Club For Growth Launches School Choice Push. What That Tells Us.

Betsy DeVos is back, and we can learn a lot from the company she's keeping. 

Over the past many years, we've seen lots of groups direct their attention to school choice aka privatization. There have been groups like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) that have built an argument around a social need--that choice was needed to get a better education for non-wealthy non-white students. There have been groups like those the American Enterprise Institute that have made their case based on the notion that people should have freedom of choice.

But Club for Growth is a different animal. And while it has not been a major player in the education debates, it's launching a big push at the end of this month, and it's worth looking at that push, because it tells us a lot about what the push for school choice is really about for many fans.

The Club is launching the National Campaign for Parental School Choice on August 31 in Concord, New Hampshire. 

It's an instructive choice. New Hampshire has become a bit of a libertarian stronghold, and was one of the places where the transformation of the GOP into Something Else first bloomed. It's a personal story for me, because what the new version of the party replaced was literally my grandmother's Republican Party. My grandmother was a well-respected GOP member of the state legislature for many many years, but when John Sununu became governor in 1983, she was not impressed. But while the Democratic Party has not gone away, the Granite State GOP has become increasingly, belligerently right wing.

She's back!

At any rate, the Club wants to start there to deliver their message that American folks all really want that school choice, particularly in voucher form, and they want to offer New Hampshire's new voucher program as Exhibit A, which is an interesting choice, because vouchers have been failing regularly for years. This newest proposal was floated this year and over 3000 people came to Concord to tell the legislature that they didn't want it. So, lacking public support for the bill, the GOP just went ahead and tucked it into the budget. This is consistent with the history of school vouchers, a policy that never gets put in place by the voters because the voters always vote it down. So when Club president David McIntosh claims that most Americans actually want school choice, actual history would suggest that he's full of it.

Helping the Club launch this national privatization tour will be former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. DeVos will be chirping the familiar refrains about how the "union-driven school lockdowns" have revealed the awesomeness of choice." Pompeo's message is expected to be more along the lines of "School choice blah blah do I look Presidential to you?"

It looks to be much of the same old song and dance, but here's why the Club for Growth participation is a tell for what's really going on here.

Club for Growth is a very conservative organization founded in 1999. Their history has been about opposing not-right-enough Republicans, opposing the Affordable Care Act, opposing raising any taxes ever (and so also opposing raising the debt ceiling), opposing any climate changey responses. In 2016, they considered Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul the "gold standard" candidates. School choice, education quality, social justice--these have not been regularly on their radar. 

When they list their own policy goals, it includes reducing taxes (including getting a flat tax), eliminating Obamacare, reducing size and scope of federal government, cutting government spending-- do you see a pattern emerging here?

Club for Growth has learned to pick up some of the language-- public schools are failing, families want "exceptional education," and parents should be able to "access the best available schools" (yes, "available" is doing an awful lot of work in that one). They are not going to even pretend that this is about social justice of improving economic futures, and they are barely pretending that choice is about educational quality.

Club for Growth doesn't want to pay taxes to provide services for other people. Not health care. Not social safety nets. And now that public education is on the ropes after going a few rounds with the pandemic and the critical race theory panic crowd, the Club smells a chance to do away with paying taxes for public education as well.

Now's a good time to remember that vouchers are a trade. Parents get a check, and government washes its hands of any responsibility for education young citizens. "I handed you some money," says the government. "Now you and your kids are on your own."

Club for Growth is a one-issue organization, a group devoted to shrinking government, cutting government services, and reducing taxes that folks pay. Their interest in school choice tells us plenty about what they and DeVos and Pompeo and whatever conservative actors sing on to this tour really want, and the smart money says that what they want is a country where rich folks don't have to pay taxes to fund a system that educates Those Peoples' Children.

ICYMI: Not Out Of The Woods Yet Edition (8/15)

 Take a deep breath and push on. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

Deep Divisions in Americans’ Views of Nation’s Racial History

Yeah, you'd already figured this out on your own, but the Pew Research people have some survey results to show just how different we are on how to view, deal with, and teach about our racial history. 

‘How Can I Follow a Law I Believe Endangers My Students?’

In states where the governor (one of those anti-big government overreach and local control guys) have imposed anti-anti-mask mandates, some school leaders are standing up anyway. In Ed Week, a defiant superintendent in Texas explains why.

A majority of parents favor mask mandates

From the Washington Post, info about a survey showing that mask mandates are preferred by the silent majority.

Furious mom demands school board revote

However, the really loud minority continues to be really loud.

Angry anti-masker punches teacher

And more than just loud...

Behind the Critical Race Furor

Is the crt panic another Koch-funded enterprise? Jasmine Banks at The Nation.

How Ohio's budget creates a path out of state takeover

Regular readers have heard about Ohio's school takeover law and the havoc it has wrought on Lorain, among others. Now there's a light at the end of that tunnel. Jan Resseger has done the reading.

How corporate school reforms and ed tech cause dangerous distrust about Covide-19

Nancy Bailey peels back the layers of chaos and distrust in the pandemic crisis.

The end of ed reform

At the Progressive, Jeff Bryant argues that modern ed reform is dead, and some other bad things are moving to takes its place.

The problem with private school vouchers

It has been a big year for pushing vouchers. Also in The Progressive's back-to-school issue, Jessica Levin runs through the various incursions of voucher policy in 2021.

Did We Get Anything Out Of NCLB Accountability?

We're in the midst of the 20th anniversary of No Child Left Behind, a legislative offspring of bipartisan consensus that has itself been left behind by virtually everybody. The bill was proposed in March of 2001, spent the rest of the year wending its way through the process, to be signed into law at the very beginning of 2002. So pretty much any time this year is fair game for a 20 year retrospective on this truly crappy law. 

Cue Deven Carlson offering a quick six-page take on the law for the right-tilted, free-market-loving American Enterprise Institute- "Holding Accountability Accountable: Taking Stock of the Past 20 Years."

Carlson leads with some good nostalgia about how wrong NCLB proponents were about the influence the law would have. He doesn't talk about the usual swing of the accountability pendulum, and he probably doesn't give A Nation At Risk enough credit for helping lay the groundwork for the unholy marriage of accountability and "reform" of public ed. But he offers a decent analysis of a handful of "successes" and "failures" for NCLB, and it's worth a look just to see what reform types believe about the NCLB fiasco.

First, the "successes."

Shifting focus from inputs to outputs. In principle, I agree that it's bad practice to simply throw money and schools without looking at what's happening. But too many reformsters moved from "let's not just measure money spent" to "the amount of money spent doesn't matter." And the Cult of Outputs immediately ran into a huge problem--we don't have any good way to measure most of the really important outputs of education. In fact, the whole input-output model (Input a piece of sheet metal and the assembly line will output a toaster) doesn't really fit the process of becoming a more educated human being. 

Like many reformsters, Carlson argues that the standards movement pushed outputs, but I disagree. Standards (what stuff will we be teaching) are about inputs. But you get into real trouble if, as NCLB did, you decide to tie the standards to bad tests, declaring in effect that you will only have standards set to things your bad standardized test can measure. NCLB "pushed student outcomes to the forefront of policy debates," except that in this case, "student outcomes" just means scores on a single narrow math and reading multiple choice test. This also led to the upside down school, where students were not there to have their needs met, but to generate the scores the school wanted and the government demanded.

Carlson writes:

And although the focus on student outcomes hasn't been without drawbacks, on balance it has been a positive development.

The first part of that sentence is a huge understatement; the second part is just wrong.

Shining a light on different student subgroups. Carlson argues that before NCLB, we didn't have information about disparities of race, ethnicity, disability, economic status, etc. I'm not convinced that's true; I don't know of anybody who looked at disparate results of the Big Standardized Test disaggregated results and said, "Woah, I had no idea." Of course, some of that awareness can be traced to awareness of disparate inputs (like, the differences between $$ spent on wealthy schools vs. poor schools) and inputs were now verboten. The more particular argument about the new NCLB-fueled "awareness" is that while we may have known about disparities in US education, we needed some kind of shiny data that could be used to convince policymakers; Carlson seems to be hinting at that here.

