To Fix Our Schools, Let’s First Fix Our Testing System

It often seems that one of the reasons South Carolina ranks last among the states in student achievement, as measured by SAT scores and the state graduation rate, is because our education officials are so preoccupied with matters that relate only marginally to the academic success of students in the classroom.

Under an accountability plan that our state education leaders negotiated with the federal government, in return for federal funds under The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, not a single school district in South Carolina met federal yearly progress targets last school year. Furthermore, only 37 percent of schools in the state made “adequate yearly progress” toward the agreed-upon goal that all students will score proficient or higher in English, math and science by 2014. Even more disturbing, state education leaders have said that these numbers will only get worse.

Instead of devoting our full attention and all of our resources toward ensuring that every student achieves at his or her maximum ability, our state holds the “distinction” of being the only state in the nation to own and operate its own school bus fleet. Ours is also one of the few states in the nation that administers its own testing system that we’ve named the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT). This test diverts vast resources and attention from what should be the focus of our educational establishment, and by any standard it fails to provide timely and useful diagnostic information that would actually allow teachers to better understand and address student performance.

Most states purchase commercially available achievement tests from companies with the professional and scientific expertise to administer tests customized to individual state standards. Unlike those national achievement tests that provide diagnostic information about individual students within a few days, our PACT results are only available long after students have moved on to another grade. Also, the PACT does not provide diagnostic information about individual students, nor does it allow us to compare our students’ achievement with their regional and national peers.

In recent years we have spent approximately $65 per-student administering the PACT, while most states obtain far more useful information for under $10 per-student. In addition to many hidden costs of administering the PACT, such as field-testing possible questions, our state spends over a half million dollars on salaries tied to the test, while districts are forced to additionally spend tens of millions of dollars to purchase the national diagnostic tests in order to obtain useful information about individual students.

Many dedicated teachers complain about the time lost in preparing for and administering tests. It is particularly unfortunate to waste valuable time preparing for and administering a test that does nothing to help us understand and address the education crisis in our state. It often seems that many of our state’s education leaders are more focused on hyping the results and masking the failures of the status quo than serving the teachers, families, and students in our state.

Before the crisis can be addressed and our education problems fixed, we need to implement a testing system better than the PACT that will allow us to diagnose the problems, great as they may be, and ensure that every child is receiving all the help he or she needs to realize his or her God-given potential.

To do justice to our students and their teachers and to focus our efforts where those efforts are needed, it’s time we turn over school bus operations to those who understand the transport business -- and its time we turn our student achievement testing over to those national companies that are expert in the field.

LET'S PUT THE CHILDREN FIRST

The South Carolina General Assembly has convened this month amid reports that our legislators will be addressing the way education is funded in our state. After forty years of “fixing” South Carolina’s schools, let’s hope they will seize the opportunity to think comprehensively and to truly change the culture in our school districts where half of all students entering high school drop out, and so many of those who remain chronically fail.

One of the advantages of South Carolina’s last-in-the-nation performance in education is that it provides the political impetus to think “outside the box.” Too often our goals in education, while well-intentioned, have been far too modest. For example, a former State education leader pledged that our State’s education performance would eventually rank among the upper half of states. But what does it mean to rank among the top 25 states, when our nation’s performance in math, reading and science ranks at the bottom of the world’s industrialized nations? Aren’t we aiming too low?

We need to acknowledge that while our legislators can provide powerful incentives for excellence, money alone is not the answer to what ails schools, including those in South Carolina. This has been proven many times, but nowhere as dramatically as in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1985 a federal district judge, concerned about segregation and low-performance among minority students, ordered the state and the Kansas City school district to spend nearly $2 billion over 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms. The money on a per-pupil basis was higher than any of the 280 largest districts in the country.

But rather than focusing on the individual needs of students and intensive tutoring to remediate problems, the money bought higher salaries, 15 new schools, an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a 25 acre wildlife sanctuary and zoo, a robotics lab, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, field trips to Mexico and Senegal, and taxis to replace school busses. After twelve years, test scores were no higher and there was more, not less, racial segregation.

In South Carolina some of our districts with the highest per-student spending have highly competitive administrative salaries, comfortable and modern district offices, and shameful school facilities for teachers and students. As with most bureaucracies, when money is targeted at organizational framework, there is a tendency for administrators to spend money on themselves first, and what little remains trickles down to teachers and students in the classroom. Our current system also results in many rules and regulations that tie the hands of principals and teachers. These rules and regulations result in a lot of uniformity among schools, but often don’t encourage excellence.

To ensure that education spending is directed to the classroom, where it is needed, many are proposing a concept called Weighted Student Funding. This is a per-student, rather than a per-district, approach where all students are assigned a foundational, or base, educational dollar value. That value is “weighted” higher, if need be, based on the relative difficulty to educate the student. In this way, economically disadvantaged and Special Education students would receive a greater amount to address their needs.

Once an appropriate amount of educational aid is assigned to a pupil, the student carries that money to his or her school directly, in the form of “real dollars,” and school-based budgeting is done annually based upon the total generated by all students who attend that school. With students free to choose among an array of schools, including charter schools, this mode of funding encourages excellence because schools are accountable to families for their performance, rather than merely to administrators for compliance with rules and regulations.

Many of South Carolina’s dedicated teachers recognize what needs to be done to improve the performance of their students, but their hands are tied by a command and control system that looks more like a totalitarian regime than the United States of America.

Even our students recognize the problems. I recently received student essays from a Midlands area high school in which one student concedes that “the only way for a district to get higher test scores is by rigorously challenging students in its schools.” The same student acknowledges the problem of social promotion, while another states that “our government is putting the money into the hands of irresponsible leaders who care more about themselves than helping our state get out of the position that it is in.”

By shifting funding from large, impersonal district bureaucracies to principals, teachers, and students, we can ensure that our education tax dollars are being used where most South Carolinians want them used, for the benefit of our children.

Every year in the life of a child is precious, and parents and their children do not have five or ten years for our Legislature to address the crisis that currently exists in our schools. Let’s encourage our legislators to put aside half measures and compromises and instead ensure that every family in our state has access to schools that work for children, and not just for those who oversee them.