Parents' choice, public funding: Don't we need to know if kids are learning?

"Education savings accounts, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, tutoring, course choice, dual degrees, and microschools are transforming K–12," writes Rick Hess. Overwhelmingly, parents want what's best for their children, but are the children learning? How do we know? Should schools that receive public funds via vouchers or ESA funds be required to give state tests?

Anti-testers "argue that choice schools are already accountable to the parents who choose them," he notes. They worry that "testing mandates would compromise autonomy, constrain curricula, and homogenize instruction."

Education is "a public good," says Ashley Berner, who directs Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Education Policy. The reason we tax people for other people's children is that "it matters to me that your child knows how to read" and "it matters to you that my children understand the branches of government and where Mexico is on the map." It matters to all of us whether a high school graduate is prepared for his or her future. "Test scores are an important part" of assessing academic outcomes.

Hess agrees that "when families use taxpayer funds to attend a school, taxpayers have a legitimate interest in how those dollars are spent." But, beyond policing waste and fraud, he wonders what that should mean in practice.

In the short run, Berner favors requiring all state-funded choice participants "to take a nationally normed assessment and report the results."

The long-term goal should be designing better tests based on knowledge rather than skills, she says. "High-performing systems around the world — in the United Kingdom, Alberta, and elsewhere — already do this to good effect," and Louisiana has shown how to link assessments to high-quality curriculum.

Of course, choice participants who value their autonomy would be unlikely to accept a knowledge-based test linked to a knowledge-rich curriculum.

There's lots of evidence that test-based accountability improved student achievement, especially in math, in the No Child Left Behind era, writes Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat. "A handful of studies have found longer-term benefits from accountability, including higher high school graduation rates, college attendance, and adult income."

But No Child Left Behind became very unpopular, and many complained schools were teaching to the test, ignoring untested subjects, and cheating.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, passed by a bipartisan coalition in 2015, "scaled back federal pressure, even as regular testing continued," Barnum writes. "States only have to identify 5% of their worst Title I schools, whereas NCLB put virtually every school on notice with specific threatened sanctions."

"Accountability hawks" think relaxing the pressure is one reason "why test scores were stagnant before the pandemic and have fallen since," he writes. There's a "wave of nostalgia in the education world" for high-stakes testing and accountability. Do we go back?