“We all want better math and reading assessments. But we should also invest in better tests of history, sciences, and the arts, and develop tools to evaluate student behavior, judge a school’s disciplinary climate, see whether students know how to cooperate, and measure whether schools are enhancing physical fitness and appropriate health choices and habits.”

Although his proposal at first blush does seem reasonable — test or measure, not just the acquisition of math and reading skills, but all the variety of intellectual, personal, and interpersonal skill and knowledge acquisition, that, as we would readily admit, ought to be fully and equally represented in the learning environment of the school.

Also, it does seem to have happened, as Rothstein and others have been making clear, almost since the day that NCLB was enacted, that math and reading, because they are the only ones tested, are pushing to the side, or entirely out of the picture, music and the arts, history, social studies and the sciences, not to mention the whole gamut of important individual and community goals.

If a few activities have withstood the math and reading testing push, such as sports, theater, maybe some vocational pursuits, it’s because these activities were not in need of tests to give them importance in the eyes of the learner.

But while Rothstein’s diagnosis of the situation we now have with NCLB is accurate his prescription for improvement is totally unrealistic. What he suggests won’t happen. For to come up with accurate, reliable, objective tests of the kinds of things he mentions is prohibitively expensive, not to mention insuperably difficult to do.

If we’ve chosen to most of all test math and reading it’s not only because these are important subject matters, and in the case of reading if not of math, essential. But it’s also because we can do so objectively, and to most people’s satisfaction.

It might be possible to come up with objective history and science tests, but most likely the history and science tested would be facts, information, and we’d be testing only the student’s memory of those facts, not his or her understanding of them.

But the arts? The student’s behavior (in class, in the school corridor, outside of school?), the school’s disciplinary climate, and all the rest,  — “whether students know how to cooperate, and measure whether schools are enhancing physical fitness and appropriate health choices and habits.” Not a chance.

In regard to most of these things that Rothstein lists teachers, and parents even more so, will judge the same children in widely differing ways. There may be children of whom we could find general agreement about how well they cooperate etc. but this sort of agreement would be rare.

Furthermore, in regard to most of the things that Rothstein would like us to measure we would have to rely primarily on the teacher’s opinion, and this, of course, would reflect the particular values and interests of the teacher as much as the progress of the student.

There now is a baby, and the baby is NCLB, or the objective measure of math and reading skills. And while these skills are not all there is, or all that should be, a living baby is what we have and we shouldn’t risk losing it while discarding the admittedly dirty bath water. To clean that water, without threatening the baby, would be the way to go.

“This is a crucial time for the district. Debates rage over the mandates of No Child Left Behind and how much testing and teaching-to-tests we should do. Charter schools — some good, some bad — are siphoning off students and resources. High schools are subdividing into Small Learning Communities, a model that’s produced mixed results elsewhere, without adequate planning or funding. Most students don’t pass Algebra I the first time, yet Algebra II will become a graduation requirement in a few years, likely increasing the already abysmal dropout rate.”

About how many inner city school districts might we have said the same thing? Probably all of them. For these are issues confronting every inner city school district in the nation. And up until now no one seems to have the answers.

The irony is that these and other issues have arisen from what were supposed to be the answers to earlier issues or problems, NCLB (the answer to low minority achievement), Charter Schools (to failing district schools), Small Learning Communities (to huge, impersonal middle and high school learning environments), Algebra II (to low expectations, when no algebra at all, or algebra I was all that poor and minority students might expect to encounter in high school).

Why have what were supposed to be the solutions to the earlier problems become the new problems?  Perhaps because we were afraid to take the big steps, to make the really fundamental changes, with the result that our timid and tentative steps were (and are) never substantial enough to bring about real reform.

And we go on in this fashion, bungling ahead with our hesitant reform efforts, really going nowhere at all.  (see Tyack, David, and Cuban, Larry. Tinkering Toward Utopia: a century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)

Take the longer school day as a case in point, a current and popular reform effort. One can agree with these reformers that children, especially at risk kids from poor and minority families, need to have more supervised hours in school during the day.

So what might we do to bring this about? We first need to persuade the principal and the teachers that such is vital to raising student achievement. Then we need to persuade the state legislators, or other funding sources, to put up a few million dollars to lengthen by a few hours the school day in perhaps a dozen now “failing” elementary and middle schools throughout the state.

And we may very well bring this about. In Massachusetts it has already been done. But our goal is, of course, much more than this. We want to extend the extended day to all struggling elementary and middle schools throughout the state, that which represents a generation-long project, at least, given the additional monies that would be needed. And there’s probably not much chance that our money sources would stay with us throughout the reform effort, leading to another failed reform.

Furthermore, even if the additional monies could be found, there is no hard evidence that the additional 2 or 3 hours in school, while probably beneficial, especially in as much as some of the extracurricular activities eliminated by NCLB would be reinstated, —there is no evidence that the extra time in school would do much to raise the children’s academic achievement in any significant fashion.

There is another irony here in that the model of a much longer school day, one that might have worked, is out there, currently in place. The model exists among all those poor and otherwise disadvantaged middle school children admitted to elite private schools where the school day is not just a few hours longer but the full 24 hour day long.

And the model exists in what I call “nativity” or “epiphany” schools, those few Massachusetts church connected private schools whose student bodies are all poor, severely disadvantaged middle school aged kids who are given full scholarships and are carefully supervised throughout most of their waking hours, only going home to sleep, and if they have one, to spend a few moments with their single parent care giver.

These two models work well for the kids. The kids are clearly achieving, both while in school and later in the colleges that most of them will attend. Why? Because these models do not represent incremental and therefore insufficient reform efforts, but are instead complete changes in children’s lives, revolutions if you like of what the kids’ lives had been up until then.

But of course they are costly and so far we prefer, or are obliged, to spend our wealth on defense and entitlements, and comfortable security for our old, but not for providing rich opportunities for our young.

What would a real reform of this nature cost? Take the present total of some 50 million students enrolled in our nation’s public schools. Assume that somewhere between a third and a fourth of them, about 15 million, would qualify for full tuition support in the sort of school I mention above.

At a per pupil cost of $25,000 (which I admit, may be low—the full cost to the Academy of a single student at Phillip’s Exeter is nearly $65,000) this would mean an annual budget amount of $375 billion, significantly less than the cost of Social Security or defense, and while a bit less than Medicare a bit more than Medicaid, welfare, and the interest on the national debt.

But this money would be money for prevention. By that I mean that such expenditures in the present would lower entitlement and other social costs in the future. We would end up paying significantly less for the costs to society of failed lives because there would be many fewer of the latter.

Unlike social security, unlike the armament industry whose costs will continue to grow, unless something else is fundamentally altered in our society, these full day tuition costs would be made up in good part from no longer needed portions of Medicare, unemployment and welfare, education and training costs.

Is it lack of vision, imagination, courage that keeps us from undertaking real educational reform? Is it something else? Must we always wait for things to happen to us, rather than making things happen?