The Failure of Public Education
Think Tank #90 - standardized testing and the bureaucratization of public schooling
It’s ‘Testing Season’ in the New York City Department of Education. Spring break is coming up, and it falls right smack in the middle of two separate standardized tests, each one consisting of two consecutive days of three-hour torture sessions in the morning followed by all-out mayhem in the afternoon.
You ever make an eight-year-old sit in a room for three hours? Try it someday. See the look of agony on their face, followed by existential horror and resignation about two hours in once their spirit is finally broken.
Actually, let’s really make the experiment accurate. Scare the shit out of the kid beforehand, tell them that the outcome of their future rests on the results of this meaningless test whose only actual purpose is for politicians to collect data and make it look like they’re doing something, then sit them in a room for three hours for two consecutive days, and rinse and repeat, two to three separate times a year.
Oh, and if you’re a student in New York and English isn’t your first language, you also have to take the NYSESLAT test—a nearly impossible to pass test comprised of three days of torture, conveniently scheduled a week after the ELA test.
I’ve been through enough education credits in college to understand that a test is supposed to have ‘validity’ (i.e. measure what they are supposed to measure). The people who created these stupid tests run their mouths about this stuff. Yet these tests don’t measure students’ proficiency in mathematics or the English language. They’re full of trickery and jargon that a child needs to be explicitly taught and has no use anywhere else. If these tests are measuring anything, it’s how much time their school devoted to standardized test prep at the expense of actual learning.
Modern educational ‘philosophy’ is all about gathering as much data as possible, using ‘evidence-based practices’ (i.e. instructional methods that someone funded a bogus study about), and ‘differentiation.’ It’s lip service to the idea that every child must succeed. In reality, these things that are supposed to be ‘protecting’ children are only harming them: promoting them to the next grade so they don’t get ‘left behind’ even when they’re not prepared for it, testing the crap out of them to ‘monitor their progress,’ putting all available resources towards making the lowest-performing kids pass ‘the test’ while the gifted children who are guaranteed to ace them are given no extra attention at all.
It’s another example of the ‘equity’ versus ‘equality’ thing. Public education was allegedly designed so that everyone could be given an opportunity to be educated (of course, this could be condemned as another example of ‘lip service’—many people would argue that it was just designed so that we could have a barely-literate population that would become nice, docile workers). However, like all ‘equitable’ things, it artificially raises the lowest of the low while neglecting the highest achievers so they cannot reach their full potential. Once again, the bell curve flattens out.
All the problems with this system cannot even be broken down into one post, so here’s an overview:
English Language Learners and special education students are given the same exact curriculum as gen-ed and even honors kids (doing anything different would be condemned as ‘inequitable’), meaning that eighth-graders who read on a third-grade level are forced to read Edgar Alan Poe, and students who can’t add and subtract are given calculators as an ‘accommodation’ and told to solve multi-step equations. Predictably, no one learns a thing.
Gifted children are essentially ignored. There’s no incentive to pay extra attention to them—teachers and schools get rated based on how many of their students can do the bare-minimum, not what the most remarkable among them can achieve.
Barely anyone ever gets left back. This is a difficult topic, because before the ‘No Child Left Behind Act,’ there were kids who’d get stuck in sixth grade until they turned sixteen, at which point they’d drop out of school.
However, the alternative is that there is actually no incentive to learn. Intelligent kids who don’t really like school figure out that it’s less work for them to just do nothing, because they can fail all year and complete one bogus packet at the end of the year that will promote them to the next grade.
It’s so corrupt, it almost seems like it’s deliberate. Maybe it is, at the highest levels. I will resign to the fact that I will never be well-connected enough to determine whether the things that look like grand conspiracies are the result of malice or incompetence.
However, at the lower levels (i.e. teachers, principals, district superintendents), everyone is merely acting out of self-preservation. Everyone is a slave to the data. Teachers have to follow the curriculum, and they get evaluated poorly and scolded by their principals if their students don’t perform well on ‘the test.’ Principals are evaluated based on how their entire school performs on the test, so they push copious amounts of test prep on their teachers. There’s no choice but to push the same curriculum on all students and pay lip service to the idea that every child is capable of the same thing—otherwise, you’re ‘depriving students of the opportunity to succeed.’ Plus, it’s completely taboo to speak against these ‘equitable’ ideas, meaning that anyone who doesn’t agree with it has no choice but to shut up and follow along if they want any chance of schmoozing their way to a high-level position.
I’m not sure what happens as you climb up the rungs further, but I imagine that it’s the same on a district-wide level. If you’re a superintendent and everyone thinks your school district sucks because your test scores are low, you’re out of a job.
Everyone is incentivized to promote these things—“The DOE” demands it. Everyone knows that the system sucks, but there’s nothing they can do about it. They just keep deferring the blame further and further up the chain of command, and at the top, there’s nobody there. Just “The DOE.” It’s almost as if this system has taken on a kind of sentience.
Of course, education wasn’t great before this. When all schools operated independently, some of them were absolutely awful. However, the new public school system, just like the ‘equitable’ principles it touts, only succeeded in flattening the bell curve. The lows aren’t as low. But it’s impossible to excel when everyone is bogged down by testing and standardization and data.
There are still excellent schools elsewhere. ‘Normal’ people are just priced out of them. Maybe it’s always been that way, meaning that nothing has ever really changed. Maybe we’re all just paying lip service to the idea that anything can ever be different than the way it has always been.
You be the judge.
Let’s start a dialogue. Is the system as bad as everyone says it is? If so, what can be done to change it? Is it even possible to change it?
Also, are things different elsewhere? My experience is limited to New York City.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article and would like to support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Thanks, also, to
for inspiring this post:
My opinion is that you have articulated the problem very well. I would say that the gifted probably have always been a bit ignored, even before ‘no child left behind.’ The gifted tend to be self learners, although I’m sure there are some slipping through the cracks because of that supposition too.
To change this idea, you’d have to know what makes us strive for the good. I think knowing how to develop and nurture conscience would be my emphasis. My experience is that mundane observation is too simple. There are tricks, games and wordplay that isolates the students that simply want clear information.
You’re a great writer. I appreciate this article.