A ray of hope “Fewer graduates of elite Ivy League schools are choosing careers in finance,” reported the New York Times recently <more>

“It’s a great idea, but …” As a veteran observer of clever bureaucrats, I have come to admire a tactic often employed by the secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner <more>

When the 800-pound gorilla speaks … You may recall the firing of Shirley Sherrod <more>

Block the vote If you have doubted that the efforts of Republican state legislators to suppress minority voting are succeeding, ponder this news <more>

Can you believe it? Politico seems to have actually succeeded in shaming a K Street firm into dropping a valuable client <more>

Land o’ Likes As you may recall, I am not a fan of Facebook, fearing it has become a major encourager of self-involvement <more>

Cashing in by going public The sponsors of the new JOBS Act seem to have assumed that encouraging IPOs will help small businesses in their struggle to survive <more>

Under the radar The latest example of White House inattentiveness comes courtesy of the General Services Administration <more>

A bad argument The New York Review of Books seems to have embraced Diane Ravitch’s campaign against public school reform <more>

Koch d’etat The Koch brothers, you may have heard, have tried to oust the leadership of the CATO Institute <more>

Michael ♥ Lloyd If you were one of those liberals flirting with the notion of a third party headed by Michael Bloomberg, consider this recent headline from the New York Times <more>

Pick your poison One error that some school reformers make is to place too much emphasis on testing <more>

Never look a gift exposé in the mouth If you wonder why I beat the drum so constantly for better media coverage of government, here’s a quote from Robert Gates about his time at the Pentagon <more>

The great “Great Divergence” As we all know, income inequality in this country has been growing for a long time <more>

Missing in action In all the coverage of the shooting rampage by the soldier in Afghanistan, and the role that his repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan may have played in it <more>

The liberal Republicanosaurus For those too young to recall that there were once more than one or two liberal Republicans, I can assure that they actually existed in considerably greater number <more>

A challenge for the media For all his faults, Barack Obama is obviously the best presidential candidate <more>

The post Koch d’etet… The liberal Republicanosaurus… Romney’s attack machine… appeared first on Washington Monthly.

June 5th Washington Monthly Event: “Education’s Next Big Test”

Introduction: The Next Wave of School Reform

By Paul Glastris

Transcontinental Education

Soon, nearly every state in the union will have the same demanding standards for what students should know. If history is any guide, a burst of innovation won’t be far behind.
By Robert Rothman

A Test Worth Teaching To

The race to fix America’s broken system of standardized exams.
By Susan Headden

Grand Test Auto

The end of testing.
By Bill Tucker

Editors: Paul Glastris, John Gravois
Reporting and research: Laura M. Colarusso
Publisher: Diane Straus Tucker
Illustrators: Peter and Maria Hoey

This special report was made possible with the generous support of
the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The post Special Report: The Next Big Test appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Discovery Channel recently ran an hour-long documentary on the Costa Concordia disaster. If the name of the ship’s owner, Carnival Cruise Lines, was mentioned, it was so sotto voce as to go undetected by my ear.

A ray of hope

“Fewer graduates of elite Ivy League schools are choosing careers in finance,” reported the New York Times recently. The Wall Street Journal, however, ran this headline: “On Campus, Wall Street Still Carries Its Cachet.” But the evidence offered by the Journal confirms that the Times has it right. The University of Pennsylvania reports that the proportion of its graduates going into financial services declined from 38 percent in 2008 to 33 percent in 2011; at Harvard the decline was from 28 percent to 17 percent; Dartmouth from 23 percent to 12 percent. The trend may be modest, but I still find it encouraging. Maybe this last recession will have a similar effect to the Great Depression. “In the 1920s an ambitious young man headed for Wall Street,” observed historian Robert McElvaine. “During the New Deal, though, he went into government.”

At one point in the 1930s, in one section of the Department of Agriculture, fifteen of the twenty-six lawyers were graduates of Harvard Law School. Fifteen of twenty-six! The Department of Agriculture!

“It’s a great idea, but…”

As a veteran observer of clever bureaucrats, I have come to admire a tactic often employed by the secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner. When the White House is considering reforms that he does not favor—and major reform is something Geithner rarely embraces—he doesn’t say, “This is a terrible idea and I’m against it.” Instead, he begins by praising the proposal and its proponents: “It’s a great idea, really brilliant of you fellows to think of it.” Then, seemingly almost as an afterthought, he adds, “Have you considered that there’s just a chance that it could lead to a Wall Street meltdown?”

It is a technique worthy of Sir Humphrey, the wily civil servant played by Ni -gel Hawthorne on the British television series Yes Minister.

When the 800-pound gorilla speaks…

You may recall the firing of Shirley Sherrod. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, dismissed her hours after a video purporting to show her making a racist remark was posted by the late right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart. The White House denied having been involved. Vilsack agreed, saying he had made the decision on his own. It later turned out that Sherrod was innocent. The Breitbart video had been edited to give a false impression of what she said.

Recently, 2,000 pages of internal e-mails concerning the event were released by the administration. In the eighth paragraph of a Washington Post story about the messages there is what I suspect is a major clue as to what really happened, and maybe even the smoking gun. When informed of the video by an official at Agriculture, Reid Cherlin, then a White House spokesman, responded by inquiring what USDA was going to say about the matter and asking, “Has she been fired? I’ll alert folks here.”

At some agencies—Treasury is an example—frequent contact with the White House is the norm, and such a message would barely cause a ripple, let alone a wave. But in a place like Agriculture, where contact from Pennsylvania Avenue is relatively rare, words like Cherlin’s can rocket around the agency with incredible speed. As the message is repeated from one person to another, there is a temptation to make it sound more and more dramatic, so that gradually “Has she been fired?” will be transformed into “The White House wants her out of here pronto.”

Block the vote

If you have doubted that the efforts of Republican state legislators to suppress minority voting are succeeding, ponder this news. From the time when Florida’s new election law took effect in July of last year through late March of this year, 81,471 fewer people have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 elections. This is the troubling finding of an analysis by the New York Times, reported by Michael Cooper and Jo Craven McGinty.

Among the law’s burdens is a requirement that groups conducting registration drives must “turn in completed forms within 48 hours or face fines.” This threat of being penalized for not meeting this absurdly unrealistic deadline has been so discouraging that groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters have abandoned their registration campaigns in the state.

Can you believe it?

Politico seems to have actually succeeded in shaming a K Street firm into dropping a valuable client. This rare feat was apparently accomplished by its revelation that the Livingston Group—composed of former Republican Congressman Bob Livingston, former Democratic Congressman Toby Moffett, and Tony Podesta, brother of a former aide to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—had tried to justify the Egyptian military’s raid on NGOs that were trying to encourage democracy. It’s good that Livingston has finally seen the light. Still, the group must have had a very strong stomach to spend four years not only representing the current military government of Egypt but the Hosni Mubarak regime that preceded it. And dropping the client seems to have been less a result of conscience and more of being found out.

Land o’ Likes

As you may recall, I am not a fan of Facebook, fearing it has become a major encourager of self-involvement. Confirmation of my concern comes from a study reported by Damien Pearse in the Guardian which finds “a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most ‘toxic’ elements of narcissistic personality disorder,” including “self-absorption, vanity, superiority, and exhibitionistic tendencies.”

Further evidence that Facebook encourages relationships that are more superficial than real comes from a story in the New York Times about a therapist who committed suicide not long ago. One of his associates observed, “I looked at his Facebook page recently … he had over a thousand friends. But there are acquaintances and there are friends, and I think he probably had a lot of acquaintances and not a lot of real friends.”

Cashing in by going public

The sponsors of the new JOBS Act seem to have assumed that encouraging IPOs will help small businesses in their struggle to survive. But what these initial public offerings of stock usually represent is a “cashing in” by the owners of companies that are already successful. For example, the most recent IPO you’ve probably heard about is Facebook’s.

By the way, Fortune’s Allan Sloan explains that the reason only 5 percent to 7 percent of Facebook’s shares are being offered is to “create an initial shortage of stock so that the share price runs up when public trading” starts. “It’s not enough for Mark Zuckerberg & Co. to have created an amazing, incredibly valuable company,” continues Sloan. “They feel the need to use this tacky market trick to drive up Facebook’s value even more.”

Under the radar

The latest example of White House inattentiveness comes courtesy of the General Services Administration, which managed to create a scandal by squandering $823,000 on a conference of its employees at a luxury casino outside of Las Vegas. Why, you may ask, should the White House bother keeping an eye on the GSA? Because it does the purchasing and leasing for the rest of the federal government, and does so far from the media limelight, corruption is a constant danger.

In a properly functioning administration, the Office of Management and Budget serves as the president’s eyes and ears, providing early warnings of trouble down below in the executive branch. I had hoped that the OMB under Jack Lew would do a better job at this than it did under Peter Orszag, who seems to have devoted himself primarily to making sure he looked good in the books being written about the Obama White House. But the first signs are not auspicious—there was no early warning of trouble at the GSA.

The Sherrod case, by the way, is another example of the tendency of the White House to become involved in an agency’s affairs only when the agency gets in the news. The sole exceptions are State, Treasury, the national security agencies, and those that are involved in carrying out programs sponsored by the administration.

A bad argument

The New York Review of Books seems to have embraced Diane Ravitch’s campaign against public school reform. It has published articles by her in back-to-back issues this year. In the March 8 issue, she argues that

The “no excuses” reformers maintain that all children can attain academic proficiency without regard to poverty, disability, or other conditions, and that someone must be held accountable if they do not. That someone is invariably their teachers.

Nothing is said about holding accountable the district leadership or the elected officials who determine such crucial issues as funding, class size, and resource allocation. The reformers say that our economy is in jeopardy, not because of growing poverty or income inequality or the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, but because of bad teachers. These bad teachers must be found out and thrown out. Any laws, regulations, or contracts that protect these pedagogical malefactors must be eliminated so that they can be quickly removed without regard to experience, seniority, or due process.

This magazine has been part of the reform movement since 1969. We have criticized the unions for protecting bad teachers. But we have never said that teachers alone should be held accountable for the failures of public education, and we have never contended that poverty and disability have nothing to do with these failures. We have also criticized second-rate administrators and the responsible elected officials. Indeed, Ravitch’s portrayal of the reform movement is close to being false—and is given a smidgeon of truth by the Johnny-come-lately Republicans who have only recently joined the cause of school reform because they are out to destroy the union movement. (I can remember how hard it used to be to get conservatives interested in reforming public education—their favorite solution to its problems was to provide vouchers so students could attend private school instead.)

Ravitch cites Finland’s teachers as being so good that they never have to be fired. This might be true here if we had Finland’s rigorous standards for training and hiring teachers, but in our public schools, hiring has largely been based on “education” credits or degrees obtained, mostly, from second-rate teacher’s colleges (now often called Somethingorother State) where methodology is emphasized, subject matter is not, and passing grades are far too easily obtained. These standards exist because teacher’s colleges and teacher’s unions have advocated and defended them.

Koch d’etat

The Koch brothers, you may have heard, have tried to oust the leadership of the CATO Institute. CATO’s policies agree with the Kochs’ right-wing positions 80 percent of the time. But that’s not enough for the Koch brothers. They want total control. This mirrors what has happened to the Republican Party today. You have to be right wing all the way.

Michael ♥ Lloyd

If you were one of those liberals flirting with the notion of a third party headed by Michael Bloomberg, consider this recent headline from the New York Times. “With Visit to Goldman, Bloomberg Says, Chin Up.” The accompanying story by Michael Grynbaum notes that Bloomberg, “who has earned billions on Wall Street, has built his reputation as a staunch defender of its culture.” I suspect there’s another factor involved. It is that much of the economy of Bloomberg’s city has come to depend on the surplus wealth generated by the Wall Street money machine. After all, that money supports the value of Manhattan real estate, not to mention all the high-end restaurants—and for most of us outsiders, most restaurants in New York seem high end—as well as the worlds of art, fashion, and private education.

Pick your poison

One error that some school reformers make is to place too much emphasis on testing, even when it takes into account different student backgrounds. Consider the case of a teacher who was good enough to be immediately rehired by the excellent Fairfax County, Virginia, school system after she had been dismissed in the District of Columbia primarily because of her students’ poor test scores. I believe evaluation of classroom performance by principals, other teachers of proven ability, and, in the case of secondary schools, by students themselves should weigh equally with test results. In an article in the April issue of the Atlantic , Jonathan Alter reports that the Chicago schools have found that students are the most reliable evaluators. Come to think of it, I bet you knew who your good teachers were and which ones were really lousy.

