Some Thoughts about "L. A.'s Leaders in Learning"

As usual, I had a mixed reaction to L.A.'s Leaders in Learning.

I completely agree with this:

"We're measuring who is in schools rather than how effective the schools are," said Helen Ladd, a professor and testing expert at Duke University.

This portrait of a "high-achieving" school could have been written about my own school district:

Topeka Elementary in Northridge serves a community where one in four parents attended graduate school. Over the seven years analyzed, two-thirds of Topeka's students scored above grade level, contributing to its sterling API score of 879.

But the school is intently focused on bringing up those who score below. In part that's because the API, while not primarily concerned with students' progress, is designed to give more credit to gains by low achievers.

"It's where you get the most bang for your buck," said Principal Miko Dixon. "Everything we do is about getting those kids up."

Those low-achieving students made small but steady gains, the Times analysis found. The much larger group of high achievers was essentially flat in English and steadily falling behind in math. When ranked by student growth overall, Topeka was in the bottom 3% of district elementary schools.

The most common way for a child to get high scores on standardized tests is to be born to an educated, middle-class family. These kids will routinely get wonderful test scores even if the school essentially ignores them. I'm glad to see the L.A. Times shining a spotlight on this problem.

If you've got kids with low test scores, one way to bring their scores up is to "teach to the test". If this means ensuring that the kids have their math facts down, I'm OK with it. But if it means drilling the kids on the exact format of the tests, to the extent that they can fail a test on the same subject if the format is different, it's not OK. Take a look at Linda Perlstein's Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade for a scary example of test prep.

And where does that leave us? With a deeply troubled public school system, that's where. We've got bright middle-class kids bored and drifting in schools that benefit from the test scores they post, while ignoring their academic needs. Then we've got children of poverty enduring hours of test prep, which stunts their intellectual growth.