Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

Citizens have a low opinion of Congress, but usually support their own Congressional representatives. Obviously, if everyone's satisfaction with their own representatives is justified, their judgments about Congress as a whole are not. Indeed, this is precisely the argument of the education establishment. "The closer parents are to the public schools, the more they approve of what the schools are doing. This is the education establishment's answer to the critics of public education.

Let me suggest a different explanation of the apparent inconsistency. Report cards are the main if not the only communication from school districts to parents. The questions I wish to raise are as follows: What are schools telling parents about the educational progress of their children? Are the schools providing candid if unpleasant information about pupils who are not achieving very well?

In my opinion, the public schools are not providing parents with candid assessments of pupil progress. I do not have systematic data on the issue, but would be astonished if the public schools were presenting parents with the unpleasant information about their children's low levels of educational achievement. First of all, most parties who release information do so in ways that enhance their own position. Politicians tell us about all the wonderful things they are doing for us, but seldom point out the costs or the negatives of their efforts allegedly on our behalf. Sellers tell us the good things about their products or services; we have to discover the negatives on our own. We have no reason to expect a different approach in education.

Suppose you are a public school teacher. If you tell parents: "Your child is not learning very much and will be unable to get a decent job or advanced education unless there is drastic improvement," what would happen? Parents would be concerned. Some would blame the school or the teacher. It wouldn't be the first time that the messenger of unpleasant news was treated as the cause of it. The fact is that teachers have ample reason to avoid candor on the subject when and where candor is most needed.

Even if candor were the norm, there are other important issues relating to report cards to be considered. Do the parents read and understand the report cards? What follow-up actions, if any, do they take? Are teachers available to discuss the significance of the report cards?

A few years ago, I tried to persuade some of our large city school districts to look into all of these issues. To put it mildly, they showed no interest whatsoever in pursuing the matter; an independent study of the problem is probably the only way to get the relevant facts on what the schools are telling parents about the educational progress of their children. In my opinion, this is one of the most important neglected educational issues of our time. One reason is that the evidence on the issue is critical to privatization issues. If parents are getting a favorable but unjustified assessment of the educational progress of their children, they are much less likely to be interested in alternatives to public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, or home schooling, to cite the most prominent ones. The parents who support these alternatives would probably receive much more legislative support if public schools provided realistic assessments of pupil progress.

Whether or not readers agree or disagree with my analysis, let me suggest a course of action that would shed some light on the issues. Despite widespread criticism of the practice, most schools use letter grades to inform parents about the educational progress of their children.

The most common practice is to utilize the following scale, perhaps with different wording.

A - Superior or outstanding achievement
B - Above average or satisfactory
C - Average, or acceptable achievement
D - Below average, improvement is essential
E - Failure, parental action is mandatory

Although the significance of the letter grades is characterized differently from district to district, the explanation just cited would probably serve in most districts. Note, however, that the letter grades can be, and often are, very misleading. For example, if an "A" means "outstanding in the class," a pupil who receives an "A" in one class might be entitled to only a "C" or even a "D" in a different class in a different school. Parents have no way of knowing the underlying significance of the letter grades. These facts underlie my suggestion for remedial action. Parents are urged to find out the distribution of letter grades in their children's classes, schools, and school districts. If, as is likely, the schools do not keep such records, you will have learned something important. After all, if an "A" is supposed to represent superior achievement, but everyone in the class or school is receiving an "A", there is reason to question its significance, or if nobody knows how many students receive "A's". The pupils in many schools will turn out to be like the children in Lake Woebegone, all of whom were above average. Similarly, this is something that state legislators should look into. The likelihood is that legislators will often find little or no difference between high and low achieving schools in the distribution of grades for educational achievement. Needless to say, we should consider the possibility of grade inflation in private as well as public schools, but whatever the facts are, they should be laid on the table.