November is here, which means that it’s time for the public school fair. Every fall, as families with children already in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) already know, our city’s schools come together at an enrollment fair, where each school has a booth staffed by the principal and some combination of teachers, staff and parents so that families can have a convenient opportunity to get an overview of many schools at once.

This year’s enrollment fair is Saturday, November 7, 2009 from 9am to 2:30 pm and will be at the Concourse Exhibition Center at 620 7th Street. Families will be able to do an initial round of one stop shopping, visiting booths of schools they might be interested in to get a quick impression of the style of the principal and other people associated with the school. The district will have information and workshops about the enrollment process and community organizations like Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (PPS-SF) will be there, where families can get access to a wealth of information and a network of parents who can talk about their experiences at specific schools and offer advice and guidance on the process in general.

Of course, the school fair is only one of the steps in the process of identifying which schools families are interested in. Because SFUSD is still using a modified school choice process (note that this process is currently under revision and will be replaced for families with children entering school in 2011), families must submit a list of seven schools, ordered by preference that they are interested in for their children. As has been discussed in previous columns, while this allows families to look at a variety of options, it also introduces a fair amount of uncertainty, since if more people are interested in a given school then there are available spots, a lottery kicks in attempting to achieve as much socio-economic diversity in the school population as possible. This is a complex, opaque process that is impossible to predict, except in the most general way by looking at lesser known schools where there are likely to be more openings than applicants.

Developing that list of schools is both an opportunity for families and a burden. The opportunity, which is not always obvious, comes from not being tied to a designated school, one that might not be appropriate for a variety of reasons, from program offerings to starting times to a real or perceived sense of academic quality. With some important caveats (e.g. transportation limitations and restrictions for students receiving special education services), school choice means turning that equation around and looking at schools anywhere in the city that can best meet the interests and needs of a given family.

The burden is quick to identify. In addition to the uncertainty mentioned above, to get the most out of the assignment system families must learn quite a bit about what schools are out there, what they offer and then must try to evaluate how well those schools actually come through on what they promise. What people often look to first for comparison purposes are standardized test scores, which makes sense, as they are tied to the standardized curriculum schools must use and are the measuring rod that the federal government employs to determine how well schools are performing.

But standardized test scores present a multiplicity of problems that are often not apparent at first glance. Among the many difficulties with standardized tests and related scores, the over-determining role this assessment approach has taken on is probably the most serious. Many years into the reality of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and two presidents later, we still find ourselves using the blunt instrument of a test score as really the only way students and schools are evaluated. Instead of being one piece of data among several, students and schools are summed up in a number that reflects:

• a snapshot in time of a certain testing week as opposed to a window into how well students are learning over time,
• the socio-economic status of the student body,
• the skewing of scores due to student body size (small testing cohorts are much more influenced by a single high or low-scoring student that large cohorts);
• and the philosophy of a school about teaching to the test, test review, and teaching test-taking skills starting in the earliest grades.

This litany doesn’t even begin to address the absence of complex, critical thinking from these tests and their poor construction, which some argue is actually quite harmful to students, especially when there are so many alternative and additional assessment methods that can be used..

Still, standardized test scores are a reality that we must live with for now, even as we work to improve how they are created and used in evaluating students. Educators who understand the limitations of these tests can glean information from them to get another perspective on school-wide patterns, folding in the data with all of the other information they have about the school and its students. Teachers can help students use their test results as a certain type of window into their own academic performance, taking test scores as a vantage point from which students can work with their teachers to identify areas to focus on more directly