What is ironic is that I’m sure reformers came to overemphasize testing precisely because unions had been so loud in characterizing other methods—including evaluation of classroom performance by principals and unbiased and qualified teachers or by surveys of student opinion—as being too “subjective.” Testing seemed to answer the problem by being objective.

Never look an exposé gift horse in the mouth

If you wonder why I beat the drum so constantly for better media coverage of government, here’s a quote from Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense, about his time at the Pentagon: “You know, in 4 1/2 years [at the Pentagon] I never had a line outside my office of senior executives coming … to tell me all the problems in their service or in their organization. Some of the biggest problems that I acted on were first brought to my attention by an inquiry from Congress or an article in the press. I found out about [deplorable conditions at] Walter Reed from a series in the Washington Post by Dana Priest…. I found out about the problem with the lack of armored vehicles in Iraq through a USA Today story.”

Gates goes on to offer this advice to other agency heads: “So I would say when there is an article critical of us … don’t go into a defensive crouch … maybe you’ve just been handed a gift to solve a problem you didn’t know existed.”

My lament is that there are fewer and fewer Dana Priests in the media, as the industry fixates more and more on the political significance of the day’s Big Story. By the way, do you share the mixture of boredom and desperation that I feel as that story is discussed on cable news by the same talking heads making the same predictable comments, rarely if ever contributing a fresh fact?

The great “Great Divergence”

As we all know, income inequality in this country has been growing for a long time. The latest evidence: in 2010 the top 1 percent of taxpayers captured 93 percent of the additional income created over the previous year. Thirty-seven percent of it went to 0.01 percent, households with average annual incomes of $23.8 million. These facts come from studies reported by Steven Rattner and Harold Meyerson in op-eds in the Times and the Post.

For a brilliant account of how and why this nation has become more and more unequal, I recommend The Great Divergence, a new book by Timothy Noah. One study he cites shows that from 1948 to 2005, “under Democratic Presidents, the biggest income increase went to people in the bottom 20th percentile,” but “under Republican Presidents … the pattern was precisely the opposite.”

Under the Democrats, Noah finds that incomes grow and become more equal simultaneously. In other words, the economic pie becomes larger for everyone at the same time that the slice going to the bottom 95 percent gets bigger. The Republicans’ current complaint about class warfare seems to come down to the fact that, though they have done well under the Democrats, they’re mad because the rest of us did proportionally better.

Noah identifies Bryce Harlow, who worked in both the Eisenhower and Nixon White Houses but spent most of his career as the top Washington lobbyist for Proctor and Gamble, as a prime mover in the anti-equality conservative revival that became increasingly powerful from the 1970s on, coming perilously close to proving Harlow’s contention that “when business really tries, when it is fully unified and raring to go, it almost never loses a big battle in Washington.”

Missing in action

In all the coverage of the shooting rampage by the soldier in Afghanistan, and the role that his repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan may have played in it, I did not see anyone mention a crucial fact that has been noted before in this column: at any one time, there are fewer than 100,000 combat troops in the U.S. military. So when you read that we have 500,000 soldiers, you get a false impression that the combat deployments are spread among them. In fact, it’s the same 100,000 who go back again and again.

It is also a painful comment on the lack of military experience among journalists that I think this column is the only place where the following fact could be found: draftees had to serve just one year in Vietnam, including time in combat. When they got on that plane for home, they knew they were safe. In the last decade, whenever soldiers have gotten on that plane, it has been with the haunting awareness that they almost certainly will be back.

The liberal Republicanosaurus

For those too young to recall that there were once more than one or two liberal Republicans, I can assure that they actually existed in considerably greater number. When I arrived in Washington in the 1960s there were five Republicans who, more often than not, voted on the liberal side: Jacob Javits, Kenneth Keating, Clifford Case, Hugh Scott, and Thomas Kuchel. And there were seven other Republicans, like Margaret Chase Smith and John Sherman Cooper, who occasionally voted with the liberals. When Robert Kennedy, who had replaced Keating in the Senate, was shot in 1968, Nelson Rockefeller appointed a liberal Republican House member, Charles Goodell, to succeed him. Goodell would later marry my neighbor, Patricia Goldman, who in the 1970s happened to be the executive director of the Wednesday Club, a group that included about thirty liberal House Republicans. There was also a Wednesday Club in the Senate. When Olympia Snowe retires at the end of this year, Susan Collins will be the only remaining member.

A challenge for the media

For all his faults, Barack Obama is obviously the best presidential candidate. And the Democrats in Congress, for all their faults, are clearly better than their Republican counterparts. This should mean that the result of this year’s election will be a Democratic landslide. But a recent study reported in the New York Times concludes there is such a small percentage of voters in play that the election could be easily swayed either way. There is a danger that the Romney attack machine will do to Obama what it so effectively did to Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum. The challenge to the media is to refuse to let itself or the public be fooled in the process so that, by the morning of Election Day in November, the relative merits of the candidates and their parties will be crystal clear.

The post Tilting at Windmills appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The interests of U.S. corporations seem to be gradually de-coupling from those of the country at large. A little-remarked-upon aspect of this slow divorce is the declining engagement of corporate titans in civic matters. In most medium-sized cities, for instance, the major banks have long since been bought up by Wall Street goliaths, and the CEOs who once led local civic boards and charities have been replaced by itinerant vice presidents less inclined or able to involve themselves in local affairs.

Yet as recently as the 1990s, the heads of Fortune 500 companies like Procter & Gamble, Kodak, and RJR Nabisco were energetic players in important policy debates, most notably the school reform movement that began in the ’80s and culminated in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001. As the American public education system’s biggest customers, major U.S. companies had strong reasons for wanting schools to do a better job. They needed graduates with stronger math and reading skills to keep up with the more technologically sophisticated work being done on factory floors and in back offices. And they needed good local public schools in the metro areas where they were headquartered to lure the best professional talent.

And so, when progressive-minded governors were pressing their legislatures to impose higher academic standards and high-stakes tests on the local schools, the CEOs had their backs. And those governors who weren’t on board had the CEOs in their faces. The corporate chieftains supported President Bill Clinton when he tried, unsuccessfully, to make federal aid to the states contingent on reform; then they backed George W. Bush’s successful effort to do so via NCLB.

In the last decade, however, the CEOs’ interest and engagement in school reform has waned. Experts who have noticed this trend—people such as Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, Robert Schwartz of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Susan Traiman, former director of public policy at the Business Roundtable—offer several explanations. The tenure of the average CEO is shorter, and the ever-increasing demands for quarterly results have left little room for long-range thinking and outside activities. But most of all, with labor markets globalizing and nearly all economic growth occurring overseas, chief executives know that the economic strength of their enterprises simply isn’t as dependent as it once was on the American workforce.

As the CEOs have increasingly disengaged from school reform, a new breed of businessmen, with a different mentality, has involved itself: high-tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on the West Coast, and hedge fund managers and other Wall Street types in the East. Where the CEOs were pragmatic managers, bent on fixing the public schools as many of them had reengineered their own giant enterprises—by instituting better systems of accountability—the high-tech and Wall Street guys are more entrepreneurial and libertarian in their orientation, more disdainful of bureaucracy. They’ve put their money and energy into promoting charter schools, vouchers, and other “disruptive” interventions aimed at creating alternatives to—or perhaps overthrowing—the existing order.

Yet even as charter schools have expanded, the standards-and-testing model of reform continues to advance, thanks to some under-the-political-radar work by savvy state leaders, a few foundations, and the Obama administration. As our special report in this issue explains, a demanding new set of common standards, and new tests aligned to them, will soon be rolled out in nearly every state in the country, with the aim of cultivating the kind of higher-order-thinking skills Americans need if the country is to compete in the global economy.

To succeed, this new wave of school reform will require smart and energetic follow-through from state governments and ongoing support from Washington. Yet predictably, these reforms are already meeting resistance from some Tea Party conservatives and liberals allied with the teacher’s unions. Now would be a good time for Fortune 500 CEOs to step in. Problem is, there seems to be less and less reason for them to give a damn.

The post The Twilight of the Civic-minded CEO appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Caryn Voskuil first reported for duty at Washington, D.C.’s Charles Hart Middle School in 2009, she was a twenty-two-year-old first-time teacher from Green Bay, Wisconsin. With her head of long, fiery red hair, she looked so out of place in the predominantly black institution that one of her students asked, in apparent seriousness, whether she was a leprechaun. A struggling school in one of the capital’s poorest neighborhoods, Hart had a reputation for violence, mismanagement, and low test scores: in 2008, only 17 percent of its students could read at grade level. But in Voskuil’s three years at the school, Hart has made a modest turnaround: its test scores have begun inching up. For her part in that improvement, Voskuil—now a seasoned hand in the classroom—has been deemed a “highly effective teacher ” and rewarded a substantial bonus. What’s puzzling about Voskuil, and about American education today, is how conflicted she feels about what it means to be “highly effective.”

Consider two different weeks in the life of Voskuil’s classroom: early this March, she and her sixth-grade English students were making their way through a slim novel called Seedfolks. The book tells the story of a young Vietnamese immigrant girl in Cleveland who furtively plants six lima beans one day in a trash-strewn city lot. At first her neighbors spy on her with unalloyed suspicion. But once they realize what she’s doing—that she isn’t stashing drugs, money, or a weapon—they begin to feel responsible for keeping her seedlings alive. By the end of the book, the rat-infested lot has become a community garden.

“The value of the way I am teaching this week,” said Voskuil, “is that kids are falling in love with books. They’re making important connections between ideas and having this emotional connection with the narrators. They also get the satisfaction of starting and finishing an entire book, which is something many of them have never done.”

And yet whenever Voskuil spends time teaching a novel—or grammar and syntax, for that matter—she says she feels a vague twinge. “I have the sense that this is not a meaningful use of my time,” she says. “I have that sense because it’s not going to be on the test.”

The test in question—a standardized exam called the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS), made up almost entirely of multiple-choice questions—was coming up in early April. And so the week after she taught Seedfolks, Voskuil’s teaching style underwent a dramatic change. She began by physically rearranging the classroom: the students who had scored just below the “proficient” level on earlier tests were brought front and center; the students who had scored “below basic” were clustered in a small group near the window; and the few students who were already on record as proficient lined the perimeter, their desks facing the wall so they could work quietly on their own. Like a politician who spends all of her time in swing states, Voskuil wanted to concentrate on the students who were on the cusp.

Working within a tight agenda, with five-minute intervals marked by a stopwatch, Voskuil began drilling the group. Together, the students read aloud an eleven-paragraph text called “Penguins Are Funny Birds.” Then they answered multiple-choice questions such as “According to the article, how do penguins ‘fly through the water’? A .) They use their flippers to swim. B.) They dive from cliffs into the sea. C.) They are moved by ocean currents. D.) They glide across the ice on their bellies.”

And why, Voskuil asked, is it important to read the italicized introduction that always accompanies such text passages? Because it’s a summary, the group responded.

Finally, Voskuil handed out her students’ scores from previous exams—eliciting reactions that ranged from apathy to sighs to celebration—and asked them to write down their “score goals” for the upcoming test. Remember, she told the sixth graders, “we are working toward a 3/3 on our DC CAS writing rubric.”

Voskuil hates teaching like this. It’s not that she fails to see the point, exactly. She knows that all this narrow drilling has, in fact, helped elevate her students’ scores (though they are still very low) in the three years since she has been teaching. And she recognizes the test’s value as a measure of some essential skills, and as a guarantor of her school’s and her own accountability. But the assessments confine and dumb down her teaching. “You are not even allowed to be a teacher when they are testing,” she says. “You are a drill sergeant.”

In other words, Caryn Voskuil hates what has come to be known pejoratively as “teaching to the test.” She’s not alone. This kind of instruction fundamentally degrades the whole project of teaching and learning, many believe. It inevitably subjugates higher-order thinking—the kind that comes with, say, learning about character development and narrative logic, stretching one’s vocabulary, and becoming familiar with common themes—to the coarse business of pattern recognition, mimicry, and rule following. This is a lament many Americans have come to take for granted in the years since the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) was passed. Even reformers who believe in the broader project of standards and accountability seem to regard the matter of narrow-minded test prep as an embarrassing fly in the ointment.

Framing the problem of modern assessment this way makes perfect sense—until you consider that a couple of the most elite and highly regarded institutions of American secondary education involve a ton of what can only be described as teaching to the test. Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses are essentially yearlong exercises in test prep. Yet you rarely hear anyone complain about them as such. Why?

The difference lies in the tests themselves, and the kind of preparation they demand. A run-of-the-mill standardized exam like the DC CAS is a test of “basic skills.” It asks students to do things like find the main idea of a text using a series of multiple-choice questions. An Advanced Placement test, by contrast, asks students to do things like analyze and interpret texts, construct logical explanations, and put facts in context, using a mix of multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. All year, a student in AP American History is told what to expect on the final standardized exam: she knows she will need to become knowledgeable about a certain set of events spanning a certain period of time; she knows that memorizing a bunch of dates won’t really help her, and that being able to explain cause and effect will. It’s not that one model encourages “teaching to the test,” and the other doesn’t. It’s that one model causes shallow learning to crowd out the deep, and the other doesn’t.

In America, high-caliber tests like AP exams are usually the province of elite, high-achieving students on the college track. And so you might think that this two-tier assessment system is an inevitable result of inequality—that underprivileged kids wouldn’t have a prayer on these more demanding tests. Yet the industrialized nations that consistently outshine the United States on measures of educational achievement—countries like Singapore and Australia—have used such assessments for students across the educational and socioeconomic spectrum for years. Although some are multiple-choice tests, most are made up of open-ended questions that demand extensive writing, analysis, and demonstration of sound reasoning—like AP tests. “There is no country with a consistent record of superior education performance that embraces multiple-choice, machine-scored tests to a degree remotely approaching our national obsession with this testing methodology,” says Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and an expert on testing. “They recognize that the only way to find out if a student can write a competent twenty-page history research paper is to ask that the student write one.” In other words, the kind of knowledge you can measure with a multiple-choice test is ultimately not the kind of knowledge that matters very much.

For that reason, experts have for years pleaded for the U.S. to adopt the kinds of tests that mea -sure and advance higher-order skills for all students. You won’t be surprised to hear they ’ve been frustrated. Part of the reason why they haven’t gotten their way is economic. Viewed in a certain light, “basic skills tests” are in fact just “cheaply measurable skills” tests. According to Tucker, superior assessments cost up to three times more than a typical state accountability test. Quite simply, scoring essay questions and short answers is expensive.

The other big problem is that the American testing market is fragmented. If there were some unified, standard curriculum across states—like an AP course in “What You Need to Know by the End of Third Grade”—then states would be able to pool their resources to pay for a worthwhile test they could all share, and test makers would be able to set up economies of scale, bringing prices down. The rest of the industrialized world operates much like this: countries examine their students to see how well they have mastered a certain standard nation-al curriculum. For various political reasons, we do not have a standard national curriculum. And so we have tests like the DC CAS, which establish a de facto curriculum in schools like Hart—a curriculum of “basic skills.”

Having said all that, here’s some astonishing news: quietly, over the past few years, forty-five American states plus Washington, D.C., have been working to establish something called the common core standards in math and English. While not a unified national curriculum, the common core will lay down a set of high, unified standards—rubrics that define what students should be able to know and do by, say, the end of third grade. Those standards will be enough to defragment the American testing market. With them will come a set of completely new, interactive, computerized tests that promise to be much like what you’d find in Singapore or Australia or an AP classroom—exams that test higher-order thinking by asking students to show, in a variety of different ways, whether they have mastered a set of working concepts. If this sounds like the kind of thing that might actually debut around the time we all drive electric cars, think again: these new assessments will start field testing next year, and are due to land in most American classrooms in 2014.

Most of what you know about school testing is about to change. That much is relatively certain. What remains to be seen is whether that change will be so dramatic that it overloads the current system.

American schoolchildren have been taking achievement tests for decades. In the 1950s, they used their well-sharpened number 2 pencils on some -thing called the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, which is still in use and is almost exclusively multiple choice. Tests of this period were of the low-stakes variety—indeed, they usually weren’t required at all—and they were “norm referenced,” meaning that students were rated as they compared to each other. (Nancy was in the 90th percentile, Susie in the 70th, and so on.) When the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, U.S. schools came under pressure to up their game. The Elementary and Secondar y Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the precursor to No Child Left Behind, focused federal funding on poor schools with low-achieving students. Meanwhile, there was a growing feeling among the public that all students should be striving for well-defined learning goals and be tested on that basis. Some of this demand for data on students’ achievement was met by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, popularly known as the Nation’s Report Card, which was first administered in 1969. The NAEP measured just a sampling of students, and it didn’t break out state results as it does now, but it marked a trend toward using tests to monitor performance.

Worries about the caliber of the nation’s schools cropped up again in the mid-1970s when the College Board revealed that average SAT scores of American students had been falling since the mid-1960s. The public started to demand proof that schools were doing their jobs, and the states responded by requiring students to take minimal competency tests in order to graduate from high school. These so-called exit exams set several important precedents: they started a trend toward more accountability; they led to more statewide testing; and they began a shift away from measuring students’ performance relative to each other and toward a new regime of measuring how well students individually met strict standards. In psychometric terms, norm-referenced tests were giving way to “criterion-referenced” tests.

Yet, for political reasons—mostly in the form of resistance by local school boards, teacher’s unions, and parents—the bar for passing these exit exams was almost universally low. According to Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, no state before 1990 administered an exit exam that even reached the ninth-grade level.

The ineffectiveness of these tests became obvious in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, the landmark federal study that warned of a rising tide of mediocrity in the nation’s schools. A number of states responded to the report by pushing for higher standards and mandating tests. Then, in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton nudged the movement along further with legislation that gave grants to state and local governments to set new standards and create tests to measure how well students were meeting them. Most states took advantage of the grants, but the legislation provided no mechanisms to punish schools that failed to make progress. To the extent that there was accountability, it was unevenly adopted by the states.

That changed in 2001 when President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law, under which, for the first time, the federal government itself was demanding that school districts be held responsible for the performance of their students. The tests that gauged this performance measured minimum competency, and they required states to show that their stu -dents were making yearly progress toward the goal of becoming proficient. They also led to a fundamental change—many would say for the worse—in the relationship between testing and instruction. Whereas the original goal of achievement tests was to improve instruction by providing educators with useful information, says Daniel Koretz, an assessment expert with the Har vard Graduate School of Education, the new goal was to improve instruction by holding someone accountable for results. Koretz calls this shift “the single most important change in testing in the past half century.”

NCLB has had some successes. Because it requires states to break down data among racial and other demographic groups, it has identified significant achievement gaps, and in most states those gaps are narrowing. It deser ves credit for inducing broad gains in achievement in the key subjects of reading and math (even as it crowds out other subjects), and it has encouraged teachers to use data to shape instruction. But more than ten years after the law ’s passage, 50 percent of schools are not making the Adequate Yearly Progress required by the law.

The greatest drawback of NCLB, meanwhile, is the one that so unnerves Caryn Voskuil: the tests it spawned ask students to restate and recall facts rather than to analyze and interpret them. It turns out that this is largely a legacy problem: because the stakes of standardized tests in America before NCLB were historically very low, states had no interest in paying much for them. And when those stakes got higher and states did need measures of accountability, they simply used or replicated the cheap tests they already had. They did so, in part, because each state had its own standards, and thus needed its own tests. That fragmented demand, along with the need for lightning-fast scoring, led to a shortage of experts to build the tests, as well as downward pressure on the profit margins of testing companies. The troubles in the industry, according to Thomas Toch, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, created a strong incentive for states and testing contractors to write tests that measure largely low-level skills.

When President Obama took office in 2009, he inherited all the flaws of NCLB and standardized testing. But just as frustration with the law was reaching its height, he was also handed an opportunity: the common core movement, an initiative of state governors and the heads of large school systems, was guiding the states toward uniform academic standards, thus solving one of the biggest obstacles to improving tests and raising achievement. Using the vast pool of money established by the 2009 federal stimulus package, Obama prodded the movement along. Specifically, he allocated $330 million for the states to design a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, nationwide test. In laying out this challenge, the administration established the following guidelines: the tests should be aligned to the new high standards; they should measure deeper learning; they should be computerized; and they should be capable of being used to evaluate not just students but educators. Oh—and they would have to be up and running in classrooms by 2014.

The states banded together to embrace the challenge, and eventually they winnowed themselves into two pioneering R&D teams (with, alas, anesthetically long names): the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). Each team, or consortium, is producing its own tests, but their scoring systems will be comparable—as those of the ACT and the SAT are to each other—so there will essentially be one national benchmark of readiness for college and careers. Over the past several months, these networks of state assessment directors, teachers, college administrators, content experts, and psychometricians have been racking up frequent-flyer miles and phone minutes, hashing out all the intricacies of twenty-first-century assessment. It’s not exactly astronauts and rocket scientists in The Right Stuff—but their efforts may ultimately have as much or more of an impact on the country.

Because the consortia are still letting out contracts, they won’t have test prototypes until this summer. But already the outlines of the two projects are taking shape. Both groups are designing interactive computerized tests that will have far more essays and open-response questions, more practical math exercises, and more word problems than current models. They will both use more nonfiction and informational text in addition to literary text. Both also call for fast machine scoring. The groups have similar goals for the long term, but PARCC, whose assessments won’t even be fully computerized until 2016, is less ambitious and more practical in the short term.

Since they are required by NCLB, most of the tests offered by both consortia will be “summative,” meaning that they summarize the development of learners at a particular time. PARCC, which represents a collaboration between twenty-one different states, is focusing on these kinds of tests, which states will use to hold educators accountable and to judge students’ readiness for college. It will have two assessments, and in a big departure from current practice, one will include performance tasks, such as asking a student to analyze a text using evidence to support claims or having him apply math skills and processes to solve real-world problems. At the end of the year, it will combine these into one summative score. PARCC will also have a speaking and listening test graded by a teacher.

The SBAC, a collaboration between twenty-six different states, will also create summative tests, but it will also develop “formative” assessments—tests that are used to gauge student progress in midstream and help teachers make course corrections. A formative test, which takes place during a sequence of instruction, can consist of anything from calling on a student in class to giving him a math quiz or assigning him a lab report. In each case, the teacher uses the resulting information to adjust her instruction. Designers of the next-generation tests believe that some standardized assessments can be formative, as well.

One problem with today ’s standardized tests is that they are virtually useless when given to children who are not performing at grade level. The sixth-grade DC CAS, for instance, doesn’t tell Voskuil much about her many students who are barely reading at the third-grade level—it just says that they’re failing. (By the same token, many students who are way ahead of the curve simply register as “proficient.”)The SBAC addresses this challenge with a new kind of test: one whose questions change based on individual student performance. If the student does well, the questions get progressively harder; if he does poorly, they get easier. These so-called computer adaptive tests are more costly to create, but the beauty of them is that they can pinpoint where students really are in their abilities. The SBAC will also offer two optional interim assessments, which will ask students to perform such tasks as making an oral presentation or writing a long article. These exercises, which would take students one or two class periods to complete, will require students to use other materials or work with other people.

Another problem with most current testing regimes is that they consist almost entirely of big tests administered at the end of the year. By the time a teacher learns that her students were having trouble with double-digit multiplication, the kids are already off to summer camp. Thus the new common core system will include more frequent assessments, which will measure skills that have recently been taught, allowing teachers to make mid-course corrections. Assessment, says Margaret Heritage, a testing expert with the University of California, Los Angeles, “needs to be a moving picture, a video stream.”

While it is still too early to describe any of these common core tests in detail, some testing companies have developed prototypes using the same kind of interactive assessment models that the two R&D teams are talking about. One of these prototypes is being developed by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and piloted in a number of schools. Watching a student use this prototype offers a more concrete glimpse of what the near future of testing might look like.

In a ninth-grade classroom in North Brunswick, New Jersey, a student logs on to a computer. As if viewing an online slide show, he clicks on an aerial photograph of drought-stricken Lake Meade. A pop-up box tells him that his task is to determine what water conservation measures are necessary. Photographs and sketches depict a spillway, a river, a dam, and the lake that the dam has created. Next to these illustrations is a sketch of a sink with a faucet and a stopper. The prototype then asks the student to draw analogies between the pictures—between the stopper and the dam, the faucet and the river, the sink and the lake.

After showing the capacity of the sink in gallons, the prototype asks the student to perform a number of calculations (onscreen and using a built-in calculator) that determine the water ’s f low rate and speed, then to plot them on graphs using the mouse and cursor. It even asks the student to explain some of his choices in writing: for instance, how can you tell from the graph that the slope is three gallons per minute? What is remarkable about this test—aside from the fact that all these calculations actually feed into a simulation of water flowing, just so, into the sink—is how much time it devotes to one subject. It goes deep, in other words, and presents the kind of problem a student might see real value in solving.

