Genevieve Siegel-Hawley column: Commit to improve — not dismantle — public schools

“A Nation at Risk” sounded alarm over the state of the country’s public school system. Presenting test scores without important context like the rapid expansion of educational access for historically un- or underserved groups, the report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in our schools. It also marked a paradigm shift for U.S. education policy.

In the decades since “A Nation at Risk” was published, we have witnessed bipartisan retrenchment on school desegregation and other efforts to increase opportunities for all children to experience a well-resourced K-12 education. Instead of focusing on public school system inputs like funding and strong teachers, “A Nation at Risk” and its progeny center attention on outputs like standardized test scores.

Focusing narrowly on student test scores has constricted our vision for public education. Established during Reconstruction to prepare future citizens for informed participation in Virginia’s new — and, given the ensuing white backlash, short-lived — multiracial democracy, our state’s public schools serve collective as well as individual goals.

Integrated public schools can strengthen a backsliding, diversifying democracy by reducing social inequality and prejudice. They can forge collective understanding and bonds between children, providing them with tools to navigate increasingly complex challenges together. And public schools can advance the learning of individual students. Yet only the latter can (partly) be measured by a standardized test score.

Understanding how individual students perform on tests over time offers useful information for educators and families, highlighting areas of strength and opportunities for growth. But the uncertainties of test reliability and validity — layered onto racially separate and unequal K-12 schooling, and increasingly inequitable access to learning before kindergarten and outside of the school day — raise serious questions about decisions made on the basis of student test scores alone. Too often, those issues have been set aside in favor of a punitive school accountability regime.

The high stakes attached to test performance under the regime dominating U.S. education policy since “A Nation at Risk” stigmatizes and further segregates schools. A vicious cycle ensues when labels like “failing” or “lacks accreditation” are disproportionately applied to schools serving students with concentrated, unmet needs.

Absent crucial background like burgeoning, historically racialized educational inequities, accountability labels offer stakeholders a way to talk about schools in simplistic terms that blame students and schools for poor performance, without acknowledging the systems surrounding them.

The same labels also have shaped housing markets, used by school ratings and real estate companies to define communities and schools with lower scores as less desirable. Advantaged families avoid lower-performing schools, which fuels stratification — even as promised resources for struggling schools too often have failed to materialize.

High-stakes accountability does more than stigmatize students and schools for poor test performance; it also sanctions them with the threat of restructuring, takeover or closure. Punitive sanctions make it more difficult to attract and retain experienced educators in environments shaped by shame, instability and reductive teaching to the test.

For all of these reasons, Virginia policymakers have reached across the aisle in recent years to decrease the number of tests taken and to better understand student achievement growth. Proposed legislation and fledgling experiments point to even more alternatives.

Legislative ideas from North Carolina include holding schools accountable for racial and economic segregation, along with associated gaps in opportunity. Experimental ideas from the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment include multiple measures of school quality, with input from family and student surveys, as well as holistic portraits of student performance.

We could innovate in the direction of better communicating and addressing the complicated constellation of factors that influence student learning in public schools. We also could more closely examine the context for and claims made by “A Nation at Risk” and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 90-day report.

Each was written at the request of leaders committed to privatizing public schools, and each distorted real test trends with inappropriate data comparisons and ahistorical conclusions. What if the goal was not how to best assess public school performance but how to best erode confidence in public schools?

A way forward is to do both. We should question the cynical premise of reports designed to discredit public education, even as we strive to deeply comprehend how schools have fallen short as sites of learning, mobility and citizenship preparation. And then, for the sake of Virginia’s contemporary version of a multiracial democracy, we should commit to improving rather than dismantling our public system of education.