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In 2003, the New Jersey Department of Education released a white paper, “New Jersey Special Review Assessment,” which called for among other things, an end to Special Review Assessment (SRA) alternate graduation routes. The Department summarized all of its objective thus:
The elimination of the SRA; the creation of expanded remedial opportunities for students failing the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA); the development of an appeal procedure; and the award of a differentiated diploma for students who fail to achieve proficiency on the HSPA, but who do meet other graduation and attendance criteria.
As a consequence of this effort to be rid of the SRA, there are now two instruments of alternate assessment, the HSPA is the first level, considered by some to be a “middle school” level exam, and the SRA, which never went away.
The Installment of the HSPA has had little effect as 60 percent of those who take it are unable to meet the standard and therefore must take the SRA. When the NJDOE’s report was released in 2003, the graduation rate, according to Education Week’s annual Diplomas Count report, was 84.8 percent. New Jersey’s has since continued to top graduation rates, 82.5 in 2004, 83.3 in 2005, 82.1 in 2006. The current year’s Diploma’s Count report is based on 2006 data.
Sharing the top of the list with New Jersey, in ranked order: New Jersey (82.1), Wisconsin (81.7), Iowa (80.7), and Minnesota (79.2). The change in graduation rates for each state from 2000 to 2006 were: Wisconsin (+3.5), Iowa (+2.0), Minnesota (+0.3), and New Jersey (-1.3). New Jersey, despite being ranked first in high school graduation, actually enjoyed a higher rate of graduation in 2005.
Though New Jersey’s graduation rates over this period reflect a decline of -1.3, the rate has been relatively constant, hovering around 80 percentage points for six years, despite the external strain of policy mandates like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which makes graduation more difficult for both students and teachers. The change in the other three states for this period can be described in each case as a modest increase, very modest in Minnesota.
New Jersey for six years has been producing more high school graduates than the three other states. According to Census Bureau data, higher education enrollment, which was estimated to be around 470,302 in 2000, has increased by 85,761 students to 556,063 in 2007. That’s a 15% increase in higher education enrollment. Comparing New Jersey’s higher education enrollment data to that of the other three states reveals the following ranking: MN (+18%) WI (+17%) NJ (+15%) IA (+14%) . Though New Jersey has the highest high school graduation rate among the three other states, New Jersey’s is only third highest increase in college enrollment during the period in question. Third highest is nothing to scoff at but why not first?
We would like the data to suggest that New Jersey’s alternate assessment is churning out high school graduates who lack the skills to move on to higher education. However, New Jersey does not seem to be doing so bad – though enrollment in New Jersey colleges is growing at a lower rate than it is in two of the other three states. Should New Jerseyans continue to ask questions about the SRA and what alternate graduation routes are doing to New Jersey’s future workforce? Perhaps.
According to some, more New Jerseyans are going out of state for college. Also, there are a greater number of special needs students like immigrants since 2000. This is something like an account proposed in the fall of last year by the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities (NJASC). NJASC at that time placed the blame for the supposed “brain drain” on the State of New Jersey for underfunding higher education and playing a part in making our higher education institutions unattractive for in-state students. But what about the effect of alternate routes on New Jersey’s future workforce? The immigration account holds a bit of weight, though when we examine the increase in the approximate number of high-school enrolled students during the period in question there has been very little, about 37, 437.
The other three states have enjoyed steady, though modest, increases in the high school graduation rates since the reinvention of The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB. Yet, we cannot be certain that just because New Jersey’s college enrollment is 1-3% lower, students in those states are performing better than students in New Jersey. For instance, all four states, due to the testing mandates of NCLB, require students to take a kind of exit exam. And all four states now have alternate assessments in place. Two of the four states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, make explicit on their education department websites that alternate assessments are in place for students with disabilities. Though each of the other states now have alternate assessments in place, until recently New Jersey was alone in the practice of alternate assessment. Indeed, as recent as 2002, many states were without exit exams much less alternate exit exams. And in the rush to comply, many states have erected both with relative simultaneity. The institution of these standards occurred during the time span from which the enrollment data was gathered. Consequently, the effect of alternate routes on college enrollment in the three other states discussed may not yet be reflected in the survey data. For New Jersey, however, the effect would show in the data.
In all of this, a few questions persist. To what degree have Minnesota’s and New Jersey’s enrollment percentages been affected by the lack alternate routes? And how would New Jersey’s enrollment percentages look if alternate routes were not available. How high school is a function of higher education in New Jersey requires deeper investigation.
