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New arguments against school choice from the Palm Beach Post

A jazz trumpeter once said that it is possible, but not necessarily advisable, to play an entire improvised solo using just one note.  In that spirit, we recognize the poor tone, atrocious tuning, weak range, and generally inferior sound of this screed by Palm Beach Post columnist Jac Wilder VerSteeg. 

From a May 2 Palm Beach Post article: "As many as 1,200 Palm Beach County high school seniors may not graduate this month because they have not passed the reading or math portions of the 10th-grade Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test."

That’s a whole high school full of kids, folks. Some of them won’t get diplomas even though they’ve passed all the courses required to graduate.

That’s an insane policy. On what basis does the state decide that the FCAT is a better measure of achievement than four years of classes and grades? How does it help any kid to take away his or her diploma?

Because those four years of classes may have been watered-down tripe, making the grades for said classes unreliable measurements of a student’s knowledge.  (Side note, we’re actually quite interested in holding a debate on the subject of high-stakes testing.  Want to participate?  Know somebody who would?  E-mail address: rboots at allianceREMOVETHISforschoolchoice dot org.)  

There’s an easy fix. Just give Florida’s public school students the same kind of breaks the state gives to voucher students who attend private schools.

Boy, you were just itching to take this article into yet another round of beatings on the voucher program, eh?  Kind of like that silly old Rodney Dangerfield joke about going to a boxing match and a hockey game breaking out…

The Legislature this year belatedly passed "accountability" measures for private schools that take vouchers. Scandals – many of them reported first in The Post – finally moved legislators to act. 

Upon reaching this point in his article, VerSteeg reaches for a form titled "PALM BEACH POST REQUIREMENTS FOR WRITING ON SCHOOL CHOICE":

• "Accountability" in sneer quotes…check. 
• Voucher schools = money laundering…check. 
• Disregard history on accountability legislation and school choice advocates…checkity check.  (Major school choice advocates in the state have been pushing for accountability legislation for three years.)

Back to the article:

Compared with what public schools are forced to go through, though, voucher schools get accountability lite. There are some financial safeguards and background checks on employees. The academic accountability, in particular, is minimal. Private school voucher students still don’t have to take the FCAT. But they do have to take a standardized test of some sort.

"Minimal" accountability.  "Some sort" of standardized test.  VerSteeg, you have our deepest, most sincere gratitude–not only have you made this fisking easier to write, you have also illustrated that you don’t know what you’re talking about!  Back, once again, to our response from last week:

…let’s actually take a minute to examine the FCAT’s design.  As stated on the Florida DOE website:

The FCAT, administered to students in Grades 3-11, contains two basic components: criterion-referenced tests (CRT), measuring selected benchmarks in Mathematics, Reading, Science, and Writing from the Sunshine State Standards (SSS); and norm-referenced tests (NRT) in Reading and Mathematics, measuring individual student performance against national norms.

So, to restate: the FCAT has a criterion-referenced test and a norm-referenced test.  The basic difference between the two (go here for more specifics) is in how the test scores are interpreted:

• The CRT is used to evaluate students against state standards.  For example, a CRT for math might judge whether a student has learned what the state wants him/her to understand about algebra. 
• The NRT is used to determine how test-takers do relative to one another. A sample of students takes the test, and all other test takers are judged against that sample.  (Remember “percentile” scores on those tests you took in school?  Those were norm-referenced tests.)  Please note that the norm-referenced portion of the FCAT measures “individual student performance against national norms”.  (This will be critically important in a minute.)

Well, let’s go back and again examine the legislation currently pending in the Florida legislature.  According to page 33 of HB 7041—that’s the bill introduced in the House (go here)—any school accepting a voucher student will be required to annually administer “one of the nationally norm-referenced tests identified by the Department of Education.”  In other words, all voucher schools would have to start using nationally norm-referenced tests—the same kind used in the FCAT.  

