The Core Knowledge Blog

“A perfectly equal school system is not likely to produce equal students,” notes Barron’s Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan in an unusually strong commentary titled Another Lost Generation. Labeling No Child Left Behind a failure he notes “a proper policy must require that all children have the opportunity to be educated up to their potential.”

“Testing has identified some schools where hope had vanished. It has galvanized a few states to take over administration of a few of their worst schools,” he notes. “But such takeovers also demonstrated how hard it is for even the best-intentioned bureaucrats to overcome years of professional neglect, decades of physical deterioration and generations of parental incapacity.”

Donlan isn’t merely throwing in his lot with NCLB bashers, however. Far from it. “Many teachers and their advocates have retreated behind a wall of denial,” he writes. “Some denounce high-stakes testing, as though conducting tests without providing consequences for failure would be more useful. Others denounce the tests themselves as too difficult, as though anything could be measured by a test that all students pass. And many denounce the tests, easy or hard, for demanding too much rote regurgitation of facts, as though facts were not the first necessary bricks for building an intellectual edifice.”

One wouldn’t expect to read such a strong, clear-eyed take on education in a paper that covers investing and business. But Donlan’s diagnosis hits the bulls-eye.

“Who has been fooling whom? It seems educators and politicians and parents and students have been fooling each other, and fooling themselves,” he concludes. “Public schools that mismeasure themselves are unlikely to produce real educational achievement. And schools that mismeasure student achievement, even on such a simple scale as graduation rate, are unlikely to solve their own problems.”