☆ Don’t worry about Bay Area public school rankings, says CA School Choice Foundation pres
The Opp Now team spoke with educational expert Michael Alexander to parse unsettling recent news: The Bay’s public schools are sliding behind local privates in statewide rankings. Alexander finds COVID-19 mandates to blame for local public institutions’ bad break — not declining school quality. An Opp Now exclusive.
Opportunity Now: This SF Chronicle article reports how Bay Area public schools are faring worse in rankings than local private schools.
In particular, the prestigious (and lately, controversial) Lowell High School didn’t even break the top 100. However, Bay Area private schools’ rankings, including online-only private schools, did much better in terms of nationwide rankings.
What, do you think, are the implications of these ranking discrepancies?
Michael Alexander: When evaluating any business, you have to take an analytical perspective.
Now, it’s almost impossible to make judgments on schools’ quality of education. Schools vary widely in emphasis, quality of students, and other important factors that can’t easily be quantified.
Rankings like this use quantitative measures based on “academic performance,” usually in certain areas like reading and math. But, similarly, content of those courses and the quality of students are always going to vary.
Moreover, with a public school like Lowell High, we should note that they were required to follow a number of health regimes during COVID, including not being open/reduced attendance, changing schedules, and remote instruction. Really, you can’t ask me to speculate what went wrong for them; but ask their administration, and they’d probably tell you, “Our hands were tied. We had to close, have remote teaching, require masks, etc.”
This perspective permits us to see at a high level the impact of management on any outcome. You always have to look at management. When management does unwise or unprofitable things, the whole school (or district, county, state, etc.) is forced to go along. During COVID, Lowell’s administration didn’t have any control or choice over these types of governance decisions.
ON: Okay, then it sounds like you don’t think our local public schools have fundamentally changed the way they approach academics. Rather, the onerous ordinances they complied with during the pandemic led to worse student scores. Is that accurate?
MA: Yes. Ultimately, I don’t think there’s been a decline in quality of Bay Area public school students, or that they’ve experienced unrecoverable pandemic-era learning loss. And there’s likely been no significant change in quality of instructors. So what made the difference for rankings?
External factors caused the school’s administration to make changes that we know are closely associated with declining performance (e.g., in-person shutdowns, general sense of crisis). It’s no more complicated than that.
Other than that, it’s always hard to determine the quality of schools and compare them. You must selectively identify and weigh criteria (e.g., libraries, resources, college acceptance rates), which often don’t measure the domains you want them to measure. That’s why I’m not a big fan of these ranking systems, to tell you the truth.
ON: What might it take to revitalize and make competitive our public schools in the Bay Area, and the nation more largely?
MA: Private and public schools are basically structured the same way: Kids are divided into twelve neat packages, and common testing is supposed to gauge their learning.
Instead, I believe that in general, there needs to be more opportunity for experimentation and being creative and adaptable — in both public and private settings. Currently, there’s more groupthink in this so-called education profession than anywhere else in our society.
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