The ETS prototype’s writing exam gets at the same kind of deeper learning. On this test, students consider whether junk food should be sold in schools. They must do some quick research using materials supplied by the test, summarize and analyze arguments from those materials, and evaluate their logic. The test even does some teaching along the way, reminding students what the qualities of a good summary are and defining certain words as the cursor rolls over them. The test provides writing samples, such as letters to the editor written by a principal and a student. Do these samples display the qualities of a good summary? The test asks the student to explain why. Is the writer’s logic sound? The student must prove he knows the answer to that question too. Does certain evidence support or weaken a position? The test taker checks off which.

According to ETS researchers, exercises like these are effective at both assessing and encouraging deeper learning. Teachers seem to agree. “The test improves motivation because students make the connection between the assessment and the classroom,” says Amy Rafano, an English teacher in North Brunswick. “The scaffolding is right in the test. Rather than having students just write an essay, the task encourages them to read source materials and adjust [their thinking] while writing. They have to understand where information comes from. This is real-world problem solving , and it gives the students a sense of why these skills are important.” At the very least, exercises like these mark a distinct departure from the generic prompts that serve as essay items on many current tests.

If experts agree on the need for radically different tests, they also agree on how difficult it’s going to be to implement them, especially under the timetable and cost constraints dictated by the Obama administration. Just designing the tests themselves is a monumental job: the writing exercise on the ETS prototype in North Brunswick, for instance, took a team of developers several weeks to create. PARCC and the SBAC must craft hundreds of similar exercises while also making sure they work well together.

Designers of the new tests must also decide how the items should be weighted. Should syntax be counted more than punctuation? Should multiplying fractions be stressed more than graphing linear functions? In addition, educators agree on the need for more open-ended questions, such as those be -ing tested in New Brunswick, but open-ended tests have drawbacks of their own. They are less reliable than multiple-choice exams (an acceptable response can take several different forms, whereas there is only one correct response to a multiple-choice question), and they are “memorable”—meaning they can’t be reused very often if the test is to have any level of security. Most important, scoring open-ended tests is more difficult and time-consuming than scoring fill-in-the-bubble tests. To ensure consistency among the raters, each item must be reviewed many times over. Scoring a short open response that consists of a sentence or two might take a minute—compared to a fraction of a second for a machine-scored multiple-choice item—and scoring an essay could take an hour.

It is a given that the new assessments will be administered on computers. This assumes two things: that students are comfortable working digitally, and that school districts have the necessary technological capacity. The first is probably a safe assumption; the second less so. Ask any state assessment director what he worries about most, and the answer is almost always some variation on “bandwidth.” In an informal survey taken by the common core R&D teams, more than half the states are already reporting significant concerns about capacity, including the number of computers available, their configurations, and their power and speed. This poses a dilemma: requiring too much technology may present insurmountable challenges for states, while requiring too little may limit innovation. Right now, the test makers are forced to essentially guess what the state of technology will be in 2014. An assessment director in Virginia, a state that already uses computer testing—but has not signed on to the common core—old attendees at a recent conference that when a rural school in his state charged all of its laptops one night, it overloaded the building ’s circuits and shut off the facility ’s heat.

Technological capacity can also narrow or enlarge what educators call the “testing window ”—the amount of time they need to schedule for administering exams. The new tests will already require more time than existing assessments, but if districts don’t have enough computers for everybody to take the tests in the same week, they will have to enlarge the window even more, spreading testing over many weeks. In that the case, students at the back end will enjoy an advantage because they will have had more time to learn the material being tested.

While the new assessments will undoubtedly be harder to score than the current fill-in-the-bubble ones, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the essays will be scored by humans. People, as you may have heard from your robot friends, need to be recruited and trained; they are subjective; and, worst of all, they are slow. PARCC, for one, says it will bypass these fallible creatures as often as possible: it wants items scored very quickly by computers to maximize the opportunity for the results to be put to good instructional use.

Because of recent advances in artificial intelligence, according to a 2010 report by the ETS, Pearson, and the College Board, machines can score writing as reliably as real people. That is, studies have found high levels of agreement with actual humans when those humans are in agreement with each other. (Given how often humans disagree, even the ETS concedes this is at best a qualified accomplishment.) Machines can score aspects of grammar, usage, spelling , and the like, meaning that they are decent judges of what academics call the rules of “text production.” Some programs, according to the ETS, can even evaluate semantics and aspects of organization and flow. But machines are still lousy at assessing some pretty big stuff: the logic of an argument, for instance, and the extent to which concepts are accurately or reasonably described.

By way of making assurances, the ETS says that machines can identify “unique” and “more creative” writing and then refer those essays to humans. Still, the new tests will be assessing writing in the context of science, history, and other substantive subjects, so machines must somehow figure out how to score them for both writing and content. Likewise, machines struggle to score items that call for short constructed responses—for instance, an item that asks the student to identify the contrasting goals of the antagonist and the protagonist in a reading passage. A machine can handle this challenge, but only when the answer is fairly circumscribed. The more ways a concept can be described, the harder it is for the machine to judge whether the answer is right. (For now, both consortia are calling for computer scoring to the greatest extent possible, with a sampling of responses scored by humans for quality control.)

The risk of all this, of course, is that in pursuit of a cheaper, more efficient means of scoring , the test makers will assign essays that are inherently easier to score, thus undermining one of the common core’s central goals, which is to encourage the sort of synthesizing , analyzing , and conceptualizing that only the human brain can assess. Flawed and inconsistent though they may be, humans can at least render an accurate judgment on a piece of writing that rises above the rules of “text production.” Maybe this is why all those high-achieving countries that use essay-type tests to measure higher-order skills use real people to score those tests. “Machine-scored tests are cheap, constitute a very efficient and accurate way to measure the acquisition of most basic skills, and can produce almost instant results,” says Marc Tucker. “But they have a way to go before they will give either e. e. cummings or James Joyce a good grade.”

There might be one other non-robotic way to bring down the cost of scoring: assign the task to local teachers instead of test-company employees. According to the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, the very act of scoring a high-quality assessment provides teachers with rich opportunities for learning about their students’ abilities and about how to adjust instruction. So teachers could score assessments as part of their professional development—in which case their ser vices would come “free.” Teachers, however, might find fault with this accounting method.

There’s no doubt that the joint common core effort provides opportunities for significant economies of scale: individual states can now have far better assessments than any one of them could afford to create on its own. But the fact remains that quality costs. The federal stimulus funding covers the creation of the initial assessments, but the overall cost of administering the tests dwarfs the cost of creating them. In addition, the stimulus money runs out in 2014, which is only the first assessment year. The Pioneer Institute, a right-leaning Boston-based think tank that has been critical of the common core standards, has put the total cost of assessment over the next seven years at $7 billion.

Whether that number proves accurate or not, it’s clear that the new testing regime represents a huge investment that most states haven’t yet figured out how to pay for. The current average cost per student of a standardized state test is about $19.93, with densely populated states paying far less and sparsely populated states paying far more. The SBAC estimates a per-student cost of $19.81 for the new summative tests and $7.50 for its optional benchmark assessments. But the Pioneer Institute says in a recent report that those numbers are unrealistically low given the consortium’s ambitious goals. PARCC, which has scaled back its original plans, projects combined costs for the two summative tests of $22 per pupil.

How the new tests will affect the states’ already depleted coffers depends on the state. A state like Georgia, which now spends about $10 per student on testing , will likely to have to ante up more money. Mar yland’s costs should come down. Florida will have to scrap an assessment it just revised for the 2010-11 school year to align with more rigorous state standards. Whatever their situation, the states have some careful fiscal planning to do.

But let’s put things in perspective. Critics of testing habitually protest its cost, implying that the millions spent on assessment would be better put toward smaller class sizes, expanded library hours, or the restoration of art and gym. But despite testing’s huge and growing role in education, the U.S. now devotes less than a quarter of a percent of per-pupil spending to assessments. That’s less than the cost of buying each of America’s students a new textbook.

The American education system is at a major crossroads, one that few Americans are aware of. The new assessments—the product of a huge investment of time, knowledge, and talent—are only two years away from being put in place, and they’re desperately needed. It’s too early to know whether they will work as advertised, and even if they do, the danger is that states will quickly revert to their old habits of doing assessment on the cheap. But if we do this right, we could finally provide educators like Caryn Voskuil with one of the tools they need most: a test worth teaching to.

The post A Test Worth Teaching To appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Like most enterprises in nineteenth-century America, rail-roads in the early 1800s were local affairs. The first trains served mainly to carry goods between towns that canals did not reach, so each region of the country built its own rail lines. As a result, rail gauges— the width between rails—varied widely. The tracks laid between Richmond and Memphis, for instance, used a five-foot gauge, while the gauges of the Erie and Lackawanna lines in New York were six feet wide. Those in the mid-Atlantic, such as the Baltimore and Ohio, used the gauge that was standard in England: four feet eight and a half inches wide. These variations made it exceedingly difficult to connect rail lines, which in turn effectively curbed the use of railroads to conduct commerce across regions.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln recognized that this balkanized rail system also hurt something else: the war effort. He wanted to transport military materiel and goods across the country by rail. So he proposed a standard track width of five feet for the planned intercontinental railroad. He later amended his proposal to four feet eight and a half inches, to match the gauges of the largest eastern railroads, backing a plan urged by rail barons who wanted to expand their lines and their industry. This standard gauge made it possible to connect lines, and led to an explosion of railroad building. The number of track miles tripled, to 90,000, between 1860 and 1880, and then more than doubled, to 190,000, by 1900. With that expansion came the growth of whole new industries that could only be born through interstate train travel—for example, the auto industry, which depended on steel from Pennsylvania, rubber from Ohio, and coal from West Virginia, all shipped and put together in Michigan. Lincoln’s idea of a common standard helped make the United States the world’s largest industrial power.

In some ways, the American elementary and secondary education system is undergoing a transition similar to what the American rail system underwent around the time of the Civil War. For decades, each state has set its own expectations for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. These standards might reflect the tradition of local control of education, but they have made it difficult for students to move from state to state; students transferring from fourth grade in, say, Indiana, might face a different set of expectations when they arrive in fifth grade in Illinois. And, by fragmenting the educational marketplace, these varied standards have impeded the kinds of innovations that might otherwise come with economies of scale—in testing, textbooks, and teacher education.

A profound change is quietly under way. Over the past couple of years, under the leadership of national organizations representing state leaders, nearly every state, with little fanfare, has adopted common standards for student learning in English language arts and mathematics. These standards—known as “common core standards”—spell out the knowledge and skills all students are expected to acquire in order to be prepared for college and careers by the time they graduate from high school. For example, the standards state that by the end of the third grade students should be able to distinguish their own point of view from that of a narrator. By the end of high school, students should be able to “[a]nalyze seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth- century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.”

While that last bar might seem high, the idea is that students need to be able to perform this kind of task in order to succeed in college and the workplace. And now, for the first time, nearly all students in the United States will be expected to meet that same standard, regardless of where they live. By setting common expectations, states have made it possible for students everywhere to graduate from high school similarly prepared for post-secondary education and work.

At the same time, the states have also opened the door for a flood of innovation in educational products and techniques. Educators in one state who have come up with a dynamic new way of teaching can now share their knowledge with educators throughout the country, without having to fear that their insights will be utterly lost in translation. Colleges of education can work together across state lines to redesign and improve teacher education, because the teachers they ed-ucate will be teaching to the same standards. And textbook companies can develop new and better products, taking advantage of digital technology, because they can sell to a near-national market. These materials will replace the widely loathed and ineffective products that were produced by cobbling together expectations from each of the states publishers hoped to sell to.

Perhaps most importantly, the standards are making possible new assessments that could radically transform instruction and learning. The assessments are being built by two consortia of states, which can pool resources to create better tests than states could develop on their own. As a result, the consortia plan to develop challenging and innovative assessments that measure the full range of standards, such as the ability to think critically and solve problems, rather than the narrow skills covered by conventional “fill-in-the-bubble” formats. And because of the strong influence of tests on instruction, these assessments are also likely to encourage a tremendous shift in teaching and learning in nearly every classroom in the United States. Humble standards can lead to great innovations.

Most countries have some form of educational standards. In the United States, the idea began to take off in the late 1980s. At the time, advocates believed that students would learn more if states spelled out specifically what all students should know and be able to do and aligned all aspects of the education system—teacher preparation, curriculum, testing—to those expectations. That way, all oars would be rowing in the same direction.

Unlike in other countries, where national ministries of education promulgated academic standards, the setting of standards in the U.S. began in a hybrid fashion, with national organizations developing nonbinding statements of what students should learn in each subject area, and states adopting their own standards for their students, sometimes—though not always—based on the national documents. These efforts were spurred by legislation enacted during the Clinton administration, which gave grants to states to pursue standards setting and then required states to set standards as a condition of federal aid. By the end of the 1990s, all but one state(Iowa) had developed standards.

