Kevin Carey

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released a plan for K-12 education. It is expansive and expensive, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for impoverished children, aggressive efforts to promote racial integration, and sharp limits on federal support for charter schools.

Warren also pledged to “eliminate high-stakes testing,” a promise that has appeal to the public, which has widespread misgivings about such testing. She declared, “As president, I’ll push to prohibit the use of standardized testing as a primary or significant factor in closing a school, firing a teacher, or making any other high-stakes decisions.”

That language sounds like a blow against the school reform movement, which has long championed holding schools accountable for test scores, especially the achievement of low-income and minority students. But when pressed on the issue, the Warren campaign responded in a way that suggests her plan would do almost nothing to alter the use of standardized testing in K-12 schools.

The key words here are “significant factor” and “other high-stakes decisions.” To understand why, we need to go back to 2015, when Congress was in the middle of contentious negotiations over revising the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The previous version of the act, the No Child Left Behind Act, passed Congress with wide bipartisan support in 2001 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush, who enthusiastically supported school reform. It required states to administer standardized math and reading tests in Grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Schools where too few students scored as “proficient” on the tests were subject to an escalating series of interventions and sanctions.

Over time, No Child Left Behind became deeply unpopular. Critics said it was unjust to hold schools educating students from vastly different social and economic circumstances to the same standards. People also objected to using tests as the sole measure of school performance. When negotiators convened in 2015, it was clear that the heavy reliance on standardized testing would need to be scaled back. The question was how much.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the powerful chairman of the Senate Education Committee, was on the side of those deferring to the long-standing role states have played in financing and governing K-12 schools. If states didn’t want to use standardized tests, he believed, the federal government shouldn’t compel them. Alexander was joined by national teachers’ unions, which saw No Child Left Behind as a punitive law that unfairly demonized their members.

On the other side were Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House education committees and the Obama administration. They believed it was crucial for standardized tests to remain the backbone of school accountability for the same reason that schools don’t let high schoolers grade their own algebra exams and the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t let corporations invent their own accounting rules. Accountability requires objectivity. That’s why the tests are standardized and scored by state departments of education.

Murray, Scott and Obama administration officials were especially concerned with the progress of low-income and minority children, students with disabilities, and those from families where English was not the primary language spoken at home. Historically, states left to their own devices have not always acted with the best interests of such children in mind.

At one point in the 2015 negotiations, Warren voted against a version of the bill because, she later said, it lacked “minimum safeguards” and needed “stronger accountability” to ensure that federal dollars reached “those schools and students who needed them most.” It was a view of accountability substantially based on standardized tests.

A protracted debate over language threatened to scuttle the whole deal. Obama administration officials wanted tests to be the “primary” method of measuring school success. Republicans and teachers’ unions pushed back. The final compromise allowed states to include several additional measures in their school ratings, including high school graduation rates and metrics of student growth on tests, which give credit when scores improve but still fall short of proficiency.

Each of these indicators must be given “substantial weight” and, collectively, “much greater” weight than another set of newly added indicators that include measures of school safety and student “engagement.”

That’s why Warren’s use of the phrases “significant factor” and “high-stakes decisions” could be, in theory, a big deal. “Significant” sounds a lot like “substantial,” and the identification of low-performing schools for interventions and penalties is generally what people mean when they refer to, or call for the elimination of, “high-stakes testing.”

And yet, when pressed on this question, the Warren campaign repeatedly declined to confirm that those words mean what they seem to mean. A Warren aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not say that the Warren plan changes or undoes the 2015 compromise. Instead, the aide referred back to the specific examples cited in the plan, saying that Warren does not believe tests should be used to close schools or fire teachers.

That means the Warren plan, if enacted, would change very little, because standardized tests are hardly ever used to close schools or fire teachers today. According to Chad Aldeman, an analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, only 231 of the nation’s 98,000 public schools were taken over by the state because of bad test scores during the No Child Left Behind years. Of those, nearly 80% were in a single state, Hawaii, which lacks local school districts to do the taking over. Fewer still were converted to charter schools. Even after the Obama administration pushed states to create teacher evaluation systems that incorporated some test data, real-world examples of test-driven systems being used to fire teachers are practically nonexistent.