However. Here's the language that Carlson uses to describe what NCLB did. It "illuminated the outcomes of different groups. It allowed "for a better grasp." It "led to a clear-eyed understanding" and "such illuminations hit particularly hard." Carlson's description hits hard on the idea of being able to better see the disparities in US education, but he has absolutely nothing to say about what actions grew out of all this illumination. Under NCLB, it wasn't allowed to talk about the possible contributing factors for the disparity, and policymaker's new clear-eyed understanding consistently failed to lead to any actual action. 

What good does it do to shine a light on an issue if policymakers then say, "Yup, there it is. Somebody ought to do something about that. Probably those teachers." That was one of the central problems of NCLB. Problems were illuminated and policymakers did nothing. The great wave of accountability was for teachers--and not for anybody else.

Developing data systems. Carlson thinks that now that we have all these data (because numbers are magic) we have all sorts of insight. But the data is by and large results from the lousy Big Standardized Tests. Garbage in, garbage out. And ed reform's increase of the grasp of Big Data is nothing to brag about. 

So where does Carlson think they went wrong?

Setting unrealistic goals and expectations. Well, yes. Politicians set an impossible goal of 100% student proficiency by 2014, with the ever-increasing goals set to become unattainable shortly after many politicians left office. But hey--it was all okay, because the education law was due to be rewritten and reauthorized before then, allowing politicians to stop the train before it hit the wall. Instead, Congress dithered and the Obama/Duncan administration got to use the looming deadline disaster as leverage to get states to sign on for the new set of reforms. Oopsies.

Carlson correctly notes that baking the unattainable goals into the law guaranteed that it would ruin public support. It certainly guaranteed from the very first moment that teachers would know it was not a serious attempt to improve education, but simply political grandstanding. Ten years later, those unachievable goals became demoralizing as well; by the early 2010s, there were only two types of schools in this country--those that were failing and those that were lying. Carlson correctly notes that parents saw a disconnect between how they viewed their school and how the government viewed it, and decided mostly that it was the government that was wrong. 

What Carlson doesn't address is the why. Why would policymakers choose such an option that was so clearly a dumb? There was more at play than, as I said above, the belief that they could stop the machinery before it started to chew schools up.

For one, the 100% NCLB goal gave proponents a nuclear option in debate. In those days, if you tried to bring up some of the challenges or obstacles to 100% proficiency, NCLB supporters simply asked, "And which children do you want to leave behind?" The program came with a rhetorical tool for painting all opponents as child-haters.

For others, the inevitable failure rate of public schools was a feature, not a bug. Nothing provides more support for the modern school choice privatization movement than a tool for painting public schools as failing, and NCLB guaranteed that all public schools would, eventually, be labeled as failures. For charter and voucher fans, it was a marketing dream. For opponents of teachers unions, it was a golden opportunity to gather ammunition. Teachers said, "It's not fair to judge us by a system that is a bad measure and is designed for ultimate failure." Opponents shot back (and still do) that teachers and their unions were just afraid of accountability because they didn't want to have their sloth and incompetence revealed.

Narrowly focusing on reading and math test results. Carlson gets this exactly right. The test-centric system signaled what NCLB truly valued, and schools twisted themselves into ugly nots trying to give NCLB what it asked for--scores on a bad multiple choice math and reading test. Curricula were narrowed, students lost breadth in their education, and test prep reigned supreme. The emphasis on high stakes testing is the signature policy of the last twenty years. It has provided little real accountability, and has twisted education out of shape in the process. But hey-- it generates lots of numbers and spreadsheets and data.

Federal control without flexibility. NCLB was in large part about federal politicians and bureaucrats looking at the 1990s and saying, "Well, you wouldn't let us nudge you into doing what we wanted, so now we're just taking control." And it contained a bunch of (usually) unstated assumptions about why, which Carlson unpacks very neatly:

The NCLB accountability system's inflexibility highlights its motivating assumption; Educators weren't trying hard enough, and threatening to punish their schools would make them work harder. It's a mistake to make policy based on assumptions that question educators' motives and efforts.

NCLB assumed that teachers were the problem, and built its system based on that insulting and ill-informed notion. Race to the Top and RttT Lite (waivers) doubled down on that notion. Twenty years later, it's getting harder to find people who want to fill teaching jobs. 

Carlson's grasp of what went wrong is pretty good, but he doesn't really admit that those failure far overshadow any possible gains from the policy. He's worried that this will taint the notion of accountability; I feel certain that the accountability pendulum will continue to swing back and forth as it always has. 

