Test Scores Are Not Predictive of School Quality

Last updated on: January 3, 2017 at 5:00 am by Libby Anne

Test Scores Are Not Predictive of School Quality 2017-01-02T17:49:51-04:00 Libby Anne

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I’ve written about this before, but I apparently need to do it again. I just read a rather terrifying article published by Michigan’s Bridge Magazine about the results of the school choice programs Betsy DeVos and others have pushed in Michigan.

For more than a decade, Holland Public Schools has watched its enrollment fall, prompting the closure – and demolition – of multiple schools.

The decline is not the result of an aging community with fewer, school-age children. Rather, it’s largely a reflection of Michigan’s generous school choice policies. Choice has, consciously or not, left districts like Holland not only scrambling for students, but more racially segregated as its white students leave, often for districts that are less diverse.

I’m beyond angered by this. I’ve often seen it claimed that increased school choice has the potential to benefit poor minority children attending failing inner city schools, but that’s not how it typically plays out. Instead, increased school choice leads to white middle class families taking their children out of majority-minority public schools to enroll them in majority-white schools, deepening segregation.

And here’s where it gets personal: My daughter attends a majority-minority public school. It has the lowest test scores in the district. As a result, it doesn’t have the greatest reputation within the community at large. In fact, I’ve had people respond in surprise when they learn that we moved into its zoned area on purpose, knowing the quality of the school. But that’s just the issue—the school’s quality is wonderful. We literally could not ask for a better school. The administration is caring, the teachers are dedicated, the school culture is amazing and supportive. This school is a gift.

Back to the article quoted above for a moment:

… across the state, thousands of parents are … using choice to direct their children to less diverse traditional public or charter school districts.

… Advocates say parents are simply choosing schools that are better for the needs of their children, and deny that racial animus drives the majority of school choice decisions.

“Parents are making choice not on that issue (race),” said Dan Quisenberry, president of Michigan Association of Public School Academies, or MAPSA, the state’s largest charter school advocacy group. “They’re making choice based on, ‘How does this fit? Is it going to work’” for their child?

If all schools were equally successful, Quisenberry said, more families would likely choose a diverse school. But academic quality is the most important reason parents choose another school, he said.

This makes me want to wring my hands and yell. How do you think parents assess schools’ academic quality? Test scores. They look at test scores. But test scores are an utterly bullshit way to asses school qualities. As I mentioned above, my daughter’s school has the lowest test scores in the district. But that does not mean the school’s academic quality is not good. I’ll tell you what it means: It means that the school has a significant number of underprivileged minority students. That is literally it.

Back to the Bridge Magazine article:

Indeed, [neighboring majority white school district] Black River [has] test scores [that] are among the highest in the state. It’s [sic] high school scored well even when those scores are adjusted for poverty levels, which are less than half those at Holland High School. But it’s also true that Holland High performed well, when adjusted for poverty, on Bridge Magazine’s 2015 Academic State Champs.

Meanwhile, [neighboring majority white school district] Zeeland’s two high schools, West and East, had higher overall scores than Holland but, when adjusted for poverty levels, one of the best predictors of academic success, Zeeland schools were about average.

Digging deeper into the data, white students who remained in Holland schools performed higher in some grades than white students in Zeeland and Black River and at other times lower, but often comparable, according to the recent M-STEP scores released by the state.

In other words, it’s not actually about academic quality.

Looking at a school’s test scores will not tell you how your child will perform, because children’s academic achievement is substantially affected by things like income and level of parental education. An upper middle class white child with two college educated parents will perform well academically in essentially any school. Test scores are reflective of a school’s demographics, not its academic quality.

What role does race play in white parents’ decisions to flee majority-minority schools? The question, I suppose, is this—do these parents know that test scores are a reflection of school demographics rather than of school quality? Are they making their decisions based on a mistaken belief that schools’ overall test scores are predictive of their individual students’ academic progress? Or is there something more insidious going on here—an assumption that a school with a high percentage of underprivileged minority students must of necessity be a “failing school”?

We need to come to terms with the reality that increased school choice allows white parents to flee to more heavily segregated schools. If these parents’ choices really are solely about academic quality—and I very much suspect that there is more than that going on here—educators and reformers alike need to inform these parents of the limits of test scores to tell us much beyond a school’s demographics. Consider my daughter’s school—if I had made my decision based on test scores, we would have avoided a vibrant, challenging school.

Yes, there are a number of high-performing majority-minority charter schools, including all-black charter programs frequently touted as proof that school choice benefits underprivileged students. I’m not suggesting that only white parents avail themselves of school choice. But let me ask you a question: Why are these schools all-black? If these schools are successful (and by all accounts they are) and school choice is only about school quality and not about race, why aren’t white parents looking at the high quality of these schools and enrolling their children in them?

Consider this: If school choice were only about academic quality and not also about race or related factors, we would expect charter schools and permissive transfers to leave the underlying level of school segregation unchanged. And yet they do not.

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