It was good right up to the end

A rather interesting article, Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing by Meredith Broussard.

It is the new Atlantic Magazine which regrettably is click hungry and panders to popular shibboleths as reflected in the article headline - Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing. Sounds like the usual jeremiad about school underfunding and discrimination against the poor and the general disgustingness of America which so often appear in magazines. But there's more to the article than that, though I do think that Broussard misses a couple of important nuances.

Her big reveal is that 1) the answers to standardized tests are there in plain view in the standard textbooks and 2) schools (or at least those in Philadelphia) do a startlingly bad job of keeping track of textbooks. Broussard attempts to makes this an issue of funding but it is not clear that extra funding would actually solve the problem of schools having books but not making them available to teachers who need them. If you don't know how many books you have, where they are, or how many you need and don't have any mechanism for assuring that available books are moved from storage to classrooms where they are needed, then simply buying more books is not likely to make much of a dent in the problem.

The education establishment, in trying to explain their many shortfalls, frequently, and I believe correctly, makes the point that education is more than a simple commercial commodity. It is a complex process with innumerable exogenous variables beyond school control. But even if that is true, there are some things that schools can, do, and should control - such as book acquisition, inventorying and fulfillment. This is plain vanilla inventory management process, identical in concept and most details to any other enterprise. There is nothing special about acquiring, tracking, distributing and managing textbooks in a school.

In Broussard's example, they even have a recently implemented inventory management system explicitly designed to handle textbooks. The problem is that they don't use it.

So if you strip away the spin and the attempt to reinforce stereotypes and failed strategies (throw more money at it), you can read Broussard's article and find that:

The information to score well on standardized tests is made plainly available in the standard textbooks.

The school district has lots of books floating around but is incapable of efficiently and effectively matching teacher demand for textbooks with the existing supply of textbooks.

The school district has the data tools (in the recently implemented inventory system) to efficiently and effectively management the textbook inventory management process but chooses not to use it.

The school district is carrying the capital cost of an expensive but unused information system.

The school district is carrying the opportunity cost of available but unused textbooks.

The school district is carrying the labor cost of excess management time spent ineffectively managing textbook inventories inaccurately with excel spreadsheets.

The school is carrying the labor cost of teachers spending time trying to scrounge up books informally from elsewhere in the system when they ought to be able to make a simple two minute request and expect fulfillment.

The school district is forgoing the student knowledge acquisition and the improved test scores (and therefore likely life outcomes) of its students that would be available were it able to effectively make available the books it does have to the students that do need them.

This is a management problem plain and simple, just as it would be in any other enterprise. It is possible that there is also a resource issue (need more money to buy more books) but that is not obvious. Broussard does a good job of putting sufficient information on the table to see that there is a management problem. But what does she conclude in her final paragraph?

It may be many years until Philadelphia’s education budget matches its curriculum requirements. In the meantime, there are a few things the district—and other flailing school districts in America—can do. Stop giving standardized tests that are inextricably tied to specific sets of books. At the very least, stop using test scores to evaluate teacher performance without providing the items each teacher needs to do his or her job. Most of all, avoid basing an entire education system on materials so costly that big, urban districts can’t afford to buy them. Until these things change, it will be impossible to raise standardized test scores—despite the best efforts of the teachers and students who will return to school this fall and find no new books waiting for them.

Its a budget issue, we need to spend more, we shouldn't test so much, we shouldn't evaluate teachers.

She wrote a whole article detailing abysmal school management and then, instead of concluding we need to manage schools better, defaults to the tired nostrums of yesteryear. It was good right up to the end.