The result of this effort was mixed. Mathematics performance for nine- and thirteen-year-olds rose substantially between 1999 and 2004, a period when standards were in place, after being flat throughout the 1990s, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal testing program. Reading scores for nine-year-olds went up as well. But scores for seventeen-year-olds remained flat in both subjects.

The results varied across states as well. In Massachusetts, for example, the proportion of fourth graders who performed above the “proficient” level on the NAEP mathematics test doubled between 1996 and 2005; reading performance also rose substantially during that period. But in California, reading performance barely budged, while mathematics performance improved.

There are several reasons for this mixed record. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, the former director of the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences, now at the Brookings Institution, has argued that the standards made little difference in education performance. Looking at the quality of state standards and states’ NAEP mathematics scores, Whitehurst found no correlation between the two. Tom Loveless, Whitehurst’s colleague at Brookings, used this data to suggest that common core standards are unlikely to make a difference either.

But the lack of correlation between the quality of standards and student performance might be expected, because standards, by themselves, do not produce higher levels of learning. For one thing, the standards varied in quality from state to state, and in some cases the state standards were either long lists of topics, too many topics to cover in a single year, or expectations that were too vague to provide much guidance to teachers. Teachers tended to continue what they had been doing rather than try to use standards to design new courses of study. In part, the poor quality of many of the standards resulted from the process of setting them: states tried to get buy-in from as many people as possible, so the standards either ended up watered down to please everyone or reflected logrolling (I’ll take your standard if you take mine).

At the same time, in many states, the other pieces of the puzzle—new textbooks, professional support for teachers—did not materialize, so teachers lacked the support they needed to change their practices. Thus, even in states with standards that were considered strong, such as California, a lack of resources limited their impact.

Tests also played a major role in affecting the influence of the standards . In theory, the tests should have measured what the standards expected, but in practice that didn’t happen. The assessments tended to measure what was easiest to measure—relatively low-level knowledge and skills, rather than the more complex abilities the standards called for. And as testing grew in importance, with significant consequences attached to the results, teachers quite naturally placed more attention on what was on the tests than on what was in the standards.

National standards could have alleviated much of the variability in state standards, but the idea became hotly contested politically in the 1990s. Under George W. Bush, the federal government issued grants to national organizations, like the National Academy of Sciences, to develop standards in key subject areas; states were expected to refer to these national standards in developing their own. But some of the national documents, particularly one pertaining to U.S. history standards, sparked fierce battles. The National Endowment for the Humanities had issued a grant to a national organization based at the University of California, Los Angeles, to develop the standards. But the day before they were scheduled to be released, Lynne V. Cheney, the wife of Dick Cheney and the former NEH chair who had issued the grant, took to the Wall Street Journal to denounce the standards as a monument to political correctness. The U.S. Senate followed suit, voting 99 to 1 for a nonbinding resolution denouncing the new history standards.

The Republican-led Congress also killed an agency created by the Clinton administration that would have assessed state standards against the national benchmarks. A later proposal by Clinton to establish a voluntary national test in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics also died amid opposition from Republicans, who feared the nationalization of what had traditionally been a state and local function. The national standards movement appeared dead.

Nevertheless, the need for national standards became more and more apparent. First, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) made the many variations in state standards all the more conspicuous. That law, enacted in 2002, required all students to reach “proficiency” in reading and math by 2014, but left it up to states to create their own standards and tests and determine what constituted proficiency. The law also required all states to administer the NAEP, the federal testing program. Results soon appeared showing that in some states nearly all students reached proficiency on state tests, while only a handful reached that level on the NAEP; in other states, the proficiency levels on the two tests were similar. These findings showed clearly that standards varied tremendously among the states, and suggested that some states were setting standards too low.

NCLB also sparked criticism of the tests that states were using to measure student performance. Teachers and others complained that too much time was spent preparing students to fill in bubbles on low-level tests. There was more interest in creating higher standards and better measures that would promote higher-level classroom activities and higher levels of learning.

The rise of globalization also made it clear that higher standards were needed, and that boundaries between states were becoming less important. What did it matter if Alabama and Massachusetts each set its own standards when students from both states were competing against students from China and India? The results from international assessments that began to be issued in the early 2000s, moreover, showed that U.S. students performed well below their peers from other countries, lending greater credence to the idea of high national standards. For example, in 2003, U.S. fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-first of twenty-eight industrialized nations in mathematics on the Programme for International Student Assessment, a test administered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The PISA results are particularly significant because that test measures students’ abilities to use their knowledge to solve real-world problems, the kind of higher-order abilities students are expected to have in order to succeed in a global economy.

Yet while the need for national standards grew more evident, those with scars from the political battles of the 1990s realized that the effort had to take a different tack. Perhaps the most important leader calling for a new approach was James B. Hunt Jr., the former governor of North Carolina and the head of an education policy organization in Durham. Hunt called a meeting of education leaders in the summer of 2006 in Raleigh to consider the idea of building common standards from the ground up: states would come together to build them, rather than allowing national organizations to impose them from the top. This was followed by a similar meeting in Washington later that year, convened by Bob Wise, the former governor of West Virginia and the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based policy and advocacy organization. The move toward common standards was under way.

To keep the effort at the state level, two organizations of state leaders, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, took the lead. The groups called a meeting at an airport hotel in Chicago in April 2009 to announce the effort and to release a memorandum of understanding, under which states would commit themselves to the initiative. Under the memorandum, states would agree to take part in the development of the standards, but would not necessarily have to adopt the product when it came out. Forty-eight governors and state education chiefs (all but those from Alaska and Texas) signed the agreement. State leaders said they recognized that they could achieve a better product if they pooled their resources rather than work separately.

The process was designed to differ significantly from the standards-setting efforts of the 1990s. Perhaps most importantly, the leaders set the goal of developing standards that would ensure that all students who graduated from high school would be ready for college or the workplace. To that end, the standards setters based their decisions on evidence of what knowledge and skills were essential for post-secondary success. That criterion helped minimize some of the political compromises that had weakened state standards.

The writers of the standards, who included some of the nation’s leading subject-area experts, were guided by a simple mantra: “Fewer, higher, clearer.” That is, they wanted to produce a document that was leaner than many state standards and would provide the focus and coherence that many of the state standards lacked. They wanted standards that would surpass the expectations embodied in many state guidelines—and that, in fact, would be as high as those embodied in the standards of high-performing nations like Finland and Singapore. And they wanted standards that would be clear, so teachers could understand the goals students would be expected to reach and redesign their classrooms to help students attain them.

There is some debate about whether the standards writers achieved all of their goals—for example, a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the common core high school mathematics standards, which were supposed to be leaner and more focused, included more topics than many state standards did. But the common core state standards, released on June 2, 2010, at a ceremony at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee, Georgia, in many ways represented a sea change in American education. The standards set out bold expectations that, if realized, would raise the level of learning for many young people. All students would be expected to understand content deeply, but also be able to apply their knowledge to think critically and solve complex problems.

For example, one of the most significant departures from much current practice in the English language arts standards is the expectation that all students would be able to read and comprehend complex texts. Evidence cited by the standards writers showed that the level of complexity of materials used in entry-level college classes and the workplace had increased in recent years, but that the language used in high school materials had grown easier over time. The common core standards expect all students to demonstrate that they can understand harder and harder texts every year.

The standards also place a great deal of emphasis on the ability to reason from evidence. The standards writers found that many teachers expect students to rely on personal experience or opinions in showing how they respond to writing or write papers on their own. Many essays required for school, for example, are personal narratives with no audience beyond the teacher—“How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” But college professors and employers expect young people to be able to marshal facts in support of a position, and so the standards expect all students to be able to draw on relevant evidence, cite it appropriately, and use it to make a case—and to write effectively and correctly while doing so.

The standards also make clear that reading and writing are not the sole province of English classes. The standards include literacy expectations in history/social science, science, and technical subjects. The standards writers recognized that understanding a historical document or a science journal article requires skills that are different from those needed to comprehend Romeo and Juliet.

The mathematics standards likewise call on students to be able to demonstrate that they understand mathematics and can use their knowledge to solve problems. Guidelines in the early grades expect students to be able not only to apply familiar algorithms but also to show that they understand what these algorithms represent and how to apply their understanding to the way mathematics is used in the world. For example, sixth graders are expected to “solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, surface area, and volume.”

In high school, the standards place an emphasis on mathematical modeling: using mathematical thinking to analyze real-world situations and make appropriate decisions. Modeling represents the way mathematics is used in careers; workers don’t solve equations that are handed to them, they have to determine the appropriate procedure, gather data, and make decisions based on the best available evidence. The standards expect high school students to learn to do the same.

The standards gained wide acceptance in short order. A few states did not even wait for them to be released to adopt them; Kentucky did so in February, four months before they were final (although the state board of education reserved the right to review the final product). Within weeks of the release, thirty states adopted the standards, and by the end of 2010, forty-three had done so. A few more added their voices in 2011, bringing the total to forty-six states and the District of Columbia. (The Anchorage, Alaska, school district signed on in March 2012, becoming the first district to do so.) The federal government helped push the adoption process along through the Race to the Top program, but by most accounts states were eager to sign on to the effort. Although there have been a few attempts in states to reverse decisions to adopt the standards, all have failed as of this writing.

But adopting the new standards was merely the first step. The steps necessary to implement the standards in classrooms, and to support that implementation through new materials and training for teachers, have been and will continue to be far more significant. They will determine whether the common core state standards, like the railroad standards of the mid-nineteenth century, have the power to be truly transformative.

The most significant step has been the development of common assessments—you might know them as standardized tests—to measure student performance against the standards. Tests play a hugely important role in influencing classroom practice. But as the usually derisive tone of the phrase “teaching to the test” suggests, the influence of state tests has been, in many cases, negative. That’s because test development is expensive, and states have opted to build relatively cheap multiple-choice tests that fail to measure students’ abilities to think critically and solve problems. The common core standards make it possible for states to pool resources and develop tests that are much more ambitious than states could pay for on their own, and thus should drive classroom practice in a more positive direction.

The U.S. Education Department jump-started the development effort by awarding $330 million to two consortia of states that are creating tests that promise to be major advances from current practice. These tests, scheduled to be ready for the classroom in the 2014-15 school year, are expected to ask students to perform tasks, such as conducting research and writing lengthy essays, that will measure much deeper skills and competencies than do current tests. That, in turn, will encourage teachers to have their students conduct extended projects and write extensively—experiences they will need in college and the workplace. Although the effort holds enormous promise, the consortia are under extremely tight deadlines, and whether they will be able to carry out their ambitious plans remains to be seen.

Other cross-state innovations are under way. For example, a group of mathematics educators known as the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership has launched an effort to work with middle and high school teachers to revamp teacher preparation programs to ensure that new teachers are prepared to teach to the expectations of the common core standards. The partnership is lining up potential participants; the initial planning committee includes educators from eight states.

For-profit organizations are also getting in on the act. Pearson, one of the largest commercial textbook publishers, is developing a series of K-12 curriculum materials designed to align with the common core standards. The materials, developed with input from members of the teams that wrote the guidelines, will be delivered completely online, through devices like the iPad. They will include projects for students to complete, texts and digital materials to support students in conducting projects, and assessments to check student understanding. The firm has received support for this effort from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; as a condition of this support, some of the materials will be available to all schools free of charge.

Other firms are likely to follow suit. The fact that nearly all states have adopted the common core standards means that textbook companies no longer have to tailor their products to individual states or produce a hodgepodge of materials that reflect different states’ standards. They can sell to a nearly national market. At the same time, the availability of technology makes possible online learning resources, which are relatively inexpensive to produce and can now be used in any state.

Many innovations are taking place at the state level as well. For example, Kentucky, the first state to adopt the common core standards, has led the way in preparing teachers to work with the new standards, make changes in classroom instruction, and make expectations clear for students. The Kentucky department of education prepared an extensive analysis that compared the common core with Kentucky’s previous standards, and distributed it widely. Kentucky Educational Television also prepared online units for parents, teachers, and community members to explain the standards, and the Prichard Committee, a statewide organization of civic leaders, developed a campaign to explain the new guidelines and why they matter to parents and community members across the state.

The state department of education also built an online portal called Kentucky’s Continuous Instructional Improvement Technology System, which will host lessons, tests, and curriculum materials. The system will also include podcasts produced by higher education faculty to help educate teachers about new instructional strategies designed around the standards.

