Trust parents? Give us good information
Too many school choice programs have a blind spot
As a parent, I support standardized tests.
First and foremost, I want to see my own child’s test scores. I want to know how they’re doing compared to state and national benchmarks. Of course I look at other sources of information as well, but the tests help me understand how my children are progressing academically.
My home state of Virginia has taken some important strides on providing state test results in a timely fashion, but too many states take their sweet time to share results with parents. When the results finally do come, they’re often loaded with jargon that hides their true signaling power. That’s an ongoing problem…
But there’s a second use case for test scores where public education is doing much better, and that is allowing parents to see how other children are doing. I don’t mean this in the privacy sense—I can’t (and don’t want to) see how any specific child is doing. But I do want to know how kids are doing at my local schools, in my district, across my state, and across the country.
At the most global level, it matters to me as an American citizen how our schools are doing. As a taxpayer, I care if my tax dollars are being spent well. As part of a community, I want my neighbors’ kids to be successful so they can go on to create new businesses, become doctors or nurses or firefighters so they can take care of me when I’m old, and continue to improve society generally.
Those purposes are all far off and incidental, but there’s also a more practical and urgent need. Namely, I want to know how kids who came before mine did at the schools that I’m considering sending my kids to. Before my kids started elementary school, I looked up how my neighborhood school was doing in reading and math. I wanted to know whether kids were learning and being successful academically. Now that my oldest child is in middle school, you can bet that I’ve looked up the graduation rates and test scores at my local high schools (not to mention other factors like course offerings and clubs, etc).
The point is, test scores have a lot of different purposes. And to make a well-informed choice, I need data and information. On this second front, public education is doing a pretty good job. I can go to state report cards or a number of privately-run ratings sites to find information about my options as a parent.
Which brings me to testing requirements under Education Savings Account (ESA) programs and other forms of school choice. Many of them include some form of testing requirement for parents to learn how their own child is doing, but the results are rarely standardized or reported by school. States are spending billions of dollars to subsidize private schools, and parents have no way to obtain accurate information about their potential options.
Texas, for instance, is on the verge of passing a bill that would provide parents with up to $11,500 to pick the private school of their choosing. This will be a big public investment in private schools and is projected to cost the state $1 billion in the first year after enactment and rise to $3.8 billion a year by 20230.
Put aside what you think about this idea for a moment and just put yourself in the shoes of a Texas parent. Wouldn’t you like to know more about whether your child should pursue one of these ESAs? And if so, which school would give them the best shot at getting a good education?
And this is where Texas’ ESA proposal (like similar ones in West Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, and every other state except for Indiana) falls down. The authors of these bills clearly understand the first purpose of testing. In Texas, the legislation would require participating programs to:
share with a parent the participating child ’s results on the assessment instrument, including, if available, the participating child ’s percentile rank. A child ’s results and rank on an assessment instrument administered under this section are confidential, are not subject to disclosure under Chapter 552, Government Code, and may only be shared as necessary to fulfill the requirements of this subchapter.
Again, this checks box number one, to tell parents how their own child is doing. But it explicitly limits the state from attempting to fulfill the second aspect, informing the public about their investments and providing parents with good information about the options available to them.
Well-functioning markets depend on good information, but many school choice bills are failing in that mission.