North County Times columnist and former administrator Richard J. Riehl gets away with a common fallacy in an column about standardized tests:
Each spring California school administrators greet the release of school rankings based on Academic Performance Index (API) scores like anxious coaches awaiting the annual NCAA Tournament match-ups....
The average family incomes for the cities with the highest scores range from $64,000 to $81,000, while those for the other cities in North County range from $43,000 to $46,000...
It's long past time that we hold schools accountable, and using standardized test scores is an easy way to compare students and schools. But isn't the No Child Left Behind Act just another way of saying we want all our children to be above average?
When test scores say more about family income than about learning, it's time to examine the learning environments of our best schools: places where talented teachers are committed to helping each student succeed, where administrators have the courage and the support to make tough personnel decisions, where safe and attractive campuses have excellent learning resources, and where multiple ways to measure learning reflect the multiple ways students learn.
I don't mind Riehl's suggestion that bad schools learn from good schools. But the comment above about family income (emphasis mine) is an invitation to assume that the students from good schools did not actually earn their scores, simply because their parents have money. This is what is means to say that test scores are "more about" income than learning, and I doubt it's true. It's also highly insulting to the kids who earned those scores.
I'm not going to deny that parental income is related to test scores. I'm just tired of columnists and pundits declaring that the test scores of rich kids are due solely to money, instead of due to the hard work that these kids put into their education. No one seems willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, parents who make money have also instilled in their children the values of education and hard work; their kids would probably have high test scores even if they didn't attend schools in wealthy districts.
The assumption in these types of columns is always that income causes scores; I say parental attitude, intelligence, and value of education causes both parental income AND student test scores, and if that's true, then ignoring test results from poor schools - or pouring money into those schools - may not solve the problems.
Posted by kswygert at April 15, 2004 03:49 PM