U.S. News and World Report recently announced that in addition to its annual rankings of high schools, colleges and graduate schools, the company was releasing a list ranking the top elementary and middle schools in the country. Immediately, teachers, school officials, scholars and commentators on both the left and the right overwhelmingly panned the announcement.
Although U.S. News has long been criticized for distorting perceptions of schools and the choices of school leaders by ranking schools based on a handful of “performance” variables, Americans have always been concerned with the quality of their schools, a concern that has frequently led them to quantify schooling. In fact, the impulse driving the U.S. News rankings, which so many found disturbing, also drives much of contemporary education policy.
Evaluation and comparison have always been ways to assuage anxieties and uncertainties about educating the young. The first standardized tests in American public schools were given in Boston in 1845. The brainchild of Horace Mann and his colleague, Samuel Gridley Howe, the tests were intended to demonstrate the need for serious changes in public schools.
When test score data wasn’t available, school officials sought other information as proxies for school quality. For instance, the percentage of enrolled students attending school on a daily basis and the number of “over aged” students in a grade were understood as indicators of school efficiency and objective points of comparison across school systems.
Throughout the first decades of the 20th century, school statistics and ranked lists became common features of annual reports and newspaper coverage as the public sought to understand how well their schools were doing.
But even as these statistics circulated, experts recognized their considerable limitations. Education was an inherently local affair, so information was valuable only in the context of local decision-making. Without standard curriculums, textbooks, funding formulas, teacher licensure or graduation requirements across states or even districts, how useful could statistical comparisons really be?
Indeed, in 1959, after conducting a nationwide study of high schools, Harvard University President James B. Conant concluded that it was “impossible” to discriminate among them. There were “too many high schools of too many different types” to allow for generalizations — one could “make valid judgments about American secondary education, but only school by school.”
Conant’s warning went unheeded. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, policymakers and analysts became increasingly convinced that schools, like businesses, were just “systems” that brought various inputs together to produce desired outputs. In this view, the system could be optimized simply by measuring, monitoring and adjusting the inputs. Such a view was deeply appealing to federal policymakers who, in the midst of the Cold War, had become interested in maximizing the development of American brainpower.