Most people want to believe the best about America’s schools. In fact, traditional government schools are about as sacred and wholesome as motherhood and apple pie. But when does confidence in government schools become blind (and unwarranted) faith? Several recent articles suggest that we don’t have full clarity when it comes to the performance of our schools, namely because the facts we’re getting aren’t always the right ones. Increasingly, schools are sacrificing truth on the altar of “spin.”
Recently, the Charlotte Observer published a three-part series on school violence. Other media outlets, parents, and students have long pointed to the school discipline problems in the Charlotte Mecklenburg schools, saying they were worse than reported. At long last, the Observer‘s report featured evidence too incriminating for the CMS School Board to ignore. The School Board member who chairs the district’s Safety Committee stated, “The light has been shined on CMS, and now we can see where the dirt is.” It’s unfortunate that it took a media outlet, rather than a school official, to “shine the light” on this issue. Whatever happened to internal quality controls?
Unfortunately, school violence seems to be one of many areas where school officials are shading the facts. Lisa Snell, director of the Reason Foundation’s education program, suggests in a recent article that school officials regularly “distort the data” and “game the system.” While the amount of education data the public receives is at an all-time high (thanks to reporting requirements from No Child Left Behind), the accuracy of this data is pretty dismal in many cases. Officials are inflating graduation rates, sweeping testing irregularities under the rug, and lowering proficiency standards.
In fact, a report by the Education Trust singles out North Carolina for improper reporting of graduation rates. “Graduation rate” in our state is defined not by the percentage of students who enter 9th grade and receive their diploma four years later, but rather by the percentage of graduates who received their diploma in four years or less. The fine print: dropouts are completely excluded from calculations. Not surprisingly, North Carolina has the greatest discrepancy of all of the states between self-reporting of graduation rates and federal data.
This week, North Carolina released results from the state writing test, revealing that fewer than half of students in grades four, seven, and ten received passing scores. But even though the scores on the state test are embarrassingly low, our writing scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are lower still. Clearly, there is an unbridgeable gulf between how state administrators and NAEP officials define “proficiency” − yet another example of how hard it has become to determine whether students can actually read, write, or do math.
When it comes to how students are doing, parents and taxpayers ought to get the full, unvarnished truth. How else will we know what works and what doesn’t? We would be wise to heed the words of politician William Proxmire: “Sunlight remains the world’s best disinfectant.” If we truly want to clean up our schools − sweeping out violence, poor performance, and high dropout rates − then we need to “shine the light” into our dark pockets of failure. Then, and only then, will we be able to begin the hard work of correcting our mistakes and turning schools around.