The New York Times’ Sunday Dialogue this week raises the question: Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

The Common Core Standards have been praised, maligned and scrutinized, but mostly they have been mythologized as the solution to academic mediocrity. This comes from a business-model of product control. If you raise the quality standards, the product will improve.

The dangerous inference of this model is that testing controls the quality of students graduating from our schools.  To anyone confounded by the problem of mediocrity in the public schools, this is a seductive model, and it has driven school reform for at least fifteen years.

Rather than treating students as products, we should treat them as patients, not because they are sick, but because the decisions we make regarding their education are as complex as medical care, not as simplistic as product control.

The standardized test is the equivalent of taking a patient’s temperature: it can tell us if something is wrong, but not what. It is a crude instrument of screening. What does the doctor do with raw information? She checks it against other observations such as case history, other vital signs, and the patient’s reports.  The doctor makes a diagnosis and says, “Call me in a week, if the condition doesn’t improve.”  She does not use the body temperature to diagnose anything and the actual diagnosis is tentative.

We trust doctors because they are cautious, but methodical, in their diagnoses and, if we are good patients, we try to participate and make suggestions to be sure we are regaining our health. We understand that medicine has side-effects and diagnoses are tentative. Why do we assume testing of our minds is definitive and students are malleable products we can improve based on a single test score?

Cost. It costs a lot more to keep a patient healthy than to improve a product for the market.  Yet if we were asked if our children are more like products or patients, would any of us say they were “products”?

So we take the cheap way out: we test and fail and make our students better test-takers to improve their performance.  Or we use the tests to drive the curriculum by posting the standards on the board each day and focus our students’ attention on the product, instead of the process. That process is called “learning-how-to-learn.”

If we expect anything but the usual frustration with testing and failure, we have to invest more in our students. We need smaller classes, more collaboration of the professionals within the school, more professional development about how to use test results, more support of family literacy, and more collaboration between pre-service education and the schools.

The cost will be the hiring of more teachers, more hours in the school day for collaboration, more hours after school for professional development and family literacy, and more time devoted to training novice teachers in the schools.  Schools will become more like hospitals, where multiple measurements, collaboration across specialties, and a continuum of professional education from internship to residency has been the norm for decades.

Why would we ignore this superb model of professional practice operating right under our noses? Money. It’s cheaper to treat students like products than patients. We already spend too much medical care.

Yet, while the medical profession is learning to economize, education could be learning to assess and collaborate with the care and precision of medicine.  Eventually we will learn to control medical costs and to treat students with the dignity of primary care patients.

Unless we continue to treat students as products and their improvement as product control.