As an advocate for school choice, I should be happy.
Last month, two new studies of statewide voucher programs in Indiana and Louisiana all but eliminated the common anti-choice claim that voucher students don’t measure up when it comes to test scores.
It’s true that preliminary results in both states found negative impacts on standardized test scores in the first two years that students used a voucher, but the updated results revealed that after three or four years, students who enrolled in the voucher programs perform as well or better than their non-voucher peers.
These results align with more than a dozen prior random-assignment studies that found vouchers produced neutral-to-positive effects on test scores, along with increased rates of high school graduation and college matriculation.
And yet, the latest results leave me uneasy—not because of what they found but because of what they overlook.
Both Indiana and Louisiana mandate that private schools administer the state’s standardized test in order to be eligible to receive voucher students. The problem is that when politicians mandate a specific test and attach carrots and sticks, they can distort what and how schools teach.
Over-emphasis on standardized testing can narrow the curriculum. Several studies have shown that when schools are rewarded or punished based on math and reading scores, they tend to divert time and resources to those subjects and away from others.
For example, the Center on Education Policy found that in the first five years after states began implementing the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, approximately 62 percent of elementary district schools reported increasing the amount of time spent on English language arts and/or math instruction, and 44 percent reported decreasing time spent on social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch, or recess.
Moreover, even within those subjects, standardized tests create tremendous pressure to focus narrowly on tested concepts. This incentive to “teach to the test” can result in a de facto curriculum.
For example, if a school had been teaching math concepts A, B, and C in grade 7, but the new state test was going to cover concepts X, Y, and Z, the school would almost certainly drop the former in favor of the latter, even if the math teachers believe that the original curriculum and sequencing were superior. Keeping the original curriculum would put their students at a disadvantage on the state test vis-à-vis students at other schools that had aligned their curriculum to the test.
This standardization might make sense in a world in which there was one right way to teach math, or at least one right order to teach math concepts, but that is not the world we live in.
These might be trade-offs worth making if there were strong evidence that the actions schools take to boost test scores also produce improvements in later life outcomes such as graduating high school, going to college, getting a decent job and so on.
However, it’s unclear whether high-stakes standardized tests actually serve their intended purpose. As Professor Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas has pointed out, there is an increasing disconnect in the research literature between changing performance on standardized tests and later life outcomes.
Even more fundamentally, test scores do not (indeed, cannot) capture the diverse goals and priorities of families because tests are limited only to metrics that are more or less objectively measurable: namely, math and reading. But parents value much more than scores – they want safe classrooms, small class sizes, classroom discipline, religious education, teachers who instill a love of learning, high levels of high school completion and evidence of post-secondary success, a greater sense of community, and more.
Attempts to impose test-based accountability can be counterproductive. If a state revokes a school’s eligibility to receive voucher students based on the school’s average test scores despite its performance in those other areas, then policymakers have, at best, eliminated a family’s least-bad alternative, and they may well have eliminated an alternative that is superior overall.
If we want a more effective and holistic approach to holding education providers accountable, we need to put parents in the driver’s seat. That means empowering parents to choose their child’s school through vouchers, education savings accounts, charter schools, inter-district choice and other mechanisms—and equipping them with the information needed to choose wisely.
Standardized test scores can play a valuable role, but rather than mandating a single test and imposing bureaucratic rewards and sanctions, states should allow public and private schools to choose among the numerous nationally norm-referenced tests, like the California Achievement Test or Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Schools could select tests that are better aligned to their own curriculum and parents could factor in their scores among other relevant information when selecting a school.
The latest voucher studies should be encouraging to advocates of educational choice, but we should be careful not to take the wrong lessons from them. Test scores can be useful in helping parents make informed choices, but their ability to choose should not be predicated on test scores.
Jason Bedrick (@JasonBedrick) is director of policy at EdChoice.
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