A plea to trust schools – not just tests

Deborah Meier is all for high standards and accountable schools. But don't even think about telling her we need more testing.

A leading education reformer and the author of, most recently, "In Schools We Trust" (Beacon Press), Ms. Meier has seen schools help children overcome obstacles to learning. She knows it can be done. But testing, she says, only lowers standards by emphasizing breadth over depth, and makes schools accountable for the wrong things.

That's not a popular viewpoint these days, as states race to implement high-stakes graduation exams and the federal government makes test scores the basis for most school decisions. But Meier has plenty of firsthand experience on which to base her opinions.

When she started the Central Park East elementary school in East Harlem in 1974, the district had the lowest test scores in the city. she was convinced that by giving teachers more autonomy and creating a small, democratic community with high standards, she could achieve results. The school became a model in the small-schools movement and spawned other elementary schools as well as the Central Park East Secondary School, which sends 90 percent of its students to college.

Soft-spoken and unassuming, she gets a gleam in her eye and conviction in her voice when she talks about school reform and how America defines a good education.

"I just can't see asking for so little," she says, shaking her head as she thinks of what tests cover. "I never imagined [educators] could water down the meaning of 'high demands' that way."

At Mission Hill School, the K-8 public pilot school that Meier founded in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood several years ago, "high demands" means that middle school students present and defend their work twice a year in public exhibitions. In addition to knowing facts, they must show patterns and connections, explain why material is relevant, and demonstrate they understand a variety of viewpoints.

Meier bemoans the current thinking – that "the definition of being well-educated is your test score." The skills and qualities most resistant to being measured by tests, she says – initiative, for instance, or responsibility, or critical thinking – are the very skills schools should be emphasizing.

Ultimately, as the title of her book suggests, Meier wants schools that parents can trust. But this trust, she writes in the introduction, "is not based on blind faith. It is a hard-won, democratic trust in each other, tempered by healthy, active skepticism and a demand that trust be continually earned.... If there is faith involved in the kind of trust I have in mind, it is faith in the extraordinary drive and capacity of all children to learn and in the ability of ordinary adults to be powerful, active citizens in a democracy."

Sitting in her wide-open administration office at Mission Hill, where exchange among children, teachers, and parents is a daily occurrence, Meier shares other thoughts on the qualities of a good education – and why it won't come from the current test-based approach:

On the shortcomings of tests:

Tests are the least susceptible to being influenced by what schools do. It's not that schools can't do a lot, but tests are not the mechanisms for picking up what it is schools can add.

A school can enormously influence your feeling that you have knowledge that is important to other people and to the world. It can enormously influence your sense of responsibility for your ideas.... [In my experience, school] didn't make a big change in test scores, but it made an enormous change in these kids' lives.

On passive learning:

When Ted Sizer [an education reformer] wrote "Horace's Compromise," it was on the question of the passive culture of schools. Kids go through school and as long as they can pass courses or pass tests, they never have to show that they can do anything. So he developed this approach toward a portfolio assessment and having kids show their knowledge.

But we've gone the other way [in US public schools]. We've now made school an even more passive place, in which ... you could do 6 million things terribly, but if you've got good test scores, that's what we say is the measure.

On measuring learning vs. measuring knowledge:

It's not the high stakes even that I mind ..., but first we have to agree what we want to hold kids accountable for.

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