told that the answer to low-scoring public schools was School Choice.
That was until we learned that most charters don’t get higher scores than public schools, and voucher schools actually lead to lower scores.
So school choice advocates now claim that test scores don’t matter, at least not for non-public schools. They are still absolutely essential for public schools, and can be used to stigmatize them and close them down.
But for schools of choice, they just are not all that important. They don’t matter. They only matter for public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think this is an astonishingly cynical reversal by ed reformers and should get way more attention.
Test scores mattered SO MUCH to ed reform, until they didn’t. It really looks like the test score focus was a political ploy so they could reach their ideological goals.
It makes one feel bad for the earnest teachers and others who took them seriously.
“Families choose schools for their children based on several important factors, including culture, individual attention, and, of course, safety. ”
The focus on “safety” is really one of the nastier political gambits of ed reform.
DeVos does this constantly too- she portrays all public school students as thuggish bullies.
It’s awful and they should cut it out. Attacking public schools for an ideological goal is one thing, attacking public school STUDENTS is another.
Four legs good. Two legs better.
. . . proving that the use of a double-standard to make one’s claims is acceptable to one side, but not to the other. You can cut the irony with a knife. CBK
I would like someone to do a study looking at how much time, energy and money the ed reform “movement” spent promoting and lobbying for private school vouchers versus how much time they spent on PUBLIC schools.
It is ridiculous that our entire governmental apparatus and affliated lobbying groups completely ignore 85% of students in the US.
We should demand better. Their ideological opposition to public schools harms public school students. We’re paying these people. We should insist they do better.
How many voucher initiatives were introduced at the state level this past year compared to ANYTHING designed to in any way benefit public school students?
Our lawmakers are captured by this “movement” to the extent that they no longer do their jobs. This is unacceptable. They should be replaced by people who want to serve children who attend public schools.
Go look at any ed reform lobbying site. Try to find ONE thing that benefits any public school student, anywhere. They offer absolutely nothing to the students who attend the schools they disfavor.
Yet another piece about charter schools:
It’s really pretty amazing that we somehow ended up with an entire governmental, policy and lobbying apparatus who spend ZERO time and energy on the public schools 85% of US kids attend.
This is what capture looks like. We pay tens of thousands of people in government to work in “public education” and none of them have the slightest interest in existing public schools.
That’s WHY public schools have done so poorly under ed reform governance. They simply do not value our schools.
We could do better. We could find, hire and pay people who value existing public schools, and public school students. This is a bad deal we’re getting, where they only work on the schools that meet their ideological litmus test.
This is a lame attempt to appear “balanced.” The fact that the district is expanding its metrics to include social and emotional considerations is concerning, not a benefit.
How about considering the premise that school “reform” does not matter as it does not improve outcomes for students, and it dilutes the resources for the public schools that take all students. If choice is so important, pay for it yourself, not with my tax dollars. Public education is a public service, and charters and vouchers are not. They are a political manipulation to gain access to public funds. I do not want my tax dollars to become your profit when it has been proven there is little to no benefit to students for it.
“You have a choice. Choose a public school”
I may use the term ‘public public’ if confusion occers.
The Detroit News ran an editorial two months ago that read the same way. Tersely, the editorial noted that every strategy to inch scores northward had failed so why bother.
So, low test scores and PISA tables were the primary justification for charters and choice advocates. Yet, now that their policies have made things no better, maybe e ven worse, the very metric they pounded is meaningless.
This is worse than bait and switch. Simply deceit and manipulation.
Privatization continues to undermine and harm public education. Privatizers keep demanding a bigger piece of the action and often get it because they are backed by billionaires. Public schools have suffered from at least ten years of continuous disinvestment. Enough is enough!
That article changed my face: dropped my jaw, rolled my eyes, and curled my lip. I am reeling. Hypocrisy at its highest level. Staggering. And yet, it gives me a glimmer of hope that this could be the beginning of the end of high stakes testing. The destroyers of public education are admitting that the data were meaningless. I especially liked the criticism of VAMs. I hope Lamar Alexander is paying attention. End high stakes testing for good. For all. For the good of all.
Corey DeAngelis, Ph.D., is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. What more does anyone need to know about the reasoning that tests do not matter, even if these are
hardwired into federal policy and the
ESSA “flexibility” offers no escape, and more
insidious metrics are being marketed/pushed like crazy for school climate and for character and for social-emotional well-being.
This is the next revolting wave from GERM, using AI to track, collective and assign some type of value to all human activity. It is a stimulus-response world of puppets with corporations and governments pulling the strings.
In a ration-logically oriented world test scores wouldn’t matter because there wouldn’t be any test scores to “analyze” because all would realize that the scores are COMPLETELY INVALID. But, just like too many of Americans believe in a sky daddy, too many believe in unethically using standardized test scores for purposes other than which the test was supposedly designed.
Every time I’ve seen a school choice debate on the news and the public school advocate presents data about school performance, the default response by the “choice” advocate has always been, “parents know what it is best for their children.”
America has definitely been scammed.
Remember when charter schools were marketed as being able to perform better with less money, but now, they are arguing for equal government funding?
Charles, the Dallas Morning News is a rightwing advocate for destroying public education. I don’t print their anti-public school editorials here
I have read their on-line items for some time. I had them figured as being supportive of publicly-operated education. Live and learn.