Standardized tests are a blunt tool, and children have different learning capacities, different interests, and different plans for the future.  A properly structured education system would be able to get students where they need to be, by high-school graduation, for the lives that they’re actually going to live, and that’s ultimately something that a test can’t capture for all of them.

But we don’t have that educational system.  What we have is an increasingly centralized system, with mandates coming down from the state and federal governments, with local administrations able to leverage the political system (manipulating parents with threats, when necessary) for more money, and with organized labor unions using taxpayer money and access to their children to affect local and state elections and ensure that the scale always tilts toward government employees.  In a system like that, some form of objective accountability is absolutely critical in order for pressure to be put on the employees and the public to have any confidence at all that they’re accomplishing what they’re supposed to accomplish.

It’s very disappointing, therefore, to read that state Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist — once the embodiment of Rhode Islanders’ hope for reform despite the system — has come around to deferring the dream, suggesting that Rhode Island postpone a meaningful test requirement until at least 2020.  That’s one more whole class that will work its way through the state’s government high schools with employees who are able to persuade themselves that they aren’t really harming students with their labor antics.  After all, the students will still receive their diplomas, won’t they?

The most telling argument for Gist’s suggested delay is that the “state recently adopted a new set of academic standards for English and math called the Common Core.”  It may be the most predictable thing in RI education that the state will change its standards and testing regime as soon as it becomes impossible to deny that the ones already in place are fully implemented and, therefore, meaningful.  No doubt, just in time for the political debates of 2022, we’ll be discarding Common Core for some other new standard that requires more years of students graduating without accountability for the system.

Turn, meanwhile, to page A6 of today’s Providence Journal, for an article about the Providence teachers’ union boycotting Superintendent Susan Lusi’s welcoming convocation, at which she “highlights the district’s accomplishments and plans for the future.”  The union’s reason is that contract negotiations have been too slow for its liking.

Don’t worry, though. “Nothing we do will be impacting students in an adverse way,” says union president Maribeth Cababro.  Sure.  What difference do “plans for the future” make?  

That’s why Rhode Islanders would be fools to believe that they’ll see greater accountability in public schools within the next decade.  The tragedy of that isn’t the use of standardized tests per se, but that it means, as Gist puts it, ““We’ve moved this deadline before. Whenever we implement it, people feel they’re not ready.”

That’s because the government employees are not ready, and that’s because they don’t want to be.  There are salary steps to climb, and there’s early retirement to enjoy.