Two-thirds of public school parents said there is “too much emphasis” on standardized tests in their community’s schools. Nearly half believe parents should be able to excuse their children from taking such tests, a sentiment fueling the testing “opt-out” movement in New York and elsewhere. Obama called for a cap on the amount of time students spend taking tests, a move Warren supported.

While the other major Democratic presidential candidates haven’t included similar anti-testing language in their platforms, they have also shied away from the kind of strong accountability stances that previous presidents of both parties have embraced.

Yet every state continues to use tests to rate schools and provide the public with information about student learning. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, despite her enthusiasm for private-school vouchers, has duly implemented the accountability compromise of 2015. High-stakes standardized tests are a durable, integral part of modern K-12 education. And that’s something that Warren does not really seem willing to change.

This article originally appeared in

Warren's Education Plan, and Why High-Stakes Testing Seems Here to Stay

(Upshot)

The celebrities and CEOs arrested in this week’s college bribery scandal were charged with paying up to $1.2 million for guaranteed admission to elite universities. And of course there’s a much larger and mostly legal system whereby rich people pull strings, hire consultants and make enormous tax-deductible donations, all in the hopes of improving their children’s college chances.

Yet academic research suggests that these efforts are mostly a waste of money and that the seized opportunities would have actually helped other students much more.

In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students’ SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are “generally indistinguishable from zero.” Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they don’t get into the Ivy League.

But there was a crucial exception. There were strong benefits for the subset of black and Hispanic students and for those whose parents had few educational credentials. It turns out that students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges. Elite higher education gives them social capital they didn’t already have.

In other words, Lori Loughlin’s daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli, who is attending the University of Southern California, would have probably been fine attending Arizona State University. (Arizona State is a thriving public research university that Giannulli’s father is reported to have cited on FBI wiretaps as the unthinkable destination he would pay bribes to avoid.) When you’re a 19-year-old YouTube star who spends spring break on a billionaire’s yacht, life tends to work out.

But if the charges against them are proved, Giannulli’s parents would have taken something their daughter didn’t need from someone for whom it might have been life-changing.

There are some important caveats to Dale and Krueger’s research. This kind of analysis isn’t devised to detect certain narrow pathways to elite professions that run through a handful of top colleges. Supreme Court clerks, for instance, tend to hail from a small number of highly selective universities. There is still a pipeline to Wall Street and management consulting that traverses a long-established network of private high schools feeding into top colleges.

But if you’re the kind of student who needs to pay someone to take the SAT for you or to photoshop your face onto the body of a varsity water polo player, you’re probably not Supreme Court material.

At the same time, research from the Equality of Opportunity Project found that while many kinds of colleges can help students move to the top 20 percent of the income distribution from the bottom 20 percent, moving to the top 1 percent from the bottom 20 percent almost always requires a highly selective institution. If you’re at all concerned about economic mobility, this underscores the waste of unfairly displacing qualified low-income students from top colleges and universities.

Selectivity may also matter more in other parts of the higher education universe. A 2009 study from economist Mark Hoekstra found that white men who attended a flagship public research university earned 20 percent more over time than similar white male students who attended less selective colleges.

Not all students at selective colleges have the same experience. Soon-to-be-released research from economists Douglas Webber, Ben Ost and Weixiang Pan found that students who majored in high-demand fields such as engineering at less selective public universities earned more than similar students who chose other majors at more selective universities.

Economists Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman found that students who accepted a scholarship to attend a public university with lower graduation rates than alternatives were themselves less likely to graduate.

In general, there are strong correlations between the resources colleges have and the success of students who attend them. So it seems nothing about the admissions scandal should dissuade parents and students from trying to find a good college to attend.

More than anything, the scandal shows how much elite higher education has become entangled in structures of prestige, status and anxiety among the upper class. It is in some ways a case of 1-percenters lusting after the privileges of 1-10th-of-1-percenters — possibly risking infamy and prison to buy something that, the evidence suggests, provides little value for their privileged offspring.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/upshot/elite-colleges-actual-value.html" id="ea7daa9a-0f27-3727-a16c-764f625912c9">The New York Times</a>.

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Kevin Carey

Articles written by the author

Warren's Education Plan, and Why High-Stakes Testing Seems Here to Stay

How Much Does Getting Into an Elite College Actually Matter?