A Goodness Gap?

Every Saturday, National Public Radio broadcasts a quiz show called "Wait, wait! Don't Tell Me!" In one feature on the show, contestants are given three absurd news stories that supposedly took place the week before, and are asked to pick the one that actually happened.

I have a story to nominate:

The Fairfax, Virginia school district decided to rate its children according to their moral character, and then analyzed the numbers to find out how ethnic and other subgroups of the student body compare in goodness.

That really happened!

They have a goodness gap, apparently, and guess which groups are not as good?
This was a bad idea in all sorts of ways, not least of which is that morality is not easy to measure. The ingredients that went into the pot to cook up these ratings included teachers' reports of such characteristics as "complies with established rules" and "listens to and follows directions."

Those might be appealing traits in a kid--as a parent, I know they are--but what do they have to do with morality?

And what did Fairfax County measure--Kid behavior? Teacher perception? Undoubtedly some unknowable mix of both. But we already knew that African-American boys are disciplined at far higher rates than other categories of students. That's been the subject of a raging national debate for many years. Is it because of peer culture? Teacher perception of that culture? Parenting? Fairfax County sheds no light. Their hot news is--Oh, here, too.

So why did they do it? Because two years ago, the school board adopted as an educational goal that students would learn how to "lead responsible, fulfilling and respectful lives." Which sounds reasonable enough.

But officials, in the era of NCLB-style accountability, looked for ways to measure the unmeasurable and then report it out by subgroup.

Actually, what they did was not that much stranger than the NCLB approach to judging school "performance" through test scores.