Wonderful Vessels of Clay  
By Martin Harris

Consider this hypothetical: you’re in the pottery business, and it’s your task to take raw clay and shape it into reasonably well-(in)formed little chalices. Years ago, you accomplished this with a fairly low production cost per unit and a fairly high output quality standard, but in recent years your unit costs have gone way up while your reject percentages –"failed to meet the standard"—have likewise gone way up. Presently, the federal agency which monitors chalice quality reports that 2/3 of your output doesn’t meet the standard at various points along the production line, and therefore you’ve been prohibited from advertising your product as "excellent" any more. 

All of that describes the post-WWII history of public education, with the exception that the feds who monitor student achievement aren’t allowed to forbid educators from calling their students the product of "high standards" even though most of them aren’t. In fact, educators aren’t even required to publish, locally, the federal test results, and have been encouraged to go out and buy their own tests which seem to show a higher product quality. Here’s a pair of examples.

One comes from Junius Canitri, President of the Vermont School Boards Association, who last Thursday wrote an open letter to Vermont newspaper editors in which he spoke glowingly of "the achievement of our students", "accomplishment in math and reading", and "affording the high standard". He also wrote enthusiastically of Vermont’s first-in-the-nation small-class-size pursuit (true) as if it were the proximate cause of high student achievement (false) and which, in fact, is disproven by the actual Federal NAEP test numbers themselves, which, predictably, he chooses not to recite in his fairly long letter. Here they are, for example, in the 4th grade reading category, for 2005: Vermont students, 227 out of a possible 500, US average 217, meaning that about 2/3 of both groups have shown that they can’t make "proficient" which equates to functioning at grade levels. It’s worse when you look at the ethnic breakdown: Vermont as a statistically all-white state scores 227, but the US white 4th grader average is 228. Not great but a point better than Vermont. And yet Mr. Canitri describes his State’s schools’ chalice-output as excellent.

The other comes from Guy Darst, deputy editorial page editor emeritus for the Boston Globe, who wrote a similarly glowing description of Massachusetts’ schools’ chalice-output and argues that "the Bay State should build on its educational success". Let’s go to the numbers, again 2005 4th grad reading: Massachusetts, 231, US 217, or, racially, Massachusetts white students, 237, US 228. Massachusetts didn’t get much for its money ($11,681 per pupil in 2005) with 2/3 of its 4th graders unable to function at grade level, but it got marginally more than Vermont at $11,608 that same year. Like Vermont, Massachusetts went out and purchased, deployed, and publicized the results of its own locally preferred test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, but explains it by asserting that, as proof of equal testing rigor, "Massachusetts students usually do well on the NAEP". To Mr. Darst, it seems, 4th graders doing well means getting a 231 out of 500 and quietly ignoring a 67 percent chalice rejection rate. His adverbial choices go unchallenged.

Is it legitimate to compare students to clay vessels? Heck, the Old Testament had Jeremiah speaking thus of humans when he addressed the Kingdom of Judah, and The Apostle Paul did likewise in his second letter to the Corinthians. Horace Mann, that worshipped mid-19th century advocate of free public education, spoke far more harshly when he wrote of educating little savages, but whatever you may think of such as Horace Mann or, later, John Dewey, the educator who agued that schools should minimize student individuality and maximize collective consciousness, at least schools in their times produced students most of whom could pass achievement tests. "Excellent"? Probably not, but a lot better, 3-R-wise, than today’s.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights