A few years back I was one of the education critics to be impressed with the work of William Sanders, a professor of statistics at the University of Tennessee, who advanced the idea of value added testing. At the root of this approach is the notion that the highest performing schools are not necessarily those that score highest on tests, but rather those that show the highest level of improvement in their individual students.
While a trustee of the State University of New York, I tried unsuccessfully, along with then-Provost Peter Salins, to institute value added testing on SUNY campuses, with a view toward pointing the way for other higher education institutions to follow suit.
Now the New York City Department of Education has adopted, but unfortunately muddied, this promising assessment methodology – in the course of creating school report cards that issue single letter grades and that are only in part based on the value added approach.
Writing in The New York Sun, Andrew Wolf explains how the city educrats have managed to compromise the this testing tool:
The value added concept, which could and should stand on its own, is [in the new city grading system] corrupted with a bagful of subjective adjustments, bonus points, and bureaucratic discretions. Once boiled down to the single familiar letter grade, we end up with nothing.
To make value added testing work requires appropriate testing devices. The tests [now administered] … are not designed to be used in this way. Entirely new tests, carefully calibrated to build one upon another, need to be used or created. So at its core the new system is a kludge.
Pinpointing with devastating accuracy the role of politics in this fiasco, and calling for (as I did at SUNY) external, objective parties to engage in measuring institutional performance, Wolf writes:
Finally, there’s the question of the city administering, grading, and evaluating the school system it itself runs. The legislature should insist on turning these functions over to an independent entity, one that would ensure that the conclusions are objective, not part of an enterprise whose goal includes advancing the political fortunes of whoever happens to be mayor.
One tends to despair that government can get much of anything right in its management of education. It’s enough to make one join Wolf in adopting Grover Norquist’s adage (in Wolf’s words) “that the only way to restrain government is to starve it.”