Looking at some school improvement “miracles”

by David Safier

Diane Ravitch is an education scholar who supported No Child Left Behind until she saw its failings and potential destructiveness and changed her tune. Today she penned an op ed in the NY Times looking at some of the school "miracles" touted by both conservatives and the Obama administration and finding the facts don't corroborate the miracle.

NOTE: I sometimes sound like an anti-education cynic when I debunk these claims of great leaps in school achievement, like I glory in schools' failures. I would love to believe them if they were true. I would also love to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy — and, what the hell, that Elvis is alive and hanging out with Jim Morrison. But to promote educational fictions is destructive, because it leads to the promotion of false "solutions" which often do more harm than good.

Ravitch looked at a handful of "miracle schools" and gave some stats that make things look less miraculous.

• "In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama hailed the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, where the first senior class had a graduation rate of 97 percent." Behind Randolph's graduation rate is the fact that only 21% of middle schoolers were tested as proficient or advanced in math and 10% met science standards. Sadly, this is an improvement over past performance, but it puts the "graduation miracle" in its more sober, less encouraging context.
• "Education Secretary Arne Duncan sang the praises of an all-male, largely black charter school in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, Urban Prep Academy, which replaced a high school deemed a failure." But state records have only 17% of the students passing state tests "compared to 64 percent in the low-performing Chicago public school district." Again, the results fall far short of Duncan's effusive praise.
• "Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan joined Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, to laud the transformation of Miami Central Senior High School." Apparently, things have improved at the school, but here's some context: "[I]n math, it ranks 430th out of 469 high schools in Florida. Only 56 percent of its students meet state math standards, and only 16 percent met state reading standards."

If, instead of cherry-picking a stat that inflates a school's success, the cheerleaders would be more honest about the modest successes, that would be fine. But the inflated speechifying leaves visions of sugar-plums dancing in people's heads, implying these schools have jumped from the bottom of the heap to the top, or at least have reached the middle of the pack. (And yes, I'm criticizing Obama and Duncan, who have sipped the conservative educational Kool-Aid and are enabling people who are hell bent on privatizing our public school system, not increasing educational quality for all students.)

Pulling out a few anecdotes from a few schools whose dismal student achievement has risen a few points to a slightly less dismal level is hardly an indication those schools represent a strategy we should follow. And it absolutely doesn't show, as conservatives maintain, that schools working alone can make a consistent, significant difference in correcting societal problems caused by generations of poverty and, in many cases, racial and ethnic discrimination.