In addition, the state has engaged its higher education institutions. The Council on Postsecondary Education, the governing body of colleges and universities, is working with the K-12 education system to develop assessments based on the standards to be used to determine placement in first-year college courses. And colleges of education are redesigning their teacher preparation programs to align them with the expectations of the standards.

The common core state standards still could face a number of challenges, and one of them is political. Despite the widespread adoption of the standards among states, the concept still faces opposition from a small group of critics who consider them—contrary to the evidence—a federal takeover of what has been a state responsibility. Legislatures in half a dozen states have considered bills to review the adoption of the standards, and the state board of Alabama, with a new composition, considered a bid to revoke their approval. As of this writing, all of these efforts have failed.

The opponents have something of an advantage, in that many of the leaders who spearheaded the common core effort are no longer in office. After the 2010 election, thirty new governors and twenty-five new state school superintendents took office. These new leaders had not signed the 2009 memorandum of understanding that put the standards effort into motion. But the failure of the repeal efforts thus far suggests that there is a strong base of support for the common core.

While that diffuse sense of enthusiasm for the standards has helped repel political attacks, in other ways the lack of a centralized governance structure may be a liability. Without an overarching authority, there is no system of quality control. Companies can produce products and claim that they are aligned to the standards, but there is no independent way to judge the validity of their claims. And what will happen when it is time to revise the standards, when new evidence suggests that topics might need to be added or taken out? Who will oversee that process? While states have led the effort so far, a more formal mechanism might be needed.

A third challenge is financial. It costs money to develop new tests, buy new textbooks and other materials, and train teachers—but the standards were adopted at one of the worst fiscal moments in American history. States are trying to upgrade their education system at a time when they are cutting budgets across the board. Moreover, states vary widely in the extent to which they are preparing to implement the standards. While most states have pledged some form of professional development for teachers, in some states these could end up being superficial. States are only beginning to engage their higher education institutions in the effort, which could delay changes in teacher education, and not all are like Kentucky in putting together resources for teachers and parents.

Yet the prospects are not, on the whole, bleak. For one thing, the fact that nearly all states have adopted the standards makes it possible to achieve some additional cost savings through economies of scale. Teachers in forty-six states should be able to share the same online courses in professional development to prepare them for the new standards regime, rather than having to reinvent the wheel state by state. (Offering the course online, by the way, saves still more money; in the past, “teacher training” meant hiring an instructor, removing teachers from their class-rooms, and hiring substitutes to cover for them for a few days.) As the efforts by the two state consortia to develop new assessments aligned to the common core standards have shown, cross-state development can produce a much better product at a lower cost than states could produce operating independently. Discussions among states about cross-state partnerships are now in progress.

Moreover, the expenses involved in implementing standards do not all require new money. States spend money every year on tests, textbooks, and teacher training; that money will now go toward materials and training related to the new standards, rather than to their existing standards. In the end, the common nature of the new standards is likely to be their most important contribution. Just as President Lincoln envisioned a transcontinental railroad that would tie the country together economically, the common standards can knit the country together educationally.

The result, if it is sustained, will be a major advancement for equal opportunity. Well before most other countries, the United States opened access to education and made universal public schooling common. With the advent of the standards movement, states began to define what that education should consist of. Now there is near-nationwide agreement on the matter, and the bar is higher than ever before. All students, regardless of their background or where they live, are now expected to learn what they need to know to be ready for college or the workplace by the time they graduate from high school. The tough part—living up to that challenge—comes next. But the foundation is in place.

The post Transcontinental Education appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the old days, supermarkets struggled to keep track of the thousands of items on their shelves. Each month, they’d shutter the store so their employees could hand-count every soup can, cereal box, and candy bar. The first electronic scanning systems came along in the 1970s, which helped take a little of the drudgery and inefficiency out of the grocer’s life. Then came waves of advances in computing power and remote sensing technologies. By now, for most retailers, regularly shutting down to conduct inventor y is a thing of the past. Instead, they can constantly monitor their shelves through bar codes, scanners, and radio-frequency devices. And as it has turned out, all this technology has given them far more than just a better way to count cans: today, retailers not only keep track of what’s on their shelves, they also use the constant flow of real-time information to predict, analyze, and respond quickly to consumer demand.

This kind of real-time assessment and response has become a part of modern life in a number of areas. New car owners increasingly rely on remote sensors, not a yearly mechanic’s visit, to detect engine problems and keep tires at the right pressure. And more and more, diabetics no longer have to stop and inject themselves. Instead, they use a continuous glucose monitor to send blood readings to an insulin pump, which warns them if their blood-sugar level spikes and allows them to adjust their level of insulin. In each of these areas, a scientific understanding of systems—whether biological, mechanical, or commercial—has been combined with new technology to develop more useful, productive, and actionable monitoring and measurement. And all of it takes place almost invisibly, in the background.

Not so in America’s classrooms. Schools across the nation still essentially close to conduct inventory—only we don’t call it that. We call it “testing.” Every year at a given time, regular instruction stops. Teachers enter something called “test prep” mode; it lasts for weeks leading up to the big assessment. Just as grocery-store workers might try to fudge inventory numbers to conceal shortfalls in cash, schools sometimes try to fudge their testing results, and cheating scandals erupt. Then, in a twist, regular classroom instruction resumes only half heartedly once the big test is over, because there are no stakes attached to what everyone’s learning. Learning stops, evaluation begins: that’s how it works. But in the not-so-distant future, testing may be as much a thing of the past for educators as the counting of cans is for grocers.

Zoran Popovic, a computer scientist and the director of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, is one of a new cadre of researchers point -ing the way to a post-testing world. Popovic has designed a prototype of an online, puzzle-based game called Refractions. The game challenges students to use their knowledge of fractions to help provide the right amount of power to animals in marooned spaceships. Using puzzle pieces, students bend lasers and split the energy beams into half, one-third, and even one-twelfth power. In the process, they get a feel for a number of important concepts, such as equal partitioning, addition, multiplication, and common denominators.

While Refractions looks like a relatively simple game, the real complexity is behind the scenes. The game records hundreds of data points, capturing information each time a player adjusts, redirects, or splits a laser. This data allows Popovic and his colleagues to analyze and visualize students’ paths through the puzzles—seeing, for example, whether a student made a beeline for the answer, meandered, or tried a novel approach. Since the data shows not just whether the student solved the puzzle, but also how, it can be used to detect misconceptions or skill gaps. Good math teachers do this all the time when they require students to “show their work”—that is, to write down not just the answer to a math problem on a test, but also the calculations they used to derive the answer. The difference is that Popovic’s game essentially “shows the work” of hundreds of thousands of players, recording data automatically in a way that allows teachers and scientists to draw robust inferences about where students tend to go astray. This would be virtually impossible with paper tests. And it’s this massive scale that promises not only new insights on student learning but also new tools to help teachers respond.

Popovic’s game is one of dozens of experiments and research projects being conducted in universities and company labs around the country by scientists and educators all thinking in roughly the same vein. Their aim is to transform assessment from dull misery to an enjoyable process of mastery. They call it “stealth assessment.”

At this point, all this work is still preliminary—the stuff of whiteboards and prototypes. Little if any of it will be included in two new national tests now being designed with federal funds by two consortia of states and universities and scheduled to be rolled out in classrooms around the country beginning in 2014. Still, researchers have a reasonably clear grasp of what they someday—five, ten, or fifteen years from now—hope to achieve: assessments that do not hit “pause” on the learning process but are embedded directly into learning experiences and enable a deeper level of learning at the same time.

In this vision, students would spend their time in the classroom solving problems, mastering complex projects, or even conducting experiments, as many of them do now. But they ’d do much of it through a technological interface: via interactive lessons and simulations, digital instruments, and, above all, games. Information about an individual student’s approach, persistence, and problem-solving strategies, in addition to their record of right and wrong answers, would be collected over time, generating much more detailed and valid evidence about a student’s skills and knowledge than a one-shot test. And all the while, these sophisticated systems would adapt, constantly updating to keep the student challenged, supported, and engaged.

One way to think of stealth assessment is to compare it to a GPS system—one that has the ability to monitor, assess, and respond to progress along the way. The metaphor is helpful, because it illuminates not only the promise of stealth assessment but also the crucial missing component that we lack now. A GPS system starts with a detailed digital map of all the roads and possible detours in a given terrain; then the system’s software constantly tracks your car’s location relative to that map. Similarly, stealth assessments will require a detailed understanding—a cognitive model or map—of all the different ways learning can progress in math, science, and various other disciplines. A student’s performance would then be tracked against the various routes and pathways that learners tend to follow as their understand -ing progresses. But while cognitive scientists have made great strides in the past two decades, our understanding of how students learn is not nearly detailed enough to resemble a full map—certainly not one that reflects the whole range of possible routes, detours, intermediary steps, and junctions created by each student’s individual strengths and weaknesses.

But the solution may be self-generating. While both stealth assessments and GPS systems must start from an initial map, they also share another critical capability: the potential to become more accurate over time. As GPS software records millions of data points on destinations and routes, it begins to detect otherwise unknown traffic patterns, leading to better and better routing. The same potential holds for stealth assessments. Researchers can use student performance data from across a variety of tasks to update conceptual models and better understand how students learn. David Kuntz, vice president of research at Knewton, one of the companies developing new “adaptive” learning platforms, notes that, just as data collection improves the recommendations of a GPS system, collecting large data sets in the classroom can help to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about how students learn. And, by comparing how similar students perform when given different types of content or instructional activities, researchers can also begin to understand which learning interventions work for which students, under which conditions.

Education, of course, can’t be reduced to a series of online games. More than just a set of concepts to be learned, it’s also a complex set of relationships: between students, teachers, and the environment in which they learn. Florida State University professor Valerie Shute, who coined the term “stealth assessment,” agrees. Her assessments aren’t meant to replace human teachers, but to help teachers understand student misconceptions and provide recommendations for action. She sees automated scoring and machine-based reasoning techniques as tools for teachers to “infer things that would be too hard for humans.” Just as a pilot uses a navigational computer to crunch vast amounts of data for use in flight, teachers should use these tools to play an ever more active role, reviewing students’ progress and providing better-informed guidance and assistance as they solve problems.

While computers have long been used for drilling facts or equations, Shute is designing her assessments to keep tabs on a deeper kind of learning—the kind that takes greater care and effort to measure but is essential for making sound progress. In math, for example, heavy drilling may help students pass a quiz on, say, fractions. But in order for them to put their knowledge of fractions to good use later on in, say, algebra class, students need a real conceptual grasp of what fractions are and how they work.

Shute’s new project involves building and embedding stealth assessments in the game Crayon Physics Deluxe (CPD). This is meant to cultivate and measure just that kind of mastery. In CPD’s virtual world, students must discover and/or apply their knowledge of the principles of physics, such as gravity, kinetic energy, and inertia, to propel a red ball through various puzzles toward its destination, marked by a yellow star. But in this world, just as in the real world, students aren’t just given problems with one predefined answer with which to solve them. Instead, students experiment with different approaches in a world largely of their own creation. Using a virtual crayon, they draw their solutions. In one instance, they might draw a ramp to roll the ball across an obstacle. In another, they draw a rock that falls on a lever to thrust the ball upward. The game encourages students to continually refine their approach, rewarding not just what it calls “old school” solutions but also more “elegant” ways to move the ball toward its destination.

As they play, CPD is assessing their performance constantly, collecting information on both simple indicators, such as the time spent on a particular problem, and complex information, such as the agents of force and motion—a springboard, say—that students use to accomplish a task. As students play, the assessment draws on more and more of the data points, which are constantly mapped against a model to update an estimate of the student’s competencies. In this case, a teacher could use CPD alongside more traditional instruction, ensuring that students understand the mathematical equations in physics but also the concepts underlying it.

Another stealth assessment in CPD strives to measure students on their care, organization, and persistence in trying to solve problems—what researchers call “conscientiousness.” Research consistently shows that these skills can predict academic achievement but are independent from intelligence or cognitive ability. They are also essential to success in school and life. In CPD, data on persistence, for example, comes primarily from problems that students have trouble solving. CPD tracks the number of times a student tries to solve each problem and the overall time spent on each try. And the assessment is designed so that even the cleverest students are given problems that challenge them; that way, all students are measured on their level of persistence. Of course, there are various pencil-and-paper tests that can measure these skills. But those tests typically involve self-reported items and are taken in isolation from the learning process, as if persistence were a static quality, unrelated to the actual task or content at hand. Shute’s goal is to build stealth assessments that can be inserted into almost any game or interactive lesson, allowing both students and teachers to see how qualities like persistence and creativity relate to their overall performance throughout the course of learning, and may even be improved over time as a function of game play.

So far, all these stealth assessment prototypes fall into the category of what educators call “formative assessments.” That means they are functionally analogous to the kinds of short-term tests, like chapter quizzes, that teachers use for diagnostic purposes—to gauge whether students grasp the lesson you just taught, so you can adjust your instruction in real time. This sets such tests apart from “summative assessments”—the weightier, more stress-inducing tests taken at semester’s or year’s end to judge the performance of students, teachers, and schools. It’s reasonably clear that stealth technology can someday be used for formative assessments. The big question is whether this technology can also eliminate the need for the annual summative testing.

The answer, in theory anyway, is yes. If done correctly, stealth assessments could help educators amass much greater evidence, over time, and at a deeper level, of what a student knows and is able to do. But doing so will require major changes in instruction—changes that would probably be beneficial for a whole host of reasons.

Today, a calendar defines what students learn and how they progress. An eighth-grade U.S. history course fits into two eighteen-week semesters, with a test at the end of each. And no matter what knowledge students walk in with or what they manage to absorb in the first eighteen weeks, the teacher must move on to the second eighteen weeks’ worth of content when the schedule dictates. This is what some educators call a “time-based” approach to education; a “competency-based” approach flips this paradigm. In this model, rather than wait for an end-of-year test, students can demonstrate their competency in a subject over time, allowing them to move on as they are deemed ready. Learning, instead of seat time, defines progress.

One glimpse of this future can be found at School of One, a personalized learning program in New York City that was named one of Time magazine’s “50 Best Inventions of 2009.” School of One is an experiment not only in technology-based lessons and assessments but also in competency-based student progress. If a seventh grader is working at a fourth-grade level, instructors focus unapologetically on fourth-grade material—attempting to ensure that, as the student progresses, he has really developed the right fundamental understanding going forward. It’s a big adjustment for teachers and parents, but students respond in striking ways. Joel Rose, former School of One CEO and now co-founder of New Classrooms, says that when students see that assessment results are used, in real time, to help them learn, then their entire relationship with testing changes—so much so that they often naturally draw their own clear distinction between the one-shot “tests” that they face in other classes and ongoing “assessments.”

The coming revolution in stealth assessment is not without potential dangers, pitfalls, and unintended consequences. If students perceive that the constant monitoring is meant primarily to judge them, rather than help them improve, then they may be less likely to experiment or take risks with their learning. Worse still, it’s conceivable that teachers would just find new ways to teach to the test, focusing their instruction on how to beat a computerized assessment algorithm rather than how to solve a challenging physics problem.

Eric Klopfer, director of MIT ’s Education Arcade and a proponent of stealth assessment, warns against a superficial “gamification” of learning. Just as in traditional classrooms, where the use of gold stars and special awards is only as sound as the underlying relationships among students and teachers, adding game-like rewards to educational lessons only works if the game itself is rewarding. If you give students a reward for things they don’t want to do, Klopfer says, then students stop doing those things as soon as the reward stops. It takes good instruction to challenge and engage learners. The best intrinsic motivation isn’t a flashy game, Klopfer says, but “success through meaningful accomplishments.”

Still, stealth assessments are at a very early stage in their development, having yet to be proven in a large scale trial. Their drawbacks, kinks, and breakthroughs will no doubt become far more clear—and perhaps more manageable—over time. Numerous big experiments are on their way. As Popovic works on Refractions—which has been played by more than 100,000 people at this point—he’s also building the equivalent of an open-source plat -form to accelerate others’ efforts, in hopes of shaving off the time it takes to develop games with embedded assessment from scratch. Ultimately, his goal is to crowdsource designs for new games and assessment challenges from both educators and students. Dynamic Learning Maps, a consortium of thirteen states that was awarded $22 million in federal funding to develop new assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities, plans to embed items and tasks in day-to-day instruction to map a student’s learning over the course of a year. Klopfer just received a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a massively multiplayer online game to help high school students learn math and biology. And Pearson, the giant education publisher, led a $33 million investment in Knewton. It’s hard to tell, but at this pace it’s conceivable that the sit-down-stop-everything-else test may, within the decade, seem as old-fashioned as counting tubes of toothpaste on a supermarket shelf.

The post Grand Test Auto appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The school reform movement—the decades-old bipartisan drive to improve public education with standards and high-stakes tests—might seem, on the surface at least, to be running out of steam. Its crowning achievement, George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which shook up public schools after it was passed in 2001, is now widely seen as flawed and in need of a massive overhaul. Yet efforts to do so have been stalled for years on Capitol Hill because of political disagreements over how to proceed. With reform in limbo, the Obama administration has been reduced to passing out Get Out of Jail Free cards to countless school districts that face penalties for failing to meet the law’s strict targets for improvement. Meanwhile, liberals who were always uncomfortable with using standardized tests to judge student and teacher performance are increasingly in revolt against the whole school reform movement. And conser vatives who never liked the increased federal role in education brought by NCLB are agitating for a return to local control.

Yet looks can be deceiving. The truth is that the standards-and-testing model of school reform is far from dead. In fact, it’s about to kick into a new high gear, in ways that will alter what happens in the nation’s classrooms as fundamentally as NCLB did, and probably more so. Unlike previous waves of school reform, which were debated in Congress and covered in depth by the press, this next one is the product of compacts among states and a quiet injection of federal money—and has therefore garnered almost no national attention. Consequently, few Americans have any idea about the profound changes that are about to hit their children’s schools.

The reforms will unfold in three stages, each of which is explored by an article in this report.

In the first stage, already well under way, almost ever y state is instituting something called the “common core standards,” a demanding new set of shared benchmarks that define what students should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. These benchmarks will replace a jumble of widely varying and often weak state standards that have hitherto guided America’s schools.

The second stage, hard on the heels of the first, is the development of a new set of high-stakes tests based on these new standards. These tests are already being crafted by university and state education department experts across the country, and are scheduled to be rolled out beginning in 2014. They will be fully computerized and far more demanding than anything most American schoolchildren have ever experienced.

The third stage, now being dreamed up in university and corporate labs, will see the rise of new kinds of computer-based learning software, often in the form of games, in which testing happens automatically as students play and work. When this software becomes available for classrooms a decade or more from now, learning and assessment will meld into a single process, and high-stakes testing as we know it will virtually disappear.

All three of these efforts are at -tempts to fix the flaws in the current standards-and-testing regime—the chief flaw being that it creates incentives for schools to aim too low. Existing state standards tend to force teachers to cover too much material shallowly. And existing tests tend to be cheap multiple-choice exams focused on assessing basic skills rather than higher-order thinking.

Of course, an alarming number of students lack those basic skills, especially poor and minority students. And the current standards-and-testing system can claim some credit for putting a significant dent in that problem. Since 1992, when states first started seriously imposing standards and high-stakes tests, African American eighth graders have gained 26 points, and Hispanic eighth graders 22 points, on the math portion of the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. That means both groups are roughly two and a half grade levels above where they were in 1992, a stunning if seldom-acknowledged improvement. Reading scores haven’t risen as much: 12 points for black eighth graders, 13 for Hispanics. Still, that’s more than a grade level higher than where these groups were twenty years ago—real progress.

The problem is that teaching and testing for basic skills also tends to lead to a dumbing down of the curriculum and to endless drilling for tests, which frustrates teachers, parents, and students alike. It also does little to improve students’ ability to think critically and independently, solve complex problems, apply knowledge to novel situations, work in teams, and communicate effectively—abilities that students must have to succeed in college and, increasingly, the modern-day workplace.

Getting schools to impart these “deeper learning” capacities is precisely what the new wave of school reform aims to achieve. And there is good reason to hope the reforms work, because in many ways the competitiveness of the U.S. economy depends on it. On the Programme for International Student Assess -ment (PISA), a widely used international test that measures higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills, the United States falls in the middle of the pack among thirty-four developed countries in reading and science, and ranks below the average in math.

In a sense, this is nothing new. As far back as 1964, U.S. students scored relatively poorly in math and science compared to those in other nations. But we made up for deficiencies in quality with volume: for decades, America graduated a far larger percentage of its citizens from high school and college than did any other country. That advantage in degree attainment, however, has disappeared as other countries have caught up. The U.S. now ranks twelfth in the world in the percentage of its twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds with post-secondary degrees. We’ve fallen behind not because U.S. high school graduates aren’t going on to college—that number has risen consistently—but because the percentage completing college has hardly budged. That’s a sign, in part, that too many U.S. students are leaving high school ill-prepared academically. All of this is happening, notes labor economist Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University, at a time when the globalization of labor markets and the elimination of routine jobs—even reasonably skilled ones—by digital technology means that more and more jobs in the future will require creativity and higher-order-thinking skills.

Is it possible for a large, highly developed nation to make the kinds of changes necessary to boost the critical- thinking skills of its students? Consider the case of Germany. In 2000, Germans learned that their schools, which were long assumed to be first rate, ranked below the average when compared to other countries on the PISA, largely because of the poor quality of schooling offered to less-advantaged citizens. The shock of that news led to a series of reforms, including common national academic standards and new assessments tied to those standards. The result: from 2003 to 2009 Germany added 10 points to its math scores and 6 points to its reading scores on the PISA—on a scale in which 500 is the international average.

That may not seem like much, but over time such progress can deliver huge economic gains. In a 2010 study, economists Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich found that differences in PISA scores and similar measures of cognitive skills explain a great deal of the difference in growth rates among advanced economies from 1960 to 2000. They further calculated that if the United States could raise its average PISA score 25 points by 2030, it could increase its GDP by $45 trillion over the lifespan of children born in 2010.

Could the new tests and common core standards be the secrets to achieving results like this? Obviously it’s too early to say. But it’s hard to think of another set of government policies already in the pipeline that could more dramatically impact the long-term strength of the U.S. economy. So it’s all the more curious that the new tests and standards have garnered almost no press attention, especially in a presidential election year in which the future of the economy is front and center. That’s a testament not only to the way these policies slipped in under the political radar, but also to the fact that writing about abstruse subjects like norm-referenced testing and PISA scores is hard to do (believe me). But as Washington Monthly contributing editor James Fallows once wrote, the mission of serious journalism is “to make what’s important interesting.” By that definition, the authors of the three pieces in this report—Robert Rothman, Susan Headden, and Bill Tucker—have produced very good journalism indeed.

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Watergate:
A Novel
by Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 448 pp.

After that, it will be interesting to see how much we hear about Richard Nixon again. Will he be studied, like Theodore Roosevelt? Mentioned, like William McKinley? Ignored, like Benjamin Harrison? Nixon was one of the largest figures of the third quarter of the twentieth century. But as his era recedes, he is overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—the liberal icon who preceded him, and the conservative giant who came in his wake, two leaders of consequence whose ideas persist decades after their deaths. With no enduring legacy to call his own—détente was at best a mixed bag; wage and price controls were an embarrassment; he may have opened China, but Deng Xiaoping was the more significant figure—Nixon now seems destined to be best known for the Watergate scandal and for being the un-Kennedy, dark to Jack’s light, ambitious and striving in comparison to Jack’s grace and ease, sweaty to Kennedy’s infinite cool.

And yet we remain interested in Nixon, welcoming him as a character the way the Brits always seem happy to see a new Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. Just three years ago we got Frost/Nixon, where we saw Nixon tortured by guilt and defeat; later this year we’ll see Elvis & Nixon, the third film about that weird, marvelous, and ultimately meaningless encounter. We have had Oliver Stone’s tragic Nixon, the Nixon of All the President’s Men, unseen and malignant, The Watchmen’s Nixon as the despot of the new dystopia. It is perhaps the unique accomplishment of Watergate, the excellent new novel by Thomas Mallon, to depict Nixon not as a moral to a story, a symptom of a political pathology, or a walking character flaw, but as a man.

Mallon accomplishes this by leveling him. Instead of focusing on Nixon as the main character in a drama, the author presents us with an ensemble cast; the president may be first among equals in their world, but his views, reactions, and feelings do not outweigh those of the other characters. Among these players are his wife, Pat; his secretary, Rose Mary Woods; the director of the famous Watergate burglary, E. Howard Hunt; presidential aide Fred LaRue; and the utility cabinet member Elliot Richardson. It’s noteworthy that all of these characters are in their forties and fifties, the great middle passage of life where too many youthful dreams have died and too many youthful vanities persist. When the crisis erupts, this potent mix imprisons them, keeping them tied to the tracks as the train approaches. As we see these folks watch the last of their prospects melt with the ice cubes in their drinks, we feel for them as we have never felt for them before.

Mallon’s second and even more brilliant way of humanizing Nixon is to avoid dealing with much of his presidency. So many of Nixon’s key cronies—Chuck Colson, Henry Kissinger, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman—have little more than cameos here. Similarly absent are many of the colorful set pieces of the scandal that we have repeatedly seen, either live before the Ervin Committee or in successive viewings of All the President’s Men. The mystery of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap has finally been resolved, but almost certainly not in any of the ways you might have suspected. “There’s a cancer growing on the presidency” does make an appearance here, but other chartbusters from the Golden Hits of the Watergate Era—“twisting, slowly, slowly in the wind”; “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment; cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it, save the plan”; “What did the president know and when did he know it?”—don’t appear. Mallon seldom if ever puts us where the power is exercised, but, instead, in a bedroom or a bar or an antechamber where the characters are dressing or dining or traveling shortly after a shoe has dropped downstairs or hell has broken out across town. By forcing us to follow the progress of the break-in plan, the cover-up, and the increasingly threatening investigations from a distance, Mallon forces us to come to our knowledge of Watergate the way most of his characters did, without actually having been present at the famous moments of conspiracy and connivance. Because of this, the Watergate scandal is the subject of Watergate in much the same way the Chinatown neighborhood was the subject of Chinatown—in other words, not really. Watergate is about what happens to a group of frogs who live in a pot of water on top of a stove after somebody has turned the burner on.

Mallon presents all of these people with great tenderness, with the possible exception of Richardson, the preening popinjay who, appropriately, likes to paint birds and whose pride in his own rectitude enables him to escape the catastrophe for a life on the rubber-chicken circuit. Those who went down with the ship, however, are the beneficiaries of Mallon’s empathy: LaRue, the accepting stoic; Woods, the collaterally damaged loyalist; and Hunt, the good soldier, punished beyond all proportion. A great revelation is the depiction of Pat Nixon, the last of our first ladies to have a nonspeaking media personality; not only does she show that she could teach Julianna Margulies a thing or two about being a good wife, she also has more spirit and grit here than she ever allowed the country to see during those two decades she spent standing at Dick’s side in her good Republican cloth coat. Mallon rewards her for all those years of dutiful silence with an electrifying outburst where she not only expresses her discontent but also gives us an insight into her husband that we can take away and chew on. It comes on the dismal Thanksgiving of 1973, not long after the Saturday Night Massacre, and Pat finally lets Dick have it:

You don’t understand … I would have made an enemies list twice as long as yours and Colson’s, and I would have done something to get the people on it. Anything to be rid of them forever—the way I thought they were gone from our lives after ’60, and then ’62, and then—surely!—at this time last year. I hate your enemies, but you love them. You love their existence; that’s what gives you your own. That’s why I’m sick with anger at you: for bringing us to the top of this awful mountain. We’re never going to get back down without being devoured.

There is one major character in the ensemble who is not middle-aged: the shrewd, wasp-tongued dowager of Washington society, the elderly Alice Roosevelt Longworth, playing precisely the role that Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, plays in Downton Abbey—part solon, part superannuated mean girl. Mrs. Longworth was the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, the wife of Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, and the mistress of Senator William Borah. Not only did this make her a real expert on how a bill becomes a law, but having been born in the sausage factory and lived on the packing floor her whole life, she is a woman who is surprised by nothing and no one. And having been a failure at something important—motherhood—she brings a surprising gimlet-eyed mercy to the shortcomings of others, or at least to those others in whom she recognizes a remedial virtue. There is a moment in the novel when she visits Nixon shortly after his resignation, and she offers him some unsentimental encouragement by reminding him of the time, shortly after he became vice president, when her daughter committed suicide and he served as pallbearer at the funeral. She tells him,

“I saw the look on your face when you were carrying that wretched girl’s coffin. You understood the ghastliness of it all, and you knew how to deny it, too. I realized that you could do that with anything, always finding another layer of make-up to put over the tears.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“No, it’s a fact. If I let myself be swallowed by one personality, you hid yourself behind dozens of them, one ‘new Nixon’ after another.”

Nixon carrying a casket in the rain; Nixon picking up his wife and twirling her around at what he thought was an unobserved moment of joy on Air Force One; Nixon ordering the band to play all night at a White House party for returning POWs; Nixon enjoying a drink and a sail and the swelling bombastic chords of “Victory at Sea”—Mallon presents us with a human Nixon, and asks us to look at him without preconceptions. He turns out to be that somewhat aloof and distant neighbor who, once you get to know him, turns out to have more soul than you, in your arrogance, ever imagined. If you’re like me, you finish this book and wonder what Richard Nixon did to deserve the more than four decades of scorn and snark we’ve heaped upon him—except pull himself up from nothing, raise a family, pursue his dreams, and be the best damn liberal president this country has had since FDR.

Ah, clever Mallon! In keeping us out of the Oval Office, in restricting us to the upstairs rooms, we never quite see the hatred and paranoia and mania for control that were more than a small part of Richard Nixon. These were things that consumed him, and that, in the final analysis, left him without the sanctuary of goodwill in which Ronald Reagan hid after Iran-Contra and to which Bill Clinton repaired after Monica. But we don’t really need another book to remind us of that. The great reward in reading this wise and thoughtful and subtle novel is that it reminds us that our leaders are only human beings. This is something we tend to forget—foolishly, when they’re on their way up, and cruelly, when they’re on their way out.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

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The Crisis of
Zionism
by Peter Beinart
Times Books, 304 pp.

As Peter Beinart makes clear in his passionately argued and persuasive new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Netanyahu managed swiftly to gain the upper hand in the relationship—in no small part thanks to the political support he received from right-wing U.S. Jewish lobbying groups. The alliance between these organizations and the most revanchist elements of the Israeli leadership—those dedicated to expanding control over the West Bank and preventing the creation of a viable Palestinian state—represents, to Beinart, a betrayal of the democratic and humanitarian principles upon which Zionism, and especially American Zionism, was based. His book is one part analysis of how that betrayal came to pass, and one part a rallying cry for a more responsible, and ethical, approach to both the Palestinian question and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. “Unless American Jews help end the occupation that desecrates Israel’s founding ideals,” he writes at the outset of this eloquent polemic, which is certain to place him at the top of the enemies list of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Zionism will become “a movement that fails the test of Jewish power.”

Beinart’s book is the second major work in recent months to sound the alarm about the entrenchment of what he calls “non-democratic” Israel across the green line. In The Unmaking of Israel, liberal American-Israeli journalist (and orthodox Jew) Gershom Gorenberg argued that Israel had in effect created an apartheid state in the West Bank, blighted by discrimination, violence, and repression—and that those values were spilling over into Israel proper. Beinart too is deeply concerned by the rapid growth of Israel’s West Bank settlements—from a population of about 50,000 a generation ago to more than 300,000 today—and the undue influence these illegal outposts wield over Israeli politics and society. “Over time, democratic and non-democratic Israel have become Siamese twins,” Beinart observes. “In 2010 … Netanyahu called Ariel, a settlement that stretches thirteen miles into the West Bank, ‘the heart of our country.’ Many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.” For Beinart, Exhibit A in the settlements’ toxic influence has been the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in one of the most remote such outposts. Lieberman has become the leading government advocate of loyalty oaths for Israeli Arab citizens and for the forced transfer of large segments of the Arab population across the green line—where they would be involuntarily stripped of their Israeli citizenship.

But while Gorenberg focuses on ultra-orthodox extremists in the settlements and the Israeli Defense Force as the most dangerous threats to an orderly West Bank withdrawal and an equitable peace, Beinart concentrates on a different obstacle: right-wing U.S. Jewish supporters of Israel. “There are two kinds of mainstream American Jewish organizations,” he writes: “those whose tolerance for the occupation is warping their historic commitment to democratic ideals and those with no commitment to democratic ideals at all.” In the first category he puts the Anti-Defamation League, run by the outspoken Holocaust survivor Abraham Foxman, and the American Jewish Committee. In the latter he places the largest and best funded of all the lobbying groups, AIPAC, many of whose leaders were also scarred by brushes with anti-Semitism. To a greater or lesser extent, all of these organizations continue to see Jews as victims, regard any criticism of Israel as manifestations of anti-Semitism, and consider Palestinians an undifferentiated and hostile mass determined to see Israel wiped off the map. Former Knesset member and liberal politician Yossi Beilin calls the elders who run these groups a “plutocracy,” woefully disconnected from American Jews as a whole. As Beinart sees it, they’ve failed to recognize that the reality has changed. “We live in an age not of Jewish weakness, but of Jewish power,” Beinart observes. “Without moral vigilance, Jews will abuse power just as hideously as anyone else.”

To be sure, Israel continues to live in what its leaders often point out is a “dangerous neighborhood”: rockets rain down regularly from Hamas-controlled Gaza, while Iran builds its nuclear capability and calls for Israel’s destruction. But Beinart argues persuasively that the Jewish state’s security no longer depends on military control of the West Bank. Moreover, he shreds the claims of the Israeli leadership and American Jewish leaders that the occupation shouldn’t be criticized because it is somehow the Palestinians’ fault. In this view, the Palestinians have repeatedly chosen violence and spurned generous Israeli offers for peace. Beinart provides an evenhanded assessment of the 2000 Camp David talks, the President Clinton-brokered peace negotiations whose failure set the stage for the second Palestinian intifada. The conventional wisdom holds that negotiations collapsed because of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s intransigence; Beinart shows that Israeli leader Ehud Barak’s take-it-or-leave-it offer—including inequitable land swaps, the retention of big settlement blocs, and Israeli control of the Jordan Valley—would have been impossible for Arafat to accept. While hardly letting the Palestinian leader off the hook, he makes a strong case that the intifada stemmed as much from Palestinian anger and frustration at Israel’s entrenched occupation as from Arafat’s surrender to the most violent forces in Palestinian society. And he rightly points out that while Israel, by relentlessly expanding settlements, continues to ignore the 2004 road map to peace devised by the diplomatic foursome comprising representatives from the United Nations, the U.S., the European Union, and Russia known as the Quartet. By contrast, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has met his responsibility by building a disciplined security force, dramatically bring -ing down violence both within the territories and that directed at Israel.

Eight years after the intifada’s outbreak, with negotiations still frozen, Obama attempted to jump-start the peace process. The U.S. president—heavily influenced by liberal-minded American Jewish intellectuals such as Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf and Chicago attorney Newton Minnow—seemed destined for a collision with Netanyahu, whose major influences leaned in the opposite direction. These included the radical Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the earliest advocates of Arab deportations, and his own father, the equally uncompromising Benzion Netanyahu, who once worked as Jabotinsky’s private secretary. In 2009 the Obama administration was largely united behind a policy of pushing Netanyahu to declare a settlement freeze as a prelude to negotiations with the Palestinians. Soon, however, those who favored a freeze—Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer—found themselves losing ground to longtime U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross, a canny political operator who believed that pushing for a freeze with Netanyahu would be politically unwise and would end up leading nowhere.

The shrewdest player, however, was Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister ran circles around his less experienced U.S. counterpart. At Netanyahu’s bidding, U.S. lobbying groups, led by AIPAC, argued that a freeze would endanger Israeli security. The groups persuaded hundreds of U.S. congressmen to sign a letter demanding that Obama take the freeze off the table. Netanyahu proved his “sincerity” about a peace deal, meanwhile, by offering his own two-state solution, which would have left the Palestinians with patches of noncontiguous territory and Israel in control of a united Jerusalem. Politically exposed, Obama backed down. The result was a foreign policy debacle that emboldened Israel’s hawks, humiliated the U.S. president—and drove the deeply disappointed Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to seek a declaration of Palestinian statehood from the UN Security Council (which the U.S. promptly vetoed).

Beinart devotes the last sections of his book to strategies for ending the occupation and breaking the stranglehold over U.S.-Israeli policy wielded by AIPAC. His proposals range from the dramatic (a boycott of goods manufactured in Israeli settlements) to the incremental and probably unrealistic (government subsidies for non-orthodox private schools in the United States, places that tend to reinforce both Jewish identity and liberal values). Beinart believes that what is needed most is a renewed engagement with Israel among young, secular American Jews, combined with a return to the moral Zionism that preceded the 1967 war and the occupation. U.S. Jews seeking absolution in good works at home, he argues, while ignoring Israel’s fundamental disparities, are fooling themselves; Israel’s problems are theirs as well. In the end, “a disfigured Jewish state will haunt not only American Zionism but American Judaism,” Beinart writes, “and the American Jews who try to avert their eyes will be judged harshly by history.”

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