How Do We Evaluate a Good School or a Good Education System?

PISA ranking of school systems by standardized test scores. Green is top third.

A lot of our opinions on what schools and school systems are best are based on the results of standardized tests. This is true of the PISA rankings of OECD countries, currently treated as the gold standard. On this measure, East Asian schools do particularly well.

But critics point out that this is artificial. Standardized tests are not real life. Striving for high test scores can mean teaching and studying to the test, and this may steal time and effort from more valuable learning.

Chinese and East Asian schools have their critics. Some complain that the Chinese method, heavy on memorization, which works so well for standard tests, does not teach independent thinking or creativity.

I agree with these criticisms. Standardized testing is a factory method. The acquisition of skills is not the primary goal of education. Traditional education has always considered it more important to teach morality, character, good judgement, and the ability to think independently.

But how then do we measure this?

There is actually a good and simple measure available: graduation rate.

The schools considered most successful should be those that have the fewest students dropping out short of completion.

To begin with, this is a measure of the value the actual consumer finds in them. We sell students outrageously short if we imagine they do not have any interest in or ability to evaluate their own education.

You might argue that it is easy enough for any school to lower academic standards so that nobody fails and everyone finds it easy and fun; and so everyone stays in school.

But I doubt this would work in practice. I did say dropout rate, not failure rate. I warrant that few students drop out because they find a school too tough academically. If they do, arguably, that school is not doing a good job of educating, only of weeding out. It would be like a doctor who accepted only healthy patients. In my experience, students drop out because they find school boring, or corrupt and dishonest, or disrespectful, or a waste of time.

But even if this issue of logrolling or grade inflation is a consideration, it is easily met by controlling for student scores on the standardized tests. Given, then, two groups of students who score in the same range on these tests, coming from different schools, which group has the better retention rate?

Surely, after all, a large part of a school’s or teacher’s job is to inspire.

And producing students who stick to the task of getting their high school graduation is a good quick measure of their morality, character, and good judgement.

Compare schools on this metric. The school that comes out higher is a better school.

Not incidentally, private and charter schools consistently score better than public schools on this metric.