States Ease Standards for High School Exit Exams

I meant to write on this the other day. From the New York Times, "As School Exit Tests Prove Tough, States Ease Standards." Naturally, states are lowering standards so kids can pass, and leftist constiuencies are claiming "racism" for being held to tougher requirements. The question for me is not so much are exit exams a good thing, but, more broadly, what are we going to do to improve student learning in the pre-college years? I can tell you first hand, sometimes I fear for the country with the soaring levels of disengagement and unpreparedness I encounter among thousands of college freshman in Southern California.

So, it's interesting to see Jay Mathews, at Washington Post, calling for the end the of the Bush administatration's landmark educational initiative, No Child Left Behind. See, "Mr. Obama: Kill NCLB." But in junking NCLB, Mathews says we should go with a single national assessment, "a uniform national test," that holds all students accountable.

Joanne Jacobs endorses the idea, "The time and energy now devoted to NCLB compliance could be devoted to arguing over what the national exam should test and how to test it. That would be a useful argument."

Many conservatives thought Bush's education agenda was a disaster because it increased federal power and expanded the bureaucracy. That's true, although no Democratic administration has done as much to put student achievement at the center of the national debate, and always remember, education is this era's greatest civil rights challenge -- and we're failing at it, to the horrible detriment of entire generations of Americans. (Recall my thoughts on this, at "'The Providence Effect': Astonishing Educational Achievement, 'The Way It Should Be Done'.")

That said, Cato at Liberty takes issue with Jay Mathews and says get the Fed out of educational policy - give power to families:

While Mathews’ approach would do less harm than NCLB, it wouldn’t do much good. Mathews suggests that just having the feds “shame” states with bad national scores would force improvement, but we’ve seen public schools repeatedly shrug off massive ignominy since at least the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk. As long as they keep getting their money, they couldn’t care much less.

So neither tough standards nor shaming have led to much improvement. Why?

As I’ve laid out before, it’s a simple matter of incentives.

With punitive accountability, the special interests that would be held to high standards have strong motivation — and usually the power — to demand dumbed-down tests, lowered minimum scores, or many other accountability dodges. The result: Little or no improvement.

What if there are no serious ramifications?

Then the system gets its money no matter what and again there is little or no improvement.

It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

So what are reformers to do? One thing: Take government — which will almost always be dominated by the people it employs — out of the accountability equation completely. Give parents control of education funds and make educators earn their pay by having to attract and satisfy customers.

Unfortunately, that still seems to be too great a leap for Jay Mathews. But one of these days, I’m certain, he’ll go all the way!