With the historian’s critical eye, Diane Ravitch has documented the transformation of the meaning of  “school reform” over the past two decades in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.   The same words have come to mean something entirely different over the last twenty years, without notice from journalists or national leaders, such as the Council of State School Officers (CSSO).

In this new era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision-making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools. Whatever could not be measured did not count. It is ironic that a conservative Republican president was responsible for the largest expansion of federal control in the history of American education. It was likewise ironic that Democrats embraced market reforms and other initiatives that traditionally had been favored by Republicans (21).

In the decades preceding NCLB, national educational reform targeted disadvantaged populations through Title I, Early Childhood, special education, and bilingual education initiatives, seeking to integrate marginalized students into the mainstream.  Mainstreaming students does not always raise average test scores. They often enter the testing pool at the lower end and may have a negative impact on the average score. So the overall trends recorded by the NAEP in the last twenty years have been relatively flat.

Since NCLB, test scores have become the barometer of success in education, without much notice from the media. In a previous blog (“Figures Lie,” July 24), I observed how states, such as Massachusetts, Kentucky and Texas, used exclusions of students from NAEP writing assessments to enhance or mitigate the changes in their writing scores over nine years (1998 – 2007).  These states excluded special education students at twice the national average on 4th and 8th grade writing tests.  While these might be appropriate exclusions, they show how the concern for test scores affects the inclusion of students we have been trying to mainstream over the long term of educational reform.

Another radical shift in the operational meaning of “school reform” is what Ravitch called “punitive accountability.” In a lucid chapter “The Trouble with Accountability,” Ravitch thoroughly articulated the problems with test score validity and concluded with the appalling consequences of inadequate performance.

In the NCLB era, when the ultimate penalty for a low-performing school was to close it, punitive accountability achieved a certain luster, at least among the media and politicians. Politicians and non-educator superintendents boasted of how many schools they had shuttered.  Their boasts won them headlines for “getting tough” and cracking down on bad schools. But closing a school is punitive accountability, which should happen only in the most extreme cases, when a school is beyond help (165).

Ravitch also cited examples of “positive accountability,” which run counter to this trend, particularly in New York (1996) and Atlanta (2009).  Superintendent Beverly Hall in Atlanta  “raised the quality of the professional staff by careful hiring, ‘ meaningful evaluations, and consistent job-embedded professional development'”  (165). She set accountability targets for every school and financially rewarded the entire staff of the school, when it reached 70 per cent of its targets.  And ultimately Atlanta was the only one of eleven urban districts studied by NAEP between 2003 and 2007 “to show significant progress in both reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grades” (165).

The current federal administration has done nothing to change the dialog about “school reform.”  Test scores continue to be the significant barometer of success, even to linking teacher evaluations to the scores of their students.  The closing of schools has been acclaimed by the Secretary of Education. The dominant metaphor for school success is a “Race to the Top,” suggesting there will a host of losers.  None of this suggests a concern with inclusion and support for the disadvantaged in our schools.

To see the language of school reform become a “race to the top” is disheartening to any who have participated in school reform for more than the last decade.  The metaphor reveals what school reform has become: a competition based on highly suspect measurements.  The losers will again be representative of the disadvantaged and under-served students in our public schools. And the winners will be rewarded for managing the most students across a shifting and ill-defined line called “proficiency.”