Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing

26:09We're not talking about nine-year-olds who, you know, you don't want to judge the whole course of their life on one day. We're talking about people in their middle 20s seeking access to the most demanding and, in the case of medicine, life-critical of the professions. And people are saying, well, it's just too tough a thing to test them either. Well, and of course, we've seen, you know, and this certainly happened in the COVID era, a walking away from standardized assessment in admissions criteria. And frankly, one of the things that I liked as part of the Trump compact for the 10 universities that were to get sort of favored nation status on federal funding was this use of standardized tests.

26:48and it's more in fashion now. Many of the people that got rid of those assessments are now putting them back in place because while they're not perfect, they're a heck of a lot more reliable and a heck of a lot more valid than this other range of portfolios and things that really do not allow you to have a fair and transparent system. And that's true, of course, in our professional schools as well. Yeah, well, there's always a racial element here, a suggestion that the tests are disadvantageous to people who come from groups that have suffered depression in the past. And I think a point that you have made, I've seen you make this in other contexts, is the alternative to testing is not randomness.

27:30The alternative to testing is word of mouth. Right. Exactly. And word of mouth really encodes prejudices. If you think standardized testing does, wait till you hear how people say, well, you know, you can just tell he's a good doctor, just look at him. He looks like a doctor. Absolutely. And maybe the good doctor doesn't look like, what was the name of that Australian actor of the 1960s who was such a heartthrob, I'm going to forget now. But maybe Richard Chamberlain, was it Richard Chamberlain? Maybe Richard Chamberlain, the actor, would not be a good doctor. Yeah, exactly. And so are they perfect?

28:05No, but they are the best instruments we have. And I know that these are nonprofit organizations for the most part, the SAT, College Board, et cetera. They've worked hard on bias in those assessments. And they're a heck of a lot more valid than somebody's opinion. Yeah. What do you think about exams on, one of the things that makes things like MCAT different is these are exams also on the way out. They're gating mechanisms. And that's true of licensure exams in virtually every profession. And it allows us as consumers to have some kind of confidence that some threshold, some floor has been met in terms of knowledge.

28:48It still doesn't make you the great doctor, but it tells you you know something. Yeah. As you look back on No Child Left Behind, it contained both incentives and disincentives for doing well on these tests. And the schools that met the requirements, they got access to resources. There were consequences for school systems that didn't. But I wonder if you look back on it with your kind of more Machiavellian hat. Did those incentives and disincentives apply to all the power actors? Teachers unions have been a consistent opponent of testing. Unions often exist to protect their least capable members.

29:21And was there some way that in a more cunning way, the unions could have been brought more into the tent? Or was that just, were they just doomed because their mission is to protect their least capable members to be in opposition no matter what? You know, and I think, okay, so here we have the benefit of being able to look back at that. And as I'm saying now, and we're seeing it in real time, when there's no problem, that is to say, when the tests don't reveal failure, we don't need resources. And if we don't have a problem and we don't need resources, then who gives a head darn? I mean, you know, we have no federal rule, no civil rights imperative around achievement as a national matter.

29:57And so those who frail against testing, I think, are being hoisted on their own petard because here we are about, you know, a lot of rhetoric around eliminating the Department of Education, dramatically reducing federal resources, sending it back to the states with, you know, virtually no accountability, no responsibility, and kind of a let-me-eat-cake attitude. Why? Because we get, you know, there's a march towards eliminating the things that diagnose a problem that people fully know and understand we have. What does the Department of Education do, the Federal Department of Education? Well, for starters, it's a big bank.

30:35In higher education, obviously, it deploys Pell Grants and many types of advantageous loans to students so that they can pursue post-secondary education in affordable ways. It's also a leader around this national imperative. I mean, and we've had for many decades a bipartisan thesis that it is a national imperative for people to have opportunity irrespective of where they live. and that the federal government has some role, a minor role, a leadership role, an accountability role, a gap-closing role in attending to that. While 90 cents on the dollar in K-12 comes from state governments. Look, if I had a nickel for every school superintendent or chief state school officer who said to me, thank God for no child left behind, we never would have been able to pass that here in fill-in-the-blank often union state, and it has kept us honest.

