A plea to trust schools – not just tests

Do we want to hold them accountable for the periodic table of elements? I'm not objecting [to the idea] that while you're taking a chemistry course you need to know those things. But what I hold the school system accountable for ... is that I know how to learn chemistry. And that I can demonstrate that not only do I know how to learn, but if I were presented with a new problem in chemistry which I wasn't taught, I can show you how I'd go about learning it.

On whether tests can be improved:

If we were ever willing to have simple pass-fail tests – if we weren't interested in where people rank compared to other people – we probably could get better tests. But there's absolutely no evidence anyone wants to know that. They want to know where you stand in relation to other people. They want a rank order. And no, there is no way to have a rank-order test that's much different than what we have.

On money and schools:

Once you think test scores are the achievement measure, you can start proving that "money doesn't matter." At the high school I ran in New York, 90 percent of the kids graduated from high school and went on to college and did well in college. But their test scores didn't change much.

So when people say to me, "Well, more money doesn't help test scores," I say that's not the only measure. You didn't send your kid to a private school just because their test scores would go up. You sent them because they had wonderful art programs, because they had good discussions, because they taught your kid to write good essays, because they pushed your kid to think more deeply. None of which are picked up in the test. The extra measures that money offers kids – such as smaller class sizes – are not sensitive to test scores.

On accountability and school choice:

Having choice is a good mechanism [for holding schools accountable].... The wealthy always have had those choices. And they've used those choices to get their kids in schools that they thought were accountable – [but they didn't judge schools] by their test scores.

We trusted the rich to be able to judgewhether a school is right for them. So I think the rest of the public who can't afford fancy private schools should have a range of choices and opportunities to think about what they mean by a good school.

On prescribing education:

Even a nutritionist feels it's hard to know what's scientifically true. But we don't dictate for the entire population what they will and will not be allowed to eat. So here we're [dealing with] education, which is nowhere near as easy to come to scientific conclusions about, and yet the Bush administration is saying, without a lot of complaint from Democrats, that we know which is the best reading program. And we not only know which is the best approach to reading, but we actually know which of the many commercial programs is best, and that's what we're going to push, and you only get federal money if you adopt one of those approaches to reading.

We keep saying to the schools, We don't trust you to do anything. So what we're saying to kids is: The grownups in your life – your parents and your teachers and the adults you know – are not trusted by society. But this test will tell us whether you know how to read.

On an encouraging trend:

[There is a resurging] interest in small schools. Part of it came out of a [concern for] sheer physical safety, but I'm hoping that [small-school advocates] are also attached to the idea that kids and grownups have to have relationships. There has to be a reconnection between generations.... The closer [kids] get to being grownups, the less likely they are to know any grownups.

On kids who don't test well:

We just recently got the scores on [the state] writing test. I was startled by one particular girl who we think is the best writer in the school [and who scored low on the test]. How do I say this to her when she gets this score?

We had another girl who was one of the most brilliant students I ever taught. And she couldn't get into Brown because her SAT score was 890. They said if she couldget 900 they would consider her. She ended up going to Cornell, and she ended up at a great law school, and [now] she's a great lawyer.

We even had Princeton Review and Kaplan come in, and she was one of the kids who took the courses diligently. But she was from a low-income black family and the first kid to go to college in that family.

She could be president of the United States or a Supreme Court justice, she's so extraordinary. But ... there were other kids whose scores were 1300 or 1400 who didn't hold a candle to her.

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