Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

On Aug. 4, I’ll be in New Orleans at the NCS4 conference—talking to about 400 men and women whose job it is to make sure tens of thousands of people can come to a game or a concert and leave in peace a few hours later. That is a complicated job. I look forward to hearing their stories.

I increasingly hear folks like Randi Weingarten and Diane Ravitch criticize America’s current experiments in education reform as “market-driven” or “corporate.” On some level, I understand what they mean. But on another level, it’s worth considering what kind of assumptions this language implies.

First of all, what makes a reform “market-driven”? Well, Weingarten and Ravitch are usually referring to the increasing use of student test-score growth to evaluate teachers; the dismissal of those teachers who are low-performing; and the opening up of more charter schools. And that’s fair on a superficial level. Education, like health care, does not lend itself to a free-market solution. And accountability and competition are indeed hallmarks of a free market.

But seriously now. Accountability and competition are more than just that. At their best, and that is a huge caveat, they are integral to how human beings function—which is why they exist at the heart of many institutions that we hold dear. Elections, for example, rely on accountability and competition. Does that make them bad? No. Does it make them vulnerable to gaming and in need of supervision? Yes.

Accountability and competition are also hallmarks of other things….like Sports, for example. Consider the evils of “corporate” high-school soccer and “market-driven” tee-ball. (In fact, it would be fun to see what would happen if you told a high-school football coach that he could not use touch downs to assess player performance—because, after all, the player cannot control the weather, the other team, the rest of his team, etc.)

More to the point, education, like health care, is not and never has been (and never will be) a free market. The use of this kind of rhetoric is calculated, but not remotely accurate.

For example, the vast majority of American teachers are not now (and never have been) subject to dismissal for a failure to improve student test scores. Even in DC, most teachers are still not evaluated based on test scores. They are evaluated by their principals and master educators. We do not consider that market-driven. (Although perhaps we should, since most private-sector employees are evaluated by their bosses as well.)

Charter schools do indeed inject more competition to the education system. But how many of our kids are actually in charter schools? About 5%, according to the Department of Education. More kids attend private schools.

So why all the anxiety about market-driven reforms? The fear is that these kinds of policies will eventually become common place. And it is true that charter schools and value-added evaluations are growing in practice every day. In 1999, only 2% of our kids attended charter schools.

But this kind of pre-emptive fear-mongering is not helping anyone. If we are to focus on what works in education—and stay very disciplined in looking for solutions—then we can’t rule out entire classes of ideas just because they have been effective in the private sector. After all, one thing this country still does better than any other is to generate productivity and innovation in large groups of people known as companies. These companies do a massive amount of research on basic human behavior: How do people work? What motivates them? How can we make employees happy? While it may feel good to reject this kind of knowledge, it is unwise.

What we need in this country is not market-based reforms or nonprofit-based reforms; what we are human-driven, evidence-based reforms.

Both sides of this debate have a tendency to latch on to policy agendas with very little regard for how real human beings actually function. And what we have found after decades of trying and failing is that no policy, no matter how well-intentioned, will work without considering the human beings who must implement it. Without measuring what actually works, what actually does not and listening to the teachers, parents, principals and most of all the students affected, we will just keep arguing in circles, with only the talking points changing.

Bloomberg’s Jane Williams interviews Marc Tucker, Linda Darling-Hammond and me about how U.S. schools compare to schools around the world. The link will be up for a little while at least right here.

Yesterday, the weather man in DC celebrated the “end” of the heat wave. It was 95 degrees at 5:00 pm, but I suppose it’s all relative.

At our house, this heat wave had us remembering the European heat wave of 2003, when we lived in France. If you’ve ever wondered: Would this heat be easier to bear if I lived in Paris? I have the answer! From the archives of Time Magazine:

Paris was not made for this kind of suffering. When it came, the heat choked this city like a wool scarf pulled tight over its pretty mouth. Starting on Aug. 4, the temperature, normally around 75 degrees F this time of year, began hitting 104. Paris, disdainful of air conditioning and never really comfortable with ice cubes, became a burned-out paradise, full of confused people roaming wide boulevards in search of air.

But that was later. This being France, everyone at first remained debonairly calm. The old men stayed at their posts in the cafes, stoically sipping espresso in the white, noon sun. Everything in me wanted to take action, hoard bottled water, build underground shelters. But only the slightest adjustments were made: wine and candles were taken outside to the Champ de Mars, and family dinners were held beneath the Eiffel Tower. Knowing how to live apparently means knowing that nothing will last and everything has happened before. ...

If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, you know what I would bring with me? Seriously, I would take all 5 volumes of the latest PISA results to a desert island and just read them. OK, so I would need food, water and an occasional cocktail. But I swear to God, every time I open up one of those reports I find something fascinating. I get distracted for an hour and then go back to what I was doing, wondering what else is in there that I don’t know about.

Consider Table IV.3.10 of Vol. IV. (I am not making this up! It’s like they actually don’t want us to read the report. We should make classified documents this hard to decipher; wikileaks would go out of business.)

Anyway, despite all the problems with testing, and I agree there are many, here is what principals in top-performing countries report about their use of standardized tests:

FINLAND: 96% of students are in schools that do standardized testing 1-5 times a year. (2% are in schools that do testing at least once per month.)

SOUTH KOREA: 97% of students are in schools that do standardized testing 1-5 times a year. (1% are in schools that do testing at least once per month.)

Here are the comparable numbers for the U.S.:

UNITED STATES: 95% of students are in schools that do standardized testing 1-5 times a year. (2% are in schools that do testing at least once per month.)

So what does this mean? That standardized tests correlate with high performance? No, they do not. It depends on the test—and a million other things. (It does mean that Diane Ravitch needs a new argument against testing.)

PISA Vol. IV also concludes that the regular use of standardized tests does correlate with equity in schools.

To be clear: Schools that use standardized tests regularly tend to have less disparity in outcomes based on income.

So in a country with devastating disparities in educational outcomes, we should probably pay attention to this paragraph before we do away with tests:

One explanation for the positive association between the prevalence of standardised tests and improved equity in school systems is that such tests provide schools with instruments to compare themselves with other schools. This, in turn, allows schools to observe the inequities among schools, which could be considered the first step towards redressing them. The results from PISA also show higher levels of socioeconomic equity in school systems that use achievement data to make decisions about the curriculum and track achievement data over time.

If you are enough of a nerd to want to join me on the desert island, Volume IV can be found here. I’ll bring the tequila.