School choice critics demanding that voucher schools administer the FCAT do so presumably out of a desire for “accountability”—they want to make sure the kids are doing at least as well as their public schools peers.  Well, news flash for the Palm Beach Post: this legislation is your dream come true.  Because not only have most voucher schools been doing this for several years now, this legislation would require those few schools not already testing to start doing so.  Since most voucher students have been taking nationally norm-referenced tests for some time, comparison of their performance to their public-school peers has been a reality for some time.  The accountability legislation currently being considered would simply codify what has already been taking place and require those few voucher students not presently taking such tests to begin doing so. 

In short, if VerSteeg insists upon going after the new legislation, the least he could do is learn a bit about it.  But there’s more nonsense within the same paragraph:

Parents get to know the score, and so does "an independent research organization."

Again with the sneer quotes.  Does your editor hand out brownie points for this sort of thing?  Since VerSteeg glossed over it, it’s worth pointing out that the organization in question is selected by the Florida Department of Education for the purposes of long-term measurement of choice schools against their public counterparts. 

The law goes out of its way to make clear, however, that the data can’t be used to let the public know how individual private voucher schools are doing. That’s a far cry from the FCAT-based grades that public schools face.

And there’s a very good reason for that.  The choice schools in question are accepting students who are performing very poorly academically.  It takes around four years for choice students to start seeing measurable improvements in most students.  Therefore, examining individual voucher schools won’t necessarily be a valid indicator of that school’s success or quality, because new students whose test scores are generally much lower will artifically skew the school’s grades.  

The limited accountability for voucher schools doesn’t erase the underlying double standard that Gov. Bush set up for voucher schools and public schools. When it comes to academics, if the voucher school parent is happy, the state is happy. But for public schools, the parents’ perception doesn’t count. If the kid isn’t doing well on the FCAT, the kid isn’t doing well.

This is pretty much the linchpin of the demands for increased accountability: parents are assumed to be too stupid to see if a school is working.  As we recognized earlier today, your paternalism campaign is doing the trick.  Look, we have no problem discussing the impact and justification for testing.  But the least you could do is acknowledge that voucher schools are not unsupervised loose cannons. 

One solution would be to require private schools to give voucher students the FCAT, to inform the public how those schools are doing and to require voucher students to pass the FCAT in order to graduate.

But since it makes no sense to use the FCAT for that purpose in public schools, there’s no reason – except a perverse kind of fairness – to inflict the same on voucher students. 

VerSteeg, thanks again for the whole broken record thing–I have a lot of stuff on my plate today, so being able to copy and paste from earlier posts really makes things easier on me.  Once again, from last week’s fisking:

So why do we argue that voucher schools should be free of the FCAT?  Because of the other side of the coin: the criterion-referenced tests.  The CRTs are a reflection of the state standards.  Requiring a school to take on the state’s standards means, ultimately, that that school will be required to take on the state’s curriculum.  And if private schools are compelled to do that, they will cease to be an effective solution for kids in underperforming schools.  The reason that private schools are able to routinely outperform their public counterparts is that they can do things their own way—they can sidestep the bureaucracy to innovate and assemble curricula that best fits their goals.  These schools are private entities; if compelled to take up the state’s curriculum, they will lose their independence.  As long as they can demonstrate through norm-referenced tests that they are measuring up to other schools locally and nationally, choice schools are and should remain at liberty to pursue curricula that they prefer.

In short, forcing the FCAT upon schools that are already measuring their students’ growth is both unreasonable and unnecessary.  But as we pointed out last week and above, the major activist groups in Florida have been pushing for this legislation, and similar bills introduced in past sessions, in order to respond to accountability complaints.  But apparently, said legislation still doesn’t satisfy the likes of the Palm Beach Post. 

Back to VerSteeg’s article: 

Another solution would be to give up on the FCAT. But that’s going too far. The test itself isn’t bad. 

We agree–it isn’t a bad test.  Which is why most voucher schools have been using the half of it that allows for state- and nationwide comparisons.  And why all choice schools are now required to do so.

It can be a useful diagnostic tool.

For diagnosing what, precisely?  Underperforming schools, maybe?   

The problem is that the state has placed more weight on the FCAT than it validly can bear. 

Here VerSteeg seems to be hinting at the overtesting argument.  Indirectly, NYC chancellor Joel Klein addressed this just a few days ago:

Klein also flunked his anti-testing critics, who claim NCLB and the Bloomberg administration’s policy curbing social promotion have turned schools into testing mills.

He said NCLB – like most laws – is not perfect. But he described as "fundamental" the law’s focus on holding educators responsible for teaching all students.

"I’ve never met a law that couldn’t improve. But to criticize the heart of No Child Left Behin

d is to refuse to take responsibility for the achievement gap – the most serious civil-rights, social and economic crisis facing America today," Klein said.

He added that schools should be testing students "routinely," as long as the exams are based on solid standards.

"The anti-testing advocates would have you believe that people like me want our students to run through daily drills on how to properly fill in bubbles with No. 2 pencils. That couldn’t be further from the truth," the chancellor said.

"Our teachers should teach students the skills and ideas they must master in order to pass their tests. That’s teaching to the test," he said. 

VerSteeg’s proposed solution: 

Tenth-graders should continue to take the reading, math and writing FCAT. The state should continue to set what it considers to be a passing grade. As happens now, students who don’t pass should have the opportunity to retake the test in their junior and senior years.

And if those students still can’t pass by graduation time? Give them a diploma anyway. Then report their FCAT scores on transcripts requested by colleges and employers.

In other words, diplomas are largely meaningless.  VerSteeg’s proposed solution pretty much guts the accountability purposes the FCAT was intended to address.  

That’s not exactly equivalent to the break voucher students get, but it’s close.

The only "break" voucher students get is the shot at going to a decent school–a break you would take away from them.   

If colleges or employers think that a sub-par FCAT score is more important than four years of high school classes, they can refuse to admit or hire the student.

Again, the whole idea with the FCAT was to make diplomas actually mean something academically.  Now you’re going to force schools and employers to go through extra legwork to see if a high school graduate actually learned something?

The important thing is that students who did everything they were supposed to do – except pass one part of a high-stakes test – would not be sent out into the world without a high school diploma.

…a diploma that some would say was awarded from a publicly-owned degree mill. 

Under the system set up under Gov. Bush, the FCAT determines whether a student’s entire high school education is valid. But who’s to say that isn’t backward? Maybe, for some students, the FCAT just doesn’t measure what they know. 

As we said above, the whole subject of high-stakes testing is worthy of debate.  But you’re too busy taking swipes at voucher schools to actually talk about why such an approach is wrong. 

In voucher schools, parents get to decide what the newly required standardized test means. 

You’re absolutely right.  And if parents see that their kids are testing poorly at a choice school, what can they do?  They can take their kid elsewhere.  Why, this point dovetails nicely into…

Confer some of that flexibility on public school students.   Report the FCAT, but don’t sacrifice students to it.

While we may disagree on the uses of the FCAT, we’re amazed to see VerSteeg make our central point for us: kids trapped in broken schools should have the ability to get out.  So what is his beef with voucher schools, especially with the new accountability legislation in place?  If he could just get away from the NEA talking points for five minutes, we might actually find some common ground. 

In fact, let’s see your bet and raise it.  Try this on for size:

• We do precisely what VerSteeg proposes: diplomas are no longer tied to the FCAT, scores are reported only to employers and educators that request them for individual students, and average norm-referenced scores are made public for both public and voucher schools.  The field, by VerSteeg’s own reasoning, is therefore level. 
• Parents may then made educational decisions based on those scores–if they decide those scores are insufficient for their child, they are free to go to any school they choose, be it a public or choice school.  

What do you say, VerSteeg?  The comment thread is open.