He hopes that accountability fans will learn from this. I feel confident that, mostly, they won't, in part because a universal system for universal accountability is an impossible target. Any accountability system has to be able to explain-- accountability to whom, for what, measured in what way, in order to accomplish what. Not having a good answer for all of those questions guarantees a flawed system that eventually collapses on its own fractured base.

Teachers and schools should be accountable. So should policymakers, politicians, and educrats. And anybody who claims they have an easy way to do it is selling something.

Speaking of Indoctrinatin' Literature: Ayn Rand in the Classroom

So here comes the umpteenth set of protests/complaints/caterwauling over literature in schools "promoting critical race theory," aka "any books with Black people in them." The Northampton Area School District of  Northampton, PA was offered a a stack of books by The Conscious Kid, an organization that plans to donate 120,000 books "that foster anti-racist conversations and action" to 3,000 schools nationwide. 

These books are not donated to the school library, which means nobody has to read books like Hair Love or a Ruth Bader Ginsberg bio. And just in case anyone's still worried, the board specifically resolved that acceptance of any gift or donation does not constitute an endorsement. Nevertheless, at least ten folks are vocally upset because that's just where we are right now.

The Conscious Kid is not the first group to discover how excitedly schools react to the phrase "free books." No, we have to look elsewhere for that title.

In fact, the child probably got the books in English class.

The Ayn Rand foundation has long offered complete class sets of four Rand novels to... well, anybody teaching anything in a school. You can also enter your students in an essay contest, but it's not required. In fact nothing is required, but hey--free books!

Here are the available choices, with a quick summary just in case you've never had the pleasure.

Anthem It will come as no surprise to readers that Rand first came up with this as a teenager. Vague to the point of barely cloaking her argument in characters and plot (Characters in totalitarian collective dystopia fall in love and run away, pledging to bring back individuality). 

We the Living Three young people struggle to pursue their own happiness and individuality against the backdrop of post-revolution Russia. Rand's first published work. Middle class life and individuality are crushed under the Soviets, and all three characters meet a wretched end. It stands out from the other works by virtue of not including her heroically perfect ubermensch; that and its anchoring in actual history makes this the most tolerable Rand for some readers.

The Fountainhead Howard Roark, an architect, is Rand's perfect man, and everybody else is a two-dimensional character created to represent one of society's terrible flaws, allowing Rand to explain exactly why the stupid world doesn't deserve Roark's awesomeness. Thick, but readable, and matches Lord of the Flies as a book that can launch a thousand essays about symbolism because the use of symbol-heavy characters is a subtle as a two-by-four. But watch out for the rapey angry sex parts.

Atlas Shrugged Randian polemic at both its Randiest and polemickiest. It actually starts with a fun narrative hook-- steel magnate Hank Rearden and his lover Dagny Taggert are investigating the mysterious disappearance of various US captains of industry even as industry falls apart. Turns out that Rand's superman, this time named John Galt, is convincing the great business leaders to run off to a mountain hideaway for a general strike, waiting to come out and rebuild/save the nation once all the incompetent jerks have run it into the ground. Eventually Rearden and Taggert are swooped off to the Heroes' Retreat. Taggert leaves Rearden for John Galt, but that involves zero drama because Rearden recognizes that Galt is The Man, so of course she wants to trade up. Somewhere in the middle of this monster, the narrative drive grind to a halt under the weight of Rand's preaching. Then, about 100 pages from the end, Galt takes over the world's media and starts to deliver a speech and you think, "Well, he'll talk for a bit, and then all the plot will be resolved" but no-- he talks for a really, really long time. In a whirlwind finish, Galt is captured, humiliates his captors via their suckiness, and announces that now his bunch o'heroes can now come back and save the world. This is a terrible, terrible novel, but Rand considered it her magnum opus because she said most of what she had to say. Twice, even. Every politician who's ever talked about "makers and takers" has, I guarantee, read this one.

I keep dreaming of the day when someone objects to teaching these books on the basis of Rand's virulent anti-religion feelings. And in fact there's a whole sub-group of folks who connect Rand to Satanism. But sadly, no mobs are storming school boards to chase That Woman out of the classroom. Maybe crediting her as the mother of Satanism is a bit extreme, nut conservatives who believe that Rand's objectivism and Christianity are compatible are kidding themselves. Rand was abundantly clear. For instance, in Anthem, she writes:

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.
This god, this one word: I.

