A Foundation of Bubbles: Deconstructing the McKinsey Report, Part 1

The report by McKinsey and Company, "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in American Schools," has generated a lot of unquestioning fanfare in the media. Arne Duncan joined NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein in a conference to launch the report, and seized on it as "proof" that we need "radical" reform in our schools.

Klein promptly highlights Duncan's speech at the event in a video on his Education Equality Project website. The makers of the report, we've already noted, are also on Klein's payroll at NYC public schools. (We also noted McKinsey was previously on Enron's payroll.)

The report itself isn't remarkable in identifying the achievement gap. That's old news. What's new in the report is its claim that the gap is causing "the equivalent of a permanent, deep recession in terms of the gap between actual and potential output in the economy" (18).

That's an argument sensational enough to make headlines, and put teachers and principals right up there next to bankers and financiers as the culprits behind America's economic woes. There's nothing like a manufactured recession to divert us from a real one, and to divert the populist anger from that real one toward the invented one.

This is the first in a series of posts that will look more skeptically at the report than the mainstream press and the Duncan-Klein camp has.

1. A Foundation of Bubbles

The McKinsey Report itself states, "In this analysis, we focus mainly on 'achievement,' which reflects the mastery of particular cognitive skills or concepts as measured through standardized tests" (Footnote 1, p. 5). Thus the crisis this report alleges stands or falls on our willingness to accept that student performance on standardized tests is an accurate measure of student value in the workforce; it further rests on our willingness to accept the notion that the primary purpose of education is to create not citizens, and not well-rounded characters, but instead to create workers able to benefit an economy that more and more does not serve the interests of the working rank and file. Think Wal-Mart.

Nobody is saying that reading, math, and future employment based on proficiency in (and by no means mastery of) these two skills are unimportant. What should be said, though, is that other traits like creativity, global awareness, the ability to learn independently instead of needing to be taught, to work well with others, to innovate, on and on, surely also benefit our economy. If we accept that, then we should have no problem accepting that the current math-and-reading standardized test fixation carries an opportunity cost for every minute taken from broader studies in order to deliver test-prep classes to "juke the stats*."

We note a related irony on page 7 of the report, which describes the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) test upon which the study's international comparisons are based:

PISA is a respected international comparison of 15-year-olds by the OECD that measures "real-world" (applied) learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006 the United States ranked 25th out of 30 nations in math and 24th of 30 in science.

The irony? The high-stakes testing regime of NCLB has generated account after account of schools narrowing curriculum in order to focus on test-taking skills and knowing (or correctly guessing) the right answer on state tests. It's no surprise that this would produce low scores on the PISA test (which is unrelated to NCLB). PISA, as the report states, tests "real-world" application of mathematical and scientific thinking. NCLB test-prep sessions focus on the opposite of applied knowledge. I'd love to see a breakdown of how schools that performed well on NCLB-mandated state tests performed on PISA. My hunch is we'd see a picture of schools great at finding the right bubble, but horrible at applying learning and solving real-world problems.

Related: Re: "Juking the stats," if you haven't seen the Bill Moyers interview with David Simon, co-writer of the HBO series The Wire, by all means watch it. A snippet:

DAVID SIMON: Well, and facts-- one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.

[...]

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.

TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.

[...]

DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.

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