31:34And when we walk away from that, the results will, as they have, decline. I believe it, as sure as I'm sitting here. I was reading a website of one of the major anti-testing groups. And they went through a series of the objections to testing. And as you said, narrowing the curriculum was one. Unfairness was other. Racial gap. But one of the things, the last one they came to, and one of the things you notice as a writer, is the thing that someone leaves for last is usually the thing they care about the most, is they said that testing made teaching less fun for teachers. And I was struck by, is that true?

32:09Is it less fun? I mean, don't you as a teacher want to know what's going on in your class, at least all these smiling faces or blank faces? Don't you want to know what's inside those faces? Yeah, that might be true. And here's why. There is a way, I'm not going to, the word regimen comes to mind, but direct instruction prescribed in a sequential, serious way where there's fidelity of implementation and hewing to the research is the path to success. Now, you know, we have gotten into this idea that every teacher should go into their own classroom and create and invent and student-led and all of this kind of stuff.

32:52And it sounds like a blast, but does it work? and the answer is largely been no so it's just like you know we wouldn't want your physician making a thought you know the protocols for you know cancer treatment neither should we be you know start teachers make up uh stuff and and hope that it works just you know the spray and pray method of teaching and so yeah might that be less fun yeah maybe and i think one of the things i'm encouraged about is, you know, what can technology do and media do and tools that are available through technology to make teaching more fun, to, you know, better engage students, but, you know, to get results, you know, some days, times you got to eat your broccoli.

33:37Yeah. Well, in some of your statements, you've expressed in a general way, optimism about the impact of technology on education. But right now you're hearing a lot of concerns about the impact of phones. And at the college level, you hear even in fairly elite institutions, professors saying that young people, because of either technology or because of artificial intelligence or what have you, are, I think, completely unable to read anything that's more than a couple of pages long. And they no longer assign full books. They no longer assign novels. Students just can't cope with them, even at very distinguished institutions.

34:08Yeah. No, I largely agree with the people who are concerned about the use, but I do think it also can be a tool, but it ought to be, you know, part of what is prescribed, if you will, by, you know, the people who are accountable for the results. But I'm a big fan of, you know, no phones in schools. And, you know, here's a big part of the problem that relates to your question about professional life insurance exams, too. Kids can't read well enough. Why is that? We took our foot off the gas and we're paying the price for, you know, 10 years ago. I mean, Those kids who are in colleges now, you know, were underserved during COVID, don't have the necessary practice and reading skills and math skills that they should have to do work at that level.

34:52Your point about the lag is so powerful. I think one of the things that we didn't appreciate during COVID is the decisions you make in any year about education ramify for almost a century. I kept thinking all during COVID, and I generally was supportive of stern public health measures, There's especially the vaccination part that you should have to, you know, I got in a lot of heat for this, but yeah, you want to send your kids to a school, they should be vaccinated for sure. And because it's not just about your kid, it's about everyone else's kid. The other people are not volunteering to be exposed to your virus, which doesn't stay your virus.

35:24But when we closed the schools and kept them closed into that second year, it just kept hitting me. They're 50, 60, 70, 80 years from now, there are going to be Americans whose lives were wrecked because they were on the cusp of the decision. I'm having trouble. Should I finish high school or should I leave in grade 10? And there are a lot of people who made the decision in 2020, I guess I'll leave in grade 10. And they're going to be with us for a long time, we hope. But that consequence is going to be with us for a long time. Absolutely. My friend, Mike Morath, who's the chief state school officer in Texas and a darn good one, talks about in Argentina, back during the strife down there, they had a period where The schools were closed for years and they've done all kinds of analysis around it.

36:08And it has been a major part of the economic decline of Argentina. Is there any hope for the kind of remediation of the COVID generation or is it just are they just gone? Sure. Of course, there's hope. But we have to make up our mind that it's a priority and we're going to do what it takes to cure the problem. And it's because we've waited so long, it's going to be more expensive and potentially more intensive. But David, my former boss used to say, you know what? And he was famously the only Republican who did not call for the abolishment of the Department of Education. He when he when he said that, he said people heard abolish education.

