A broader, bolder approach?

Last week, in full-page ads [pdf] in the New York Times and Washington Post, a task force commissioned by the Economics Policy Institute released “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.” The education internet has been buzzing ever since.

Here is what the report says:

Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning. Schools can—and have—ameliorated some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement. Improving our schools, therefore, continues to be a vitally important strategy for promoting upward mobility and for working toward equal opportunity and overall educational excellence.

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner.

The broader, bolder approach includes increased investment in early childhood education; health services like prenatal, dental, and optometric care; and after school and summer services.

Successful programs do not exclusively focus on academic remediation. Rather, they provide disadvantaged children with the cultural, organizational, athletic, and academic enrichment activities that middle-class parents routinely make available to their own children.

Lots of education thought leaders have gotten behind this. You can see the original task force list here, and you can become a cosigner of the statement here.

Critics of the statement contend that it is anti-accountability and lets school off the hook for their role in the education crisis.

Here’s a typical critique, from Eduwonk:

I’m all for many of the proposals it champions, better access to health care and other social services, better access to pre-kindergarten education for low-income kids, using time more effectively....those are all vitally important.

But, the conspicuous soft-pedaling of a focus on results and the explicit rejection that perhaps schools are even a substantial part of the educational problem is unsettling. It’s as though the debates and progress of the last 25 years didn’t happen at all.

But when I read it, I didn’t see results getting soft-pedaled at all. Here’s what the report says about accountability and assessment:

The public has a right to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement. However, test scores alone cannot describe a school’s contribution to the full range of student outcomes. New accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods, and they will be considerably more expensive than the flawed accountability systems currently in use by the federal and state governments.

I’ve talked about this before: it’s time to focus on figuring out what real accountability would look like. If we want to argue that standard testing is a bad measure of student achievement, we have to offer a real replacement. A scientific, carefully reasoned alternative.

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