What's a 'good' school? Parents have more choices, need more info

Texas is about to pass a bill giving parents up to $11,500 per child to spend at the school of their choice, writes Chad Aldeman. How should a savvy parent use that money? Parents can check the test scores of public schools, he writes. They also need reliable information on private schools' test scores to know which school is the best choice.

"Texas’ ESA proposal (like similar ones in West Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, and every other state except for Indiana)" doesn't require schools to tell parents about average test scores, he writes. Policy makers would like that information too.

Progressive parents obsess about finding a "good" school at Brooklyn playgrounds, writes school administrator Patrick Hunt, also known Cafeteria Duty, on Holly Korbey's Bell Ringer.

Many highly educated parents put "little value on academic achievement," writes Hunt.

Parents have trouble explaining why certain schools are considered the most desirable. "Because the principal is great, they’d say. Or because the teachers are great. Or, my friend loves it. Or, it’s very child-centered."

Not one parent ever brought up a school’s academics. Not a single one. Nothing about the curriculum. Nothing about the books students read. Nothing about instruction. And certainly never a word about the school’s test scores.

One school -- Hunt calls it the Union Street School -- is especially venerated. "A fellow dad whose daughter went there stated rather matter-of-factly that the school didn’t 'put much emphasis' on academics, focusing instead on creating curiosity and instilling a sense of social justice in their students," he writes. "There are more important things in a child’s education than tests," the other father said.

Hunt looked about the school's federally mandated "report card," and found Union Street had no test results. Apparently, so many parents had opted out of testing that there were no reportable results.

He started looking up the data: "A lot of the shiny schools in nice neighborhoods with slick websites that glowed with platitudes about child-centered learning and urban farming, and posted photos of racially diverse children, and which I suspected parents loved not only for those reasons but also because other parents who talked like them and dressed like them sent their kids there, too, were, in fact, academically middling."

Considering the demographics, schools were underperforming and, in some cases, "leaving behind critical groups of students, like students with disabilities or English Language Learners," he writes. Hunt also discovered other schools that were doing better than their student demographics would predict.

Hunt tried sharing the information with parents on the playground. They didn't want to hear it.

Some had "subscribed to the luxury belief that as long as your kid has heard his necessary 30 million words before he turns 3 and his mac ‘n cheese is Annie’s brand, he can caper his way through elementary school on nothing more than vibes," Hunt writes.

"Standardized tests are not perfect, most especially the ones administered by the states," he concludes. "They’re probably too long. They’re not as precise as they should be. They can be logistical headaches. The move to digitize them is questionable."

But they're the only reliable way for parents to know if their children are doing grade-level work, Hunt writes. "Positive school wide results on standardized tests (particularly when subgroups of students show growth, or when there’s growth from year to year), far from being evidence that the school has turned into a Dickensian abattoir of childhood innocence dominated by drill-and-kill instruction are, instead, a reliable indicator of an equitable and supportive school culture with high expectations, good teachers, competent leadership, and evidence-based curricula filled with lots and lots of science, history, math, literature and art."

Vibes aren't enough.