Or this 1959 interview with Mike Wallace:

Mike Wallace: You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?

Ayn Rand: Yes. I am the creator of a new code of morality.

You can see how Rand's brand of individualism can be a hit with some teenagers--you owe nobody anything, and the highest moral good is the pursuit of your own desires and goals. I'm just not seeing that as a great message to pass along. Nor do I think Rand's work can be justified by virtue of any particular literary excellence. At best, she might make an appearance in a study of far right ideology.

But hey-- free books!!

The website says 65,000 teachers have grabbed up these books, and I'd be curious to hear what they have to say about why these works in place of all the other available works in the English-speaking world. I wouldn't for a moment propose that these books be banned, but I find it just weird that we've got to have panic attacks over books like Hair Love, an adorable book that was selected by Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, about a Black father helping his Black daughter style her hair, even as we let Rand slip into the schoolhouse with nary a peep. 

Where Is A Teacher's Staff?

I read about Penn State sports--not because I particularly care, and not even because my non-sporty daughter graduated from there, but because my nephew is a sports writer whose beat is mostly PSU. He's a good guy and the only person in my family who actually supports himself by writing. 

He recently dropped this piece about the coaching staff for Penn State football, and the stories of how they came to follow head coach James Franklin to Happy Valley.

It's one of those moments where I felt I was gazing into a completely different world. Imagine if every teacher came with her own personal support staff. What a world.

Imagine. Instead of offering detailed high quality curricula that was supposed to lessen the teacher workload or super-duper AI-branded software that was supposed to take some of the load of teachers, teachers with actual support staffs--one, or even more than one, live humans who helped that teacher do her job. Imagine a world in which "staff meeting" refers to the daily meeting a teacher has with her support staff. 

Imagine a teacher who's backed up by a group of expert specialists that she can tag in for lessons in particular areas, or who work with students with particular needs or academic issues, some of whom used the experience to launch their own teaching careers.

How cool would it be. A teacher with an office that includes desks for her various staff members, who regularly bounce back and forth between working with the students and getting work done (planning, clerical, design, etc) in the office, where they are regularly able to interact and discuss students and educational issues for the class. Educators working as a team rather than in isolation. A teacher with so much support that she doesn't have to decide which part of her job (or her life) is not going to get her attention today. And the little things--Heck, if you're not a teacher, you may not be able to appreciate what a liberating game changer it would be to be able to say, "I need a set of copies of this paper--please go get them for me right this second." (Or, for that matter, "I have to pee--would you step in and teaching this for just a minute.")

Imagine a staff of 70 teachers who don't have to share the same secretary (who really doesn't work for them, but for the administration) or the same copy machine.

We can even imagine the teachers' staff dumping a cooler of water and ice over the teacher's head after a batch of great test results.

Imagine, in short, that teachers got the same kind of support as big time coaches.

Sure, it would require a redesign of school buildings, and the personnel costs would be huge as well. This is the kind of fantasy that belongs to the whole category of "Things we would do if we really thought that education was a money-is-no-object priority." 

But wouldn't it be cool.

Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools (Ex. #152,377)

In North Carolina, Charter Day School back in 2016 was sued by parents who objected to a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts, jumpers, or skorts. They just won that suit, sort of, but revealed somethiung about themselves in the winning.

This is a school whose mission involves communicating through the arts and sciences. Charter Day School is part of the network of charters operated by Roger Bacon Academy, one of the charters that focuses on a "classical curriculum" in a "safe, morally strong environment," which meant, apparently, none of those pants-wearing girls in their school (It also supposedly means things like sentence diagramming in Kindergarten and Latin in 4th grade, but then, Baker is an electrical engineer, not an educator.)

You're in trouble now, missy.

RBA is owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr., and if that name seems vaguely familiar, it's because he is one of the titans of charter profiteering. Back in 2014, Marian Wang profiled the "politically-connected businessman who celebrates the power of the free market," and how he perfected the business of starting nonprofit charter schools and then having those schools lease their buildings, equipment, programs, etc from for-profit companies owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. That's where the Roger Bacon Academy, a for-profit charter management company comes in. 