New Jersey Graduation Rate Tables:
| 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | Change | |
| WI | 78.1 | 78.9 | 80.6 | 77.3 | 80.5 | 81.7 | 3.5 |
| IA | 78.7 | 79.1 | 82.7 | 81.1 | 82.8 | 80.7 | 2.0 |
| MN | 78.9 | 78.7 | 78.6 | 78.7 | 78.1 | 79.2 | 0.3 |
| NJ | 83.4 | 84.9 | 84.8 | 82.5 | 83.3 | 82.1 | -1.3 |
| 3-Year Averages | New Jersey’s Higher Education Enrollment |
| 2000 | 470,302 |
| 2004-07 | 556,063 |
| Change | 85,761 (+15%) |
| State | Change in College Enrollment |
| MN | +18% |
| WI | +17% |
| NJ | +15% |
| IA | +14% |
Released today, a Thomas Fordham Institute report, “The Accountability Illusion” selects, in the Institute’s own words, “36 real schools from around the nation (half elementary, half middle)— schools that vary by size, achievement, diversity, and so on—and determin[es] which of them would or would not make AYP [average yearly progress] when evaluated under each state’s accountability rules. In other words, if a particular school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to North Dakota, or Ohio, or Texas, would that same school also make AYP there?” The smart little report found that, “Although schools are being told that they need to improve student achievement in order to make AYP under the law, the truth is that many would fare better if they were just allowed to move across state lines.” The AP in, “Study: No Child Standards Vary Widely from State to State” quotes new EdSec Arne Duncan who said, “the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn’t make sense, […] A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it’s from.” AP goes on to mention that the way to make one “goal post” for all 50 states is open: “in the newly enacted economic stimulus bill, there is a $5 billion incentive fund for Duncan to reward states for, among other things, boosting the quality of standards and state tests.” “Quality” and “uniformity” in 50 states is tough. How will they do it? Well, AP adds, states are starting non-profits devoted to the task of developing these common measures of achievement. Ok, that’s fine. But no one is talking about what that should be. The only common attribute of the way this accountability system works is the absurd approach. Let’s set common standards for a really good education and just assume that we’ve already cracked the $5 billion question: what is an education?
Some of history’s greatest thinkers have spent their lives scratching their heads about that one. Those like Plato, Aristotle, John Dewey, and Robert Maynard Hutchins were most adamant about the ultimate propose of education or education as a means to some final societal or governmental end. In all of this talk about standards, parents seem to be the only ones scratching their heads.
It doesn’t seem like many people are taking the time to ponder the purpose of education but instead, and Dewey warned about this, they proceed with progress as a headless concept, toward some newer progressive education without considering the true end of progress. Math is good, let’s have more of that. Science is good, let’s give it more money. For quite a while, the object of education has been to increase our TIMSS or raise SAT scores nationally. No one has considered the actual effects of rigorously tuning millions of children to a collection of multiple choice questions.
In the spirit of thinkers like Dewey who supposed a lack of stimulus was the education best suited dictatorship, I would like here to wonder: is there some bizarre societal effect or organization produced by training kids to think only through the negative prism of elimination? There have been studies that suggest that multiple choice exams in high frequencies inhibit critical thinking by conditioning testers to confine their thoughts to a finite number of answers. The underlying idea is that there is one answer an one answer only. There are no rewards for coining unknown answers because, for one thing, how would you quantify a suitable reward on a standardized test for an answer that not unknown to the test makers? Children who coin things experience immediate negative stimulus, shame from their higher achieving peers and teachers and, in their adult lives, lowered earnings and social status.
The important question, the one that those important education thinkers of the past might ask is: what does standardized testing in high frequencies do to the character of our government? Well, Mr. Hutchins, for example, once suggested that, should people lose the capacity to think for themselves, they would become poor deciders. Invoking the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, a tradition much older than Jefferson himself, Mr. Hutchins declared that if we are incapable, or too incompetent to rule ourselves we ought then to end the relatively young project of our universal suffrage and appoint a king. He famously said that Democracy, in this way, tends toward dictatorship.
