Posted by amy at February 3rd, 2006

“Standardized tests and governmental standards are a reality, and they have value – very little of it having to do with education”

In our online discussion, Cindy, a fellow student, called me out on this, specifically “very little of it having to do with education.” I had thought about elaborating on this in the thread itself, but didn’t to wander too far away from focusing on learning objectives. I am happy to have the chance to expand on it a bit more on my blog.

I meant value as currency, as leading indicators, as allowing for correlation or comparison. And, that if we look at the arms and legs of the tests, we can see that they reach quite far.

I couldn’t tell you what was on the MCAS (Massachusetts’ standardized test for public schools), or how much they actually gauge what a student knows, but I could tell you approximately where a town stood in the rankings based on the market value of their homes. Well, I thought I could until I went looking for some numbers to back up my claim. I found a few surprises.

Of the schools that had 100% of their students pass the 2005 MCAS, 7/18 or 40% were charter schools in some of the poorest districts in Massachusetts, the other 60% were the wealthiest. The biggest surprise for me wasn’t that there were school districts like Dover-Sherborn on the top of the list (average home prices is $1,388,715.66 – would you pay $1.5m for a home with a crappy school system?) but that Boston Collegiate Charter and Codman Academy Charter were at the top of the list as well. Now, those two charter schools serve roughly the same neighborhood. While the average home price is $390,230.88, the number is deceiving, because about 60% of the population rent, and they take up about 1/3 of the space that a $400k house would go for, so for comparison sake we can say the actual home value is about $135,000.

Take away the charter schools though, and the list becomes predictable, with scores decreasing at about the same rate as the average home price. The public school serving the same neighborhoods as the charter schools are at the bottom of the list.

I’m not an economist or an education policy expert, but it would seem to me that town wealth isn’t exclusively tied to performance, and that it may be possible to design an economic development program aimed at revitalizing a community around a charter school’s success. You don’t have to spend $1.5 million to get your kid into a good school, you can look at real estate you wouldn’t normally consider.

There are thousands of other tangents we would could take with these numbers, we could look at MCAS scores as tied to school district budgets and principal bonuses vs. schools that need to be taken into receivership. But the point is that if we start to look at the ways the numbers matter in relation to other aspects of the community, then working to bring them up wouldn’t seem like such a hardship and rather than fighting the status quo, you could work effectively to improve it.