School group keeps shilling for adults, not kids

Having already taken a chink out of Louisiana’s elementary and secondary education standards, let’s hope the Legislature reins in whatever might come of the Greek chorus it established that advocates doing more of the same.

At the tail end of the 2024 session, the Legislature established the Louisiana House K-12 Education Study Group, ostensibly to study regulations on public schools, testing requirements, curriculum in particular as it pertains to local input and decision making, requirements of teachers that includes but not limited to training and general workload, and federal funding. Instead, it largely has honed in on how to change things to meet the needs of adults, rather than of children.

The major tactic to implement this strategy has been to go after student testing, which is built around two purposes: as a marker to identify areas of excellence and improvement among students and also to evaluate teacher and school performance. The state-mandated testing regime chafes administrators and teachers because it shines sometimes an uncomfortable spotlight on their product. The state’s student body has experienced slow but steady improvement in nationally-normed achievement in large part because of this rigor, at the expense of exposing weaknesses while aggravating school boards, because their members feel politically vulnerable in instances when accountability measures reveal their district’s schools aren’t doing so well, and administrators and teachers feel professionally pressured at schools whose students don’t show adequate achievement, growth, or progression.

Making the testing regime less able to be used as an evaluation tool for accountability has emerged as the direction the group, whose members mostly are elected school board members, superintendents, principals, and teachers, has taken to ascribing negative aspects to it as related to children and defining an improved regime of testing as there being less of it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as acknowledged by Superintendent Cade Brumley earlier this month when the Department of Education announced reduced Louisiana Educational Assessment Program testing for grades three through eight – but in a smarter way by eliminating identified redundancies.

But the group wants less testing, period, its members whining at its latest meeting that testing causes too much “stress.” That complaint might be valid if they could guarantee the world into which children must interact and will eventually become adults within didn’t have stress attached to it. As that’s not the real world it does children a disservice to shield them from it. And in any event, how stressful is it to take a test, something which today’s policy-makers did in the past as children even if in not so much volume? You sit down, you take it, it’s over; beats having to sit through a boring lecture, huh?

Except it isn’t over for the adults, who then find themselves evaluated on how well they prepared students for that and a great many of whom loath that pressure to perform. It is this attitude, for example, that is reflected in one suggestion made in the latest group meeting about how the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, measuring literacy, should be given some time into the kindergarten school year rather than at the start, following the argument that some takers will have little literacy experience and their results show up poorly. Instead, it was argued that they should take mid-year after some exposure to literacy learning.

Yet that defeats the entire purpose of accountability on this issue, because it thwarts a genuine pretest of ability and muddles the treatment of education’s impact when captured by a subsequent posttest. As it is, that change would increase the chances that the treatment looks like it made a significant difference, because if insufficient effort that produces little impact occurs then incremental improvement over a shorter period (pretest vs. posttest) looks more impressive than if over a longer one – and thereby boosts claims that educators performed up to standard.

Several panelists kept up the drumbeat that testing timing and frequency allegedly didn’t inform much about student abilities – one going so far as to say LEAP data “doesn't mean anything” – as a method to distract from the fact that testing also served to evaluate educators and schools. And also that all this testing was the cause of a relatively low performance ranking, as if blaming the frequency of testing blood sugar levels for a diabetic caused the problem of diabetes, extending this weird logic to the conclusion that if you didn’t test for a malady, you wouldn’t have it.

In all, the panel continued its quest to make life easier on adults in the education system – whether it be to retain an elected post, move up the administrative food chain, or receive higher compensation if not keep a job – centered around their needs and aspirations instead of those of children to receive the best education possible. The latter is best accomplished by rigorous standards and accountability measures that keep educators in government monopoly schools motivated to succeed in helping children accomplish that.

Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the mission of this crowd. It may meet again prior to its required report issued at the start of December, but signs are whatever it produces to be considered as future legislation at this point needs to be taken with a grain of salt if quality education provision is the goal of public policy.