Another Reformster Changes Their Mind Re: Big Standardized Tests

Thomas Arnett of the Christensen Institute used to like the Big Standardized Test just fine. Nowadays... well, let's see what might have changed, because it's an instructive look at reformy ideas.

Here's Arnett in December of 2015:

Opponents of standardized testing raise a number of legitimate issues that education leaders and policymakers ought to address. But getting rid of standardized tests would be a major mistake, especially considering the important role these test play in shedding light on achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Instead of retreating from the idea of testing, we need to learn from the flaws of our current assessment system and take advantage of new ideas and technologies. This way, we can ultimately improve how assessments support progress for our students and our schools.

When he wrote that, Arnett, he was just a couple of years into his gig as a Senior Deep Education Thinker at Christensen Institute, "a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank dedicated to improving the world through Disruptive Innovation" founded by Clayton Christensen, the daddy of disruptive innovation.

Christensen has a whole education department, headed by Julia Freelan Fisher, who graduated from Princeton (BA, Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies), then spent a couple of years doing PR for NewSchools Venture fund, the got her law degree from Yale. This somehow qualifies her to lead a team whose goal is "to transform monolithic, factory-model education systems into student-centered designs that educate every student successfully and enable each to realize his or her fullest potential."

Arnett's story is one we've heard from so many reformsters. Graduated from BYU with a BS in economics in 2009, then put in two years with Teach for America in Kansas City. According to his LinkedIn account, he did such awesome things as "Invested students in ambitious academic goals through vision-setting and high-quality instruction. Designed, implemented, and continuously revised student incentive systems to motivate academic achievement. Organized an administered a lunch time program that increased student work completion by approximately 40%" as well as figuring out how to "integrate" Khan Academy into the classroom. Having put in his two years, he headed out for Carnegie Mellon University for his MBA, then on to his Senior Research Fellow job with Christensen. In 2020 he added a post on the board of Compass Charter Schools. 

In short, one more guy who's a business person, not an educator, a guy who argues that education's problem is that it needs a new business model. Arnett has been a big advocate of handing education over to computer-based algorithms. Disruptive innovation, baby.

Last month, Arnett staked out a new position in post entitled "A standard play from the ed reform playbook could stunt the potential of a burgeoning field."

The piece invokes an impressive cloud of argle bargle, business jargon throwing its back out trying to do all the heavy lifting. (For example: "The value networks that established organizations sit within, and the business models they’ve developed within those value networks, make them systematically unable to pursue disruptive innovations because disruptive innovations run counter to priorities and metrics that pervade and distill from their value networks.") But the piece boils itself down to these two points:

*The metrics used to gauge the quality of conventional schooling can hinder the growth and innovation of microschools, learning centers, and homeschool co-ops.

*To foster new models of schooling, philanthropists, researchers, and policymakers must resist the impulse to impose conventional metrics and instead develop new quality measures that align with the unique aims of these programs.

In other words, remember how reformsters successfully saddled public schools with the Big Standardized Test as a way to provide solid "data" that public schools were "failing" and thereby erode trust in them and create pressure for alternatives? But BS Testing also makes our "alternatives" look bad. Also, it's hard to innovate at a school when you have to worry about BS Test scores all the time--when scores drive your school's function, it kind of gets in the way.

So, Arnett is arguing, let's not hamper reformy education-flavored businesses with the same testing albatross that we hung around the neck of public schools. Sire, we used to say that scores were crucial "data" that the public and policy makers needed, but it turns out the same hammer that busted open the piggy bank of taxpayer education dollars also hurts when you smack our preferred privatized options, so maybe don't.

Arnett is not willing to take his argument one step further-- if the kinds of metrics that have been forced on public schools are bad for alternative types of schools, then maybe they are also bad for public schools and we should just get rid of them for everyone. He doesn't come right out and say that the metrics don't actually provide some sort of absolute objective measure of educational quality. And he does lean on one lie--the notion that the metrics are a result of "value networks" as if it were all the stakeholders in public education that demanded BS testing, and not a bunch of reformsters and thinky tanks like Christensen. 

But it's all there, anyway. Arnett is late to the party, but by all means--let's do away with Big Standardized Test metrics. For everyone.