A different path for education reform

Recent readings about education reform and conversations with teachers have convinced me that the current emphasis on high-stakes testing is misguided, and that education reform as we know it is more about enriching for-profit educational testing and curriculum companies and privileged charter school networks than about strengthening public education. That's not to say that national standards for what children should know are a bad thing, but that the current punitive improve-scores-or-die regime creates all kinds of perverse incentives for a system ill-equipped to meet those standards.

An article in the current issues of Foreign Affairs, Why American Education Fails and How Lessons from Abroad Could Improve It, by Jal Mehta of Harvard, charts an alternate course that's in line with my longstanding sense, based in part on my experience as a parent, of what's wrong with our current system. While I have some caveats, three of Mehta's core premises seem to me to get at the heart of the problem:

1) You can't 'raise the bar' for students without first raising it for prospective teachers:

Chait all wet on high-stakes testing

Jonathan Chait has been a critic of the perverse incentives that distort our healthcare delivery system.  But he is willfully oblivious to the perverse incentives created by overemphasis on high-stakes testing in public school systems. 

Here's his reaction to the Atlanta cheating scandal, in which former Superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other 34 teachers, principals and administrators were indicted on allegations that they “conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores”:

[Eugene Robinson's] factual premise — that connecting teacher and principal incentives to student achievement leads to more cheating — is probably true. Is this a reason to get rid of incentives? No, it isn’t.