New education plan should balance testing, real world

Ohio’s new plan for education aims to demand and measure something more meaningful than science facts and grammar rules alone, and that’s OK. The ultimate goal of public education, after all, is to prepare students for life in a democracy.

The “one goal,” dubbed #EachChildOurFuture, is to steadily increase the share of Ohio high-school graduates succeeding in post-high-school education or training, serving in the military, earning a living wage or “engaged in a meaningful, self-sustaining vocation.”

That’s what people wish for their children.

But achieving those goals generally requires a person to read and write well, to understand history, culture and science and to be able to use numbers and technology. In schools with hundreds of students, standardized testing can be the best, most objective way to understand which students are mastering those things and which aren’t.

Many see the new plan as repudiating intense focus on standardized testing. Ohio adopted a regimen of proficiency testing in the mid-1990s, with impetus from conservatives who deplored schools’ falling performance and graduation rates. They blamed teachers and administrators facing no consequences if students didn’t succeed; “accountability” became the watchword.

Nationally, in 2001 the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act established yearly standardized testing as the primary way to evaluate a school’s performance, and testing grew at every grade level. It stressed the more-positive notion that setting high standards was the best way to inspire success for everyone.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. High standards didn’t magically improve performance, especially for kids who have disabilities or come to school traumatized by crime, poverty or neglect.

The law prescribed harsh penalties for chronic poor performance as well as incentives including cash bonuses. Detractors say this drove school administrators to focus obsessively on test performance at the expense of all else.

Almost everyone can agree that the nationwide focus on testing led to confusion and frustration in Ohio as state officials continually changed standards.

Some changes and additions came from good intentions as experts struggled to fairly account for the gaps between underprivileged students and those with stable and supportive families in wellequipped districts.

Others were strategic retreats from standards that were proving too high to meet. The end result has been a state “report card” that changed almost yearly. The moving goalposts frustrated schools, made year-to-year comparisons meaningless and inspired cynicism.

Ohio’s new plan calls for developing students’ creativity and leadership ability plus their social and emotional skills along with traditional academic aptitude and content. That will come at a cost: Assessing progress in those areas is necessarily more subjective, and that likely means more upheaval and controversy in state report cards.

Education officials should bear this in mind as new assessments and report cards are developed. Taking a step back from today’s level of testing and defining educational success more broadly is appropriate. But some standardized testing has to be a part of understanding schools’ effectiveness.

Above all, everyone should remember that educational success isn’t simple to define or to achieve. We hope the new plan recognizes that reality.