Jack Schneider of the College of Holy Cross and Pat Jehlen of the Massachusetts’ Senate Committee on Education have a sensible article about the use and misuse of test scores to measure school quality.

As they point out, test scores are highly correlated with socioeconomic status, so schools that serve low-income students look like “bad” schools even when they are doing a good job of educating the students.

The matter of how a state identifies the “lowest performing” schools is a high-stakes enterprise. After all, labeling a district as such can lead to the flight of quality-conscious parents—weakening the district’s capacity and increasing segregation by class. And additionally, schools identified among the lowest ten percent of performers face the charter “cap lift” provision, allowing the state to send up to 18 percent of the district’s funds to charter schools — twice as much as in other districts. When the cap is raised and more charters are granted, students leave, budgets are cut, and schools can close. While some families now have a new choice, others find their chosen school closed.

To be clear: some districts really are ineffective. And no one wants children to be trapped in failing schools. Yet the simple truth is that current approaches for measuring effectiveness are methodologically weak and ethically dubious.

Standardized test scores, which constitute the lion’s share of how we evaluate school effectiveness, are highly problematic. Standardized tests capture a narrow slice of life in schools and reflect only a fraction of what the public values. They are designed to be time efficient and cost-effective rather than to align with what we know about cognitive development. And they are subject to gaming.

Although they recognize that standardized tests in general capture only a very small aspect of what schools and teachers do, they think that they could be used more wisely.

Instead of judging schools solely by test scores, they might be judged–at least in part–by student growth.

This is certainly wiser than what Massachusetts and most other states do now.

But if you bear in mind that standardized testing itself is highly contested, even student growth scores will contain defects–just different defects.

Imagine living in a world without standardized testing. That might be bad for Pearson, but just imagine it.

Such a world exists.

It is found in almost every private school in America, where teachers make judgments about their students’ progress and their needs.

It is found in Finland, where teachers teach as if they were in an American private schools.

Why are we so wedded to those standardized tests, which originated as IQ tests, filled with racial and ethnic and class bias?

Which state or district will be first to try a new way of assessing school quality, for example, with an inspectorate of expert educators?