MAKING THE GRADE.(comparison between federal educational reforms and industrial-efficiency movement)

The most striking thing about the sweeping federal educational reforms debuting this fall is how much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued that efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed, and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no widget would be left behind. Now we have "No Child Left Behind," in which Congress has set up a complex apparatus of sanctions and standards designed to compel individual schools toward steady annual improvement, with the goal of making a hundred per cent of American schoolchildren proficient in math and reading by 2014. It is hard to look at the new legislation and not share in its Fordist vision of the classroom as a brightly lit assembly line, in which curriculum standards sail down from Washington through a chute, and fresh-scrubbed, defect-free students come bouncing out the other end. It is an extraordinary vision, particularly at a time when lawmakers seem mostly preoccupied with pointing out all the things that government cannot do. The only problem, of course--and it's not a trivial one--is that children aren't widgets.

Suppose that you'd like to identify and reward those schools which do a good job of improving their students' performance. That's the kind of thing that the industrial-efficiency experts, with their emphasis on "best practices," always said was a sound procedure for companies looking to boost productivity--and the new school reformers have made this idea a centerpiece of their new regime. But how do you measure the performance of a school? It turns out to be surprisingly hard. North Carolina, for instance, instituted a program that every year recognizes the twenty-five schools in the state that record the greatest single-year jump in their students' test scores. As the educational researchers Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger have pointed out, that honor is nearly always won by the smaller schools in the state. In fact, the state's smallest schools are about twenty-three times as likely to win performance awards as its largest schools. But North Carolina also identifies its worst-performing schools, and almost all of them are small schools, too. Does that mean that small schools are better learning environments or worse ones? Neither. It means that a lot of the ups and downs in a school's test scores are due to chance factors, such as the presence of a few really good or really poor students in a class, or the fact that on test day a few students may guess right on a couple of hard questions--and the smaller the school, the larger the role played by chance. As it turns out, most elementary schools are small, so it's hard to know, most of the time, whether George Washington Elementary is actually better than Thomas Jefferson Elementary or just--in that year--luckier. California has a multimillion-dollar award system, in which schools win cash grants from the state based on their performance on a 1,000-point scale called the Academic Performance Index. Thousands of dollars in state aid can rest on a one- or two-point swing on the A.P.I., and those scores are taken so seriously by parents that they can drive up local real-estate prices. But the average margin of error on the A.P.I. is something like twenty points, and for a small school ...