Testing Requirements Hurt Choice

In last week’s debate over the wisdom of requiring choice students to take state tests, a few points deserve greater emphasis.  First, testing requirements hurt choice because test results fail to capture most of the benefits produced by choice schools.  As Collin Hitt’s piece persuasively argued, a series of rigorous studies have found large long-term benefits for students able to attend schools of choice even when short-term test results show little or no benefit.  Those studies show that charter and private choice schools cause students to graduate high school and go to college at much higher rates.  Those students go to more competitive universities at much higher rates.  And choice causes those students to enjoy much higher salaries later in life.  But if you only looked at short-term test results for these students you would not have expected the magnitude of these benefits.

One (of the many) problems with imposing testing requirements on schools of choice is that it highlights a measure of performance that grossly under-states the benefits of choice.  Given the precarious political position of choice programs, highlighting a measure that severely under-states performance puts those programs in jeopardy.  I can understand why choice opponents favor testing requirements — since they want ammunition to shut choice down or regulate it into oblivion.  But why would choice supporters favor this?  It’s a huge mistake.

Second, despite the fact that state testing makes choice schools look worse than they really are, and despite the lack of evidence that state testing requirements improve outcomes or ensure quality (as they largely acknowledge in an earlier report, “The Proficiency Illusion”), Mike Petrilli continues to push for them because… well, because we’ve got to do something:

Bad schools happen. They happen in the public sector, the charter sector, and, yes, the private sector. And since education is a “public good” as well as a “private good”—because kids’ lives literally hang in the balance and so does the future of the society whose taxpayers are underwriting these costs—we can’t just look the other way….

But the answer cannot be “let the market figure it out.” Because it hasn’t, and it won’t—and somebody must.

Of course, doing something that is ineffective or counter-productive may be worse than doing nothing.  If state testing requirements don’t necessarily make schools better and fail to capture the bulk of the benefits choice schools are producing, then imposing state testing requirements on choice schools just to do something is a really bad idea.  In an effort to prevent all bad things from happening, Fordham may ensure that more bad things will happen.

Fordham’s argument that we need to do something reminds me of the brilliant song Jason Segel wrote for the fictional band, Aldous Snow and the Infant Sorrow, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall – appropriately titled “We’ve Got to Do Something!”  As he is grabbing a cane from a blind man in the music video Aldous (Russell Brand) sings:

You gotta do something,
We gotta do something,
Sometimes I sit in my room and I don’t know what to do,
but we’ve gotta do something!

…and if I was in Government,
Then I’d Government things much more differentlier,
because it ain’t the best way to government things,

– Jay P. Greene

Last Updated

NEWSLETTER

Notify Me When Education Next

Posts a Big Story

Business + Editorial Office

Program on Education Policy and Governance
Harvard Kennedy School
79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone (617) 496-5488
Fax (617) 496-4428
Email Education_Next@hks.harvard.edu

For subscription service to the printed journal
Phone (617) 496-5488
Email subscriptions@educationnext.org

Copyright © 2024 President & Fellows of Harvard College