36:46And now we're in this kind of abolish education. Do we really care whether those kids are educated or not? Or do they just wash through the system? And in a competitive environment, those people are at the starting line and my kids, you know, across the finish line. I mean, it's just gotten to be at a very corrosive place for our country. Well, in last week's show, I had a dialogue with Sam Harris about the mental attitude of the attitudes of leaders of Silicon Valley and how with this infatuation with artificial intelligence and transhumanism that has gripped some of the leaders in that community.

37:20there does seem to be in some some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in america not just a willingness but actually kind of zeal to write off vast stretches of the american population maybe even a majority of america maybe even a large majority say who needs them that you know it'll be an elite few surveying a civilization in which machines do not only the work but the thinking and most people are just surplus to any requirement that the elite few will have and maybe pay them a universal basic income maybe hope they don't reproduce uh but what happens them is of no concern to the people at the top.

37:52And this is, I don't want to say a widespread view, but it is the people who have this view are important and they have a lot of influence in the current administration. I couldn't disagree with any of that. You know, when President Trump, you know, a few months ago said all the schools need to do is teach English. So, I mean, you know, was that a throwaway line or, you know, does he actually believe that? Who knows. But I mean, I do think it's, it's, uh, there, there's some element about that. Teaching, you mean like grammar? Uh, you know what? The president could use a few lessons. Yeah, no, I mean, I, I believe that too, but no, that the, that the only thing that, you know, that in other words that, you know, native speakers should speak English, that that was the, you know, crime imperative.

38:39Oh, I see. I mean, no foreign languages. Right. Why don't American schools teach foreign languages? Well, I used to be on the kick where every student should be bilingual. If you're a Spanish speaker, you need to be an English speaker and vice versa or whatever, you know, Chinese and, you know, dozens and dozens of languages that are taught in our schools. But look, we've got to start with reading and math and then we can get into other things and should. All right. So let's, as we round to the end of the conversation, let's look at the signs of hope. You see them in Mississippi. You see them a little bit in Alabama.

39:12Aside from those two states, are there other tendencies or trends anywhere at the center of the education system that give you reason for feeling confidence about the future? Well, I think there's energy around reading. 30 plus states of California has finally gotten on board with these research based reading practices and has recently passed a law about that. And we'll see about their fidelity of implementation. I think people are taking and frankly, it's a regret I have that we've paid too little attention to teacher preparation, who's in our classrooms, how well are they prepared to deal with the kind of challenges we've been talking about.

39:50for the last half hour or so? Do they know the research? Do they understand what it is to be effective in a classroom with the kind of kid you're going to encounter? All of that. And so we're starting to see more energy around those issues. And how can technology, you know, help support what we know we need and then dramatically changing teacher core and teacher workforce? I think some of the things that we're seeing, you know, choice is happening. How might we use that tool to maximum effect. We're learning a lot about that. So, you know, people are, you know, are still at it, but I do think leadership around what it is we're trying to do, do we as a nation care about opportunity for everybody?

40:33We've got to reinstill and reinstate that principle. Yeah. I was talking, citing this conversation with Sam Harris about the disdainful attitude of business elites. Through American history, the democratic idea and the public education idea have been beyond symbiotic. They're the same idea. And if you don't educate, you don't have citizens. And a society that is disvaluing citizenship is a society that's disvaluing education. In fact, disvaluing education is a sign that you're disvaluing citizenship. And maybe there's something fitting that at a period when our democratic institutions seem to be in so much crisis that the educational institutions that are indispensable to and supportive of those democratic institutions are also facing so many questions.

41:15Yeah. And who can fix that? Us. And so we have to, as we head into midterms, ask the people that are offering themselves up for service, how do they feel about that? Are they willing to work across the aisle? Do they understand that major piece of our country's founding and success? And so we need to have answers to that. Let me finish by asking you to offer a little bit of news you can use. Some of the people I'm sure who are watching this are parents or people entrusted with the care of a child. What's the checklist that they should have in their head when they vote not only for president and senator, but school board?

41:57What are the things you want to hear from people with authority? Yeah, we've been talking a lot about education, so I'll start there. I mean, you know, we still have pretty significantly rich data about the quality of your schools. Go get familiarize yourself with your district and your campus. Not only your kid in the subgroup that your child is part of, but really understand what's going on in your school district. are the best teachers in the most challenging places. Just get smart about what you are being offered up as a consumer, number one. And number two, I think, obviously, I wouldn't be leading the Bipartisan Policy Center if I didn't believe this, but hold your elected officials at whatever level to account for their ability to work together to solve problems and to keep the main thing the main thing.

42:46And I think, you know, we are feeding the beast of electing folks who want to reinforce what we and only we want to hear as opposed to playing the long game. And, you know, we're going to get the best government that we deserve, you know, so it's on us. Well, a lot of people are running for local races, especially and including school boards, press certain hot button issues that we all have opinions about and get us all very excited. But what's the question? If you're, a parent voting in a school board election, what's the most important as opposed to the most exciting question that you should be asking yourself and asking those who seek your vote?

43:21Well, you should ask, you know, how is your kid doing and how is your community doing against these metrics that are reportable today? How many kids can read and math, what's your graduation, do math, what's the graduation rate and what is it for everybody? And what's the trajectory over time? Did your school district dip down during COVID and how much recovery was there? How many federal dollars did your school district receive and what did they do with them? I mean, these are not really very complicated questions to get answers to. And they're absolutely pretty straightforward. And they ought to be able to answer them to your satisfaction.

44:00Well, one of the things I think about a lot, and I think in the debate of this incredibly bizarre and destructive debate we're having about vaccination, is there is an important place in our economic life for individualism, but in our healthcare life and our educational life, individualism can be overtaxed. Your virus is my virus. Your bacteria is my bacteria. And your underperforming child who is falling short of his or her potential is also my problem. And anybody can have a special needs child, absolutely anybody. Yeah. And to the point of, you know, generations that are going to get written off, they're going to stress our social safety net.

44:37They're going to be aggrieved and frustrated and motivated to not nice behaviors potentially and left behind. And that's a terrible place for our country who, you know, we still, I think, fancy ourselves as the, you know, land of opportunity. Margaret Spelling, thank you for joining me today. Thank you for fighting this fight. Thank you for believing in the possibilities. Thank you, David. Bye-bye.

45:07This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

46:01Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

46:27Thank you to Margaret Spellings for joining me on The David Fromm Show today. The word Impressionism entered everyday speech after an art exhibition in 1874 in the city of Paris, where a collection of paintings by painters who would become world famous, including one by Claude Monet that gave the movement its name, were displayed to the French public. The 150th anniversary of that 1874 exhibition was in the year 2024. And to honor the event, the National Gallery in Washington and the Musée d 'Orsay in Paris organized a joint exhibition where they gathered together almost all, maybe even nearly all, of the paintings that were shown in 1874 in the show that gave Impressionism its name.

47:07And I had the opportunity to visit both of those shows and found them deeply moving. Afterward, an artist friend of mine gave me a book, and that is the subject of my discussion today about the origins of the Impressionist movement, a book called The Judgment of Paris, written by Ross King and published in the year 2006. Now, The Judgment of Paris is a complicated book with many subplots. I want to focus today on just one part of the story. One of the central characters in The Judgment of Paris is a painter named Ernest Messonnier. And in the period from 1840 to about 1870, Messonnier was the most famous and best-paid painter in France and therefore in the world.

47:47And when I say best paid, this man lived in a giant chateau and had kept teams of horses. He was a wealthy, wealthy man, all of it achieved by his artistry, which when you look at it is indeed amazing. Messonnier was a painter of incredible versimilitude, who is especially astoundingly excellent at capturing the movement of horses. Now, this may sound like not such an achievement, but actually until the invention of the motion picture camera, which allowed you to take an image, a consistent image of a horse in movement, and then break it down into frames, no one in the world exactly knew how a horse ran because the feet moved almost too fast for the eye.

48:28Messonnier built a kind of racing track at his estate where he would have a kind of cart that would allow him to keep more pace with the horses so he could take sketches and observe exactly how their knees and legs moved in order to, in the battle scenes of his great patriotic paintings, capture horses in action. Messonnier made most of his living by painting scenes of still life in costumes of the 17th and 18th century. But the thing that made him a famous celebrity were his great patriotic paintings of the two Napoleons, Napoleon I, Emperor of France in the early 1800s, and then Napoleon III, who was the ruler of France during Messonnier's lifetime.

49:03And he painted them at moments of triumph, at moments of grim defeat, but resolute defeat, very patriotic paintings honoring the Bonaparte dynasty. Messagnier lived until the year 1891, long enough to see his own work, once so acclaimed, once so valuable, go out of style. His famous pictures are now in the Metropolitan Museum. But if you go to see them, you won't because they're in the basement. And when they are on display, they're beside an elevator. No one thinks all that highly of Messonnier anymore. This artist who, in his day, dominated the profession in a way that names that we think of as more famous could only begin to envy.

49:41Another of the characters in The Judgment of Paris is a painter called Edouard Manet. You've certainly heard of him if you haven't heard of Messonnier. Now, Manet, not to be confused with Claude Monet, although in their own lifetime, people often did mix them up. So if you do confuse them, you're entitled. But Manet, who was a generation older or half generation older than Claude Monet, Manet was not a great draftsman. He wasn't even interested in the problem of Manet, of drafting. Manet was of an age where he grew up when the camera was obviously going to be, and the photography, the development of photography was obviously going to become important to the history of art.

50:13Important how, maybe you couldn't quite say. But the whole project of capturing exactly the way a horse ran, that was obviously something that machines were going to take away from people in time to come. So Manet lost interest in questions of drafting. And he became interested in the question of what is painting for now that photography exists? How do you use existing art to teach the eye to see in new ways? Now, Manet was not a revolutionary at all. In fact, he was deeply immersed in the art of the past, and many of his paintings are actually references to the art of the past. And he would take scenes from mythology, scenes from works by Titian, and then regroup them into exactly similar postures in the costume of present-day Paris.

50:56And he would have, he painted nudes, but he painted nudes of women who are present day women. He would take a pose of the goddess Athena and make her into a present day courtesan in Paris. But he got his inspiration from the past, but he was training his audience to see for the future. Now, why do I tell you this story now? For what it's worth, I pay a lot of attention to contemporary art. And I notice that in our day, as well as in the past, a lot of people become very rich and famous. And some of them are people who I don't think should be so rich and famous. And there is a kind of rough justice in the story of Ernest Messonnier, who's, by the way, a much more accomplished and impressive person than many of the people who are rich and famous today, but how the judgment of the present is not the last word, that there is a future because the future will be interested in different subjects than the past.

51:46And the study of the history of art teaches us something, which is not just to appreciate what the beauty of the things that human artistry can affect, but also to understand something about how we belong to a larger human story and how different generations of us grapple with similar and different questions over time. And the questions do sometimes change. Sometimes questions sometimes remain eternal, but other questions do change in ways that are interesting and that should humble us about our certainty, about our place in the scheme of things. I don't know. Maybe when you see people making big paintings that look like subway graffiti, maybe there's somebody doing something on TikTok right now that is actually the art that the future will care about in a way that the future ended up caring about Mr.

52:27Manet with his often crude draftsmanship and not Mr. Messonnier, the great painter of the flashing horse. To be able to lift ourselves out of our present time with all its limitations is I think a worthy activity and a way that can sometimes bring us some fear for the future, but some consolation about the difficulties of the present. People have outlived terrible things in the past. Generations that were pessimistic about the future have been proven wrong by the amazing cultural achievements of future generations. In 1874, who knew that the exhibition show, which was displayed in a photographer's studio far away from the Grand Salon in the center of Paris, that that was the future.

53:04And all the pictures that filled the big, big show places, thousands and thousands of them that attracted the attention of the world, that they would be consigned to attics and basements. Thank you so much for watching and listening to The David Frum Show today. I hope you will join us again next week for more of The David Frum Show. Remember the importance of liking and subscribing. If you enjoy the content we're providing here, it really helps to bring the message to new people. And always, if you want to give support to the work of this podcast and of The Atlantic, the best way to do that for myself and all my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic.

53:39Thank you so much for watching and viewing and listening and downloading. I hope to see you next week back here on The David Fromm Show. Thank you.

54:10This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Fromm. Thank you for listening. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Fromm Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

54:55Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.