Mr. Dewey once argued that a democratic and progressive society is one with fewer boundaries in which the greatest diversity of experience exists. He noted that democracy moves toward progress as part of its intrinsic nature and in a society of heavy class division, for instance, the rich will experience no pain and their culture, said Dewey, will be sterile, turning back in upon itself and generating nothing new as they become detached. They soon know nothing of physical reality. The poor, by contrast, will experience nothing but negative pleasure and pain in such a society. The experience of this latter group will be entirely a function of pain, a kind of experience which usually admits only sensory pleasures. Both kinds of experience, for Mr. Dewey, are incomplete and represent a kind of learning disability. Experience, for progress to happen, must be diverse and dialectical.
What then will our society look like when the effects of widespread standardized testing catch up in full force? As I have noted, standardized testing tends to restrict the creative imagination and to produce the illusion that either there are a finite number of answers or there is only one answer to every question: a, b, c; T or F. Further, citizens of, let’s call it bubble land, tend to believe that knowledge is a game of chance. If one does not know the answer at first, it can be obtained “analytically,” that is, by process of elimination. It is a dark day for thinking and for philosophy when analytic thinking becomes lopsided and synonymous with “process of elimination.” Most interesting about the citizens of bubble land is the fact that “analytic thinking” only occurs when some proctor has first bound some problem in 4 or 5 choices for them. Unfortunately for the bubble people, real problems, those of both mediocre existence and of higher order spheres, are not often shaped that way. Problems are rarely ever composed of perfect squares and circles. Instead, problems are most often pear shaped—as goes the expression.
Bubble people cannot formulate questions themselves; they can only answer questions that have been posited beforehand. Indeed, this makes Kant’s conjectures about knowledge look even grimmer for future human understanding. When Kant talked about the irritating limits of human reason, “reason” encompassed all things knowable in the universe and excluded only those things unknowable or outside our perception or fundamental set of premises. This situation is depressing enough when we consider the likely existence of things in the universe for which humans are not perceptually equipped to know. However, in a society wherein knowledge has been reduced to a small multiple of choices, the inventory of all things knowable will, unfortunately, all fit into the proctor’s handbook.
We can avoid the genesis of a race of bubble people. The standard of standardized testing was premised on the idea of equity, an equal education for all. We test this way because there are so many children, rather, there are so many parents, and each of them wants to know that each child is being taught equally—or that theirs is learning better than the others. Parents check pools of standardized testing scores on the same screen where they count their blog hits. The bubbling method is only really a matter of expedience for parents and educators.
We do not teach great books because, as Dewey told us, great books are filled with stuffy old ideas and the study of dusty old ideas only perpetuates the same stuffy old ideas. It’s is one of those vicious cycles. It’s Kantian, really. There is no room for growth or for new tradition, quoth the education god: we need diversity of experience. And anyway, said Dewey, children are too immature to learn about Aristotle’s categorical notion of friendship or, to decode the nuances of Swift’s sociological description of the Big Enders. I think he might be right.
The progress approach didn’t work and for quite a number of years children ran amok as their experience degraded inevitably into hedonism and mischief. The progressive education was traded for a moderate approach. If we skip ahead to the present we find that the curriculum has changed, though the children are still running amok. Rather than the great books, we now teach the shadows of great books based on bullet points extracted by experts who have actually learned the material—usually in private schools. Experts reduce the knowledge into pill form and children are asked to find it in a labyrinth of dubious turns. Indeed, it looks as if it was not Mr. Dewey or Mr. Hutchins, but Mr. Skinner who finally won the education battle.
Many people, including parents and policy makers, seem to believe that is that there is such thing as a best education, an education of perennial truths. This is not the case. What we have is an education system without a tenable education mission. Our educational goals have been notoriously lofty and inarticulate. We believe that education should prepare children for the 21st century; prepare children for the labor force; prepare children to compete in the global community. Then we find the subjects that do these things and throw money at them. Some of us see this and think that throwing money will not teach children. Tsk, these people say, that’s not how children are educated. They are not wrong to say so. Then, moronically, these people declare that individual spending like vouchers rather than pooled spending, throwing the money, is what educates children. Taken alone, that’s a very simple and negligent strategy. What is wrong with our current ideas of education is that education is not always a vertical category. It is, however, always a horizontal category. That is, education is political, but never perennial.
Education cannot be used to compete with other nations in an attempt to measure whose children are more capable of knowing and transmitting eternal truths. If that were possible, then we would be at the final stages of what has been called globalization. We are not, that is to say, we do not yet share one political reality with the rest of the world. We do not yet share a consensus view of which truths are eternal and which are contingent. Education always has an agenda. When educators do not choose an agenda, the agenda is chaos. Chaos is, in a sense, a patchwork of things.
In New Jersey, the Fordham Institute study found the following:
• New Jersey schools were apparently more rigorous as “15 of 18 elementary schools in [the] sample failed to make AYP in 2008 under New Jersey’s accountability system.”
• Elementary schools in 15 states that satisfied AYP requirements beat elementary schools in New Jersey that also met AYP requirements: “New Jersey ties with 4 other states that each have 3 elementary schools making AYP.”
• “The performance of individual subgroups” of New Jersey’s students with disabilities cause scores to lower in schools that might otherwise meet AYP requirements. Most interesting, “as is the case in other states, schools with fewer subgroups attain AYP more easily in New Jersey than schools with more subgroups, even when their average student performance is lower. In other words, schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP.”
• “Every single elementary school with limited English proficient and SWD subgroups failed to make AYP, in part because these students did not meet the state’s targets in reading.”
• “New Jersey falls near the middle of the state distribution in terms of the number of schools that make AYP. One particularly interesting thing about New Jersey is that a large group of Hispanic/Latino, African American, and low-income students met their targets in math. […]However, New Jersey’s definitions of proficiency generally ranked below average compared with the standards set by the other states, especially in grades 3-5 math. This likely accounts for the higher pass rate for traditionally disadvantaged groups.”
Most interesting was that “schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP” and also the last point about pass rates in New Jersey. Some people in New Jersey have suspected that our tendency to pass kids through the system by lowering our standards is responsible for our high graduation rates and, consequently, creates very soft graduation numbers. This may look good on the annual Quality Counts report, but it essentially leaves kids with less than an even substandard education. Lowering our standards is just another way of ejecting low scoring children from the system.
The worst thing about having no educational agenda is that ejected low scorers are being ejected merely because they cannot figure out the game and for no other reason. If they are not ejected and they matriculate through the system for several years, it is for the same reason. It’s actually pretty perverse. They are not being ejected because they have failed the test of citizenship—though for many children in our education system, citizenship is what, essentially, is at stake. When they are ejected, they are really being catapulted into a substandard citizenship to live as substandard citizens. Though education has forgotten the purpose of education, but the streets of our country have not.
The report admits that New Jersey is not the only guilty party when it comes to the way some groups of children are processed:
Even if actual participation guidelines for English language learners and students with disabilities are more generous under the current state assessment system, doesn’t the massive failure of these students to meet New Jersey’s targets indicate that a new approach is needed for holding schools accountable for the performance of these students? Yes, schools should redouble their efforts to boost achievement for ELL students and students with disabilities, as for other students, but when almost no school is able to meet the goal, perhaps that indicates that the goal is unrealistic. These will be critical considerations for Congress as it takes up NCLB re-authorization in the future.
Here’s On Voting’s opinion: Teaching math and science are good. Let’s teach them and leave it at that. We’ll audit or test our teachers to make sure they are teaching math and science—add civics and English, though, at equal or greater weights. Teaching is where we should be most rigorous.
I echo the words of Mr. Hutchins of the 1930s when he said that America still lacks a teaching profession. If becoming a teacher were more like becoming a doctor a lawyer or president of the United States, we might then be more inclined to trust what goes on in America’s classrooms. After all, we don’t rate or close hospitals based simply on how many patients are murdered each year by mistreatment—though sadly, as the medical profession becomes more revenue driven and more easily gamed, some people are considering such measures.
If ever we take seriously the original ends of our education system, public opinion would be the best place to begin our search for an ideal curriculum—and the curriculum is where all of our standards should begin, rather than end. If the public, you say, is far too ignorant to decide what its children ought to be learning, consider that to be a very telling fact about the present rulers of this country. Public hearings and a frequent public referendum for curriculum in each state would not only ensure that children are learning what they ought to but it would garner the direct involvement of parents in ensuring the educational outcomes. Also, parents are less likely to say that they dislike how their children are being taught. It’s just an idea. If you don’t like it, then let us reconsider the monarchy.
Perhaps there’s another option. As the end has always been western education, we might consider resuming our system of traditional education as Mr. Hutchins nearly did. Mr. Hutchins called this perennialism because the great books of western civilization–as he saw it–were perennially important and chock full of eternal truths. I disagree about their eternality, though not about the idea that they successfully transmit truths about western culture. If your end is western tradition—AND IT HAS NOT EVER NOT BEEN—then the great books would be a great curriculum. Kind of a tautology isn’t it. Perhaps it is time to realize the political, rather than the perennial, import of great books.
Popular Sovereignty 