In 2019, a federal judge passed down the ruling that any public school in the country would have expected-- a dress code requiring skirts for girls is unconstitutional. The school quietly retired the item in the dress code.

But that wasn't the end of it. Monday (Aug 9) a federal appeals court tossed out the 2019 ruling--sort of-- in a 2-1 ruling.

The two judges, both Trump appointees, ruled that contrary to the assertion of the lower court, that charter schools should not be considered state actors, and are therefore not subject to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This is yet another way for the courts to work their way around to declaring that charter schools are free to discriminate in any ways they wish. But it also makes one thing perfectly clear--

Charter schools are not public schools. They are not state actors.

The opinion told the lower court to go check and see if the rule violates Title IX (spoiler alert: it does). The dissenting opinion said they should have just plain upheld the lower court ruling. 

Meanwhile, Baker (now 81), still thinks it's a good rule:

“We're a school of choice. We're classical in our curriculum and very traditional. I believe that the more of the traditional things you have in place, the more they tend to reinforce each other,” he said in a phone interview. “We want boys to be boys and girls to be girls and have mutual respect for each other. We want boys to carry the umbrella for girls and open doors for them ... and we want to start teaching that in grammar school.”

It's a perfectly reasonable stance for a school owned and operated privately and for profit by one guy. It's not okay for a public school, but as the court has declared, Charter Day School is not a public school. 

Do 3rd Grade Tests Predict Anything?

The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) is a program of the American Institute for Research (AIR) along with an assortment of universities. They've just released a working paper version of some research that some people think is pretty significant. I've read it so you don't have to. Let me explain what they found, and why nobody needs to get excited about it.

AIR is better known for their work in test manufacturing and marketing, which gives them a dog in this particular hunt, but I'm not sure that really need concern us here.

"Assessing the Accuracy of Elementary School Test Scores as Predictors of Students' High School Outcomes" was written by Dan Goldhaber (AIR/CALDER/University of Washington), Malcolm Wolff (University of Washington), and Timothy Daily (EdNavigator). EdNavigator is a business positioned to help parents navigate a complicated education-flavored-products market--again, I'm not sure we need to be concerned here, other than to note that many of the involved parties are not exactly disinterested observers of the Big Standardized Test biz. Oh yeah--the Carnegie Foundation did some of the funding for this. 

There's a lot of fancy math in this paper, but the outcome is pretty straightforward--studying student test results in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Washington, the researchers found that third grade test scores correlate with high school outcomes, namely, high school test scores, advanced course-taking in high school, and high school graduation. 

The result is that third grade tests correlate with those factors about as well as eighth grade tests do. They also found that poverty and race/ethnicity correlate with a drop of those high school outcomes. 

There is nothing surprising here. They have been painstaking in their figuring and crunching and mathing the crap out of their data. But ultimately, they have asked the wrong question.

Because--say it with me--correlation is not causation.

We know, via many many many pieces of research, that Big Standardized Test scores are directly tied to socioeconomic status. Both third grade and high school tests.

We know that socioeconomic status correlates with other life outcomes, like graduation and jobs etc. We can even talk about how it correlates with baloney like the Success Sequence (which just puts things ass-backwards, declaring that if you wear large clothes, that's what caused you to get bigger). 

We know all about these correlations, and they point pretty clearly to SES as a cause. So research like this, while not a total waste of time, because I suppose if third grade scores were a terrible predictor of high school stuff, we'd know something was definitely cattywumpus somewhere in the system-- research like this isn't helpful because it's asking the wrong question.

What still remains unproven is this-- if you take a student who would have scored 60 on the third grade test and somehow get them to score 80 or 90, would that improve the student's later outcomes? 

We have (and have had for years) evidence that the answer is no, that raising student test scores does not improve student outcomes. 

We have been subjected to a multi-decade parade of reformsters asserting and assuming that raising student test scores would unlock a host of benefits for our students, our economy, our entire nation. But instead of proof, we've just had tautological research proving that students who do well in school do well in school., or evidence that your socioeconomic background is well-measured by the Big Standardized Test no matter what grade you're in. 

What we really need is research that asks the right question. This paper is not that.