The debate we were having fifteen years ago about test-and-punish school reform has been raging once again in the past month since the NY Times‘ Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris, and Sarah Mervosh reported that standardized reading test scores among America’s children have fallen over the past decade. The reporters quoted advocates who believe our society ought to correct this matter by bringing back No Child Left Behind-style, test-and-punish school accountability.

Strategies for punishing so-called “failing” schools—the foundation of both President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and President Obama’s Race to the Top—have been soundly rejected by educational experts. Diane Ravitch recently reminded us about Campbell’s Law, which says that, “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Back in 2014, Harvard University testing expert Daniel Koretz published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, which detailed some of the ways —according to Campbell’s law—that our nation’s obsession with standardized testing had undermined students’ education—excessive and boring drilling on language arts and math, the subjects tested; narrowing the curriculum to emphasize those two subjects and forget about other important academic work; and even cheating by a few school leaders who figured out the correct answers and forced teachers to teach specifically to the test.

Panic this spring about reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress has resulted in calls to restore NCLB accountability schemes as though that would be a solution. On Monday of this week, however, Diane Ravitch confronted newfound panic over scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress by highlighting an Atlanta Journal Constitution article by two experts on reading, David Reinking and Peter Smagorinsky, who explain that panic over a so-called reading crisis is largely tied to the confusing way scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are reported: “(I)n 1990, NAEP officials did introduce four tiers of reading achievement: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. These levels were established solely using subjective judgment about what’s expected of children tested at a specific grade level. Then, they set equally subjective cut scores to establish boundaries between these four levels… Much confusion is… centered in interpreting whether ‘basic’ is acceptably normal or if it is reasonable to expect all students to be ‘proficient.’ Many commentators, some of whom have a vested interest in arguing that there is a reading crisis… have promoted the false idea that ‘proficient’ is grade-level reading, which it absolutely is not. Then, they wrongly argue that two-thirds of American students are reading below grade level by counting ‘basic scores as below grade level.”  Over the years, to correct this misinterpretation, reading experts have argued that “basic” is approximately a “C,” while “proficient” would at least be a “B.”

A new column, however,  by Ross Wiener in Monday’s NY Times, The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Nostalgia is Delusional, is the most stunning attack on the attempt to bring back test-and-punish public school accountability.

Wiener describes himself as the former “policy director for the Education Trust, one of the most influential education reform organizations in the country. I testified before Congress, built coalitions for standards-based reform, and published analysis to advance No Child Left Behind, genuinely believing it was the path to public schools that better served low-income students and students of color.”

Wiener has, however, undergone a transformation: “Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to (a commitment to) the standardized tests.”

He explains: “(T)here was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished?”  “Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not—the practical, civic, relational and developmental—was pushed to the margins.”

Today Wiener believes we are seeing the sad results of years of test-based school policy. “Earlier generations may have endured school that felt boring or disconnected because they trusted that adults and institutions know better. Many young people today do not share that trust, and they are not going to push aside their own questions of meaning and purpose on the assurance that compliance will eventually be rewarded. You cannot accountability-pressure your way to better educational outcomes when chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, misbehavior is common, students are disengaged and skeptical that school prepares them for the lives they want to lead, and teachers feel not just tired but (also) stripped of the professional trust that makes the work meaningful.”

Wiener concludes: “Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.”

Wiener’s reflection made me remember Possible Lives, my favorite book by the late UCLA professor of education, Mike Rose. Rose made a series of visits during a three year period in the 1990s to observe teachers working in public school classrooms in communities across the United States. He portrays teachers in all kinds of communities helping students inquire, explore, and enjoy learning. In the book’s final chapter, Rose reflects on the teachers he observed:

“To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal…  As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints—though not without times of confusion and defeat—and they had determined ways of organizing their classrooms that enabled them to honor their beliefs about teaching and learning… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.”  (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

I hope you will read Ross Wiener’s profound reflection on why test-and-punish school accountability went wrong and how our public schools will better serve students when our politicians stop defining a teacher’s job as the production of test scores.