Whether you believe in market-based approaches to improving our schools or more traditional approaches, it is vital that the public know about the functioning and effectiveness of our schools. Markets require informed consumers, and democracy requires informed voters. Neither system of accountability can function effectively—let alone efficiently—without information.
This is why I work in large scale assessment. I believe that our public schools are the most important service that our governments provide. A vast majority of our children, of our citizens, go through them. Our schools prepare the next generation for citizenship, for economic participation and to be members of our communities. The moral legitimacy of our public schools comes from the same place as the moral legitimacy as all of our governments’ actions: the will of the governed. I believe in school board elections because our schools are so important that our communities should vote on them on their own, rather than part of the larger bundle we consider when voting for mayors, city council members, governors, legislators and presidents.
Frankly, we all need better information about the functioning of our schools, because we all pay taxes to support them. Our property values and rents are influenced by perceptions of the quality of our schools. And the future of our communities and our children are strongly shaped by them.
Obviously, schools are not the only influence on these things. In fact, our children’s future are more shaped by non-school factors than in-school factors. But other than family, schools might be the most important factor. (When churches influence children, they primarily do so through the behavior and teachings of parents, who are so credible and important to children.) Schools are vital institutions in our communities, second only to families in how we shape our communities for the future.
We need more information about our schools, not less. And certainly we need more than quantitative statistics and test scores. But those quantitative statistics and tests scores can be useful. They are hard to do well—thus, my work—but easy to consume. They are quick information for people who might not have the time, patience or interest to delve more deeply into rich qualitative findings about schools. No doubt, we need qualitative and quantitative reporting on more than just core academic lessons, as we want schools to do more than just teach those core academic lessons. Character, citizenship, mental and emotional health, resiliency, collaboration skills, emotional intelligence and more. But certainly, we all want to know how our schools are doing with those academic lessons that are at the center of so much that schools do. We need better tests, better reporting, and about a richer array of educational outcomes.
To abandon public reporting on our schools is, in my view, to abandon any investment in improving our schools. It undermines the basic engines of school improvement, be they grounded in democratic oversight or in market mechanisms. I know of no moral call greater than trying to do better by today’s children and even better still by tomorrow’s children. This calls for investments to learn how we can do better by our own, our community’s and our nation’s children.
No one voted for abandoning such efforts. We already spend so little on education research, making our research efforts so much more difficult than they should be. Cutting education research funding is a statement that no one’s children are worth investing in or improving for, not even our own. I can think of no more immoral view than that. I have all kinds of criticisms about what NCES and IES do and the research they fund, but those are primarily in terms of the important types of research that goes unfunded, rather than taking issue with the importance of the research that they do fund. Cutting this research is giving up on the most fundamental infrastructure of our society.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose this on America, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
(With apologies to John Dewey.)