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The debate on education in the United States must move 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 in order 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 that on to our successors. Instead, it has embraced the goal of making sure young men and women are competent in what they choose to do in life. Competition is important, but it does little to prepare the next generation for the task of deciding what the future of this nation will be.

If citizens are to remain citizens and not merely consumers; if individual happiness must be the product of something more than the mere satisfaction of individual wishes and desires; then, the discussion about education in the United States must move to a higher level. It must touch the most important purposes that animate the nation. The advent of dot-com 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 in all places all the time; communicate immediately anywhere in the world; to make decisions on anything from holiday gifts to competing candidates with a click of the mouse; to create a mass democracy like never before in the history of the world. Ironically, as we possess the technology to communicate with each other more efficiently than ever, we run the risk of becoming a nation of strangers, each alone in front of a computer screen, speaking in chat rooms, via email, via of the Web.

We have the tools to transform the nature of democratic government, to ensure that democratic government responds 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 if that is really a good idea?

In an age of instant access, instant information, and instant gratification, do we possess the wisdom to distinguish between the desire to satisfy the momentary urge to serve popular opinion and the discipline, foresight, and discernment necessary to pursue long-term interests? of a nation? ?

These are the most fundamental issues the American republic has ever faced. For generations, the educated citizens of that republic have found answers to these questions, sometimes through deliberation, sometimes out of sheer luck. But the global context in which these questions are asked today is unlike anything in the history of the world, so our ability to find the right answers is paramount. 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 the most critical to ensuring the future of that democracy.

While accountability has been a slogan of education reform 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 things and laggards in others. This is really complicated. Choosing schools with high or low average test scores is an obvious way to proceed, but the strong correlation between test scores and students’ socioeconomic backgrounds makes this problematic. This approach will tend to reward schools with successful students and to 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. advantages and disadvantages accompany them to school. In its simplest form, value-added assessment means judging schools and sometimes individual teachers based on the student learning gains they produce rather than the absolute level of achievement their students achieve. However, it turns out that just as students begin at different levels of achievement, they also begin at different rates, sometimes for reasons unrelated to the quality of the instruction they receive. For example, parents of middle-class children are more likely to help them with homework. To identify how much value a school adds to a student, the effect of the school on student achievement must be isolated from the effects of a number 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 types: those that include variables that represent the socioeconomic characteristics of students, as well as a student’s test scores from previous years, and those that use only previous test scores from a student as a way to control for confounders.

The ability to incorporate measures of student backgrounds into the model is a loaded and complicated issue. Those who use the first type of analytical model (including 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 much. they progress from year to year. Given the same quality of instruction, low-income and minority 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 are adding to students. A student’s background is not strongly correlated with a student’s earnings, once the student’s test scores in previous years are taken into account. If socioeconomic status does influence student achievement, as many research suggests, this raises thorny policy questions for assessing value added. Omitting these variables from the model can be unfair for schools (or teachers) with a high percentage of disadvantaged students.

Public education is undergoing a 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 was meant to serve.

Effective education is not about programs and processes; it’s about what’s best for your child. Some districts can grapple with this dilemma by using both the level of achievement and the results of the value-added analysis to identify effective schools. Another answer is to assign rewards and penalties based on value-added analysis as an interim measure until all students are in a position where it is reasonable to expect them to meet high standards. Certainly other variations and hybrids are waiting to be developed and tested.

The debate about including the characteristics of the students’ backgrounds in the model is important. More research is needed on how the different models work. Today, for example, we do not even know whether 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 simply looked at average test scores or simpler measures of gain.

It is not so clear that the models can be safely used to identify effective and ineffective teachers. Researchers have found that teacher effectiveness (as measured by any type of model) can change a lot from year to year. This means that teachers often make major changes in their effectiveness or that statistics on teacher effectiveness are not accurate. (It could be that the model does not fit adequately to the presence of disruptive students in a class, for example.)

Because the value-added assessment for individual teachers is imperfect, many believe it is best used as a diagnostic tool to identify teachers who need the most help, rather than as the “high risk” basis for rewards and punishments. . Others argue that complicated analytical methods that leave much in the hands of statisticians should be abandoned for schools and teachers alike in favor of simpler calculations that can be more easily understood by policy makers, educators and teachers. 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 build on these advances by beginning to collect the data necessary to make the models work, including regular test scores for all students in core subjects, and by creating longitudinal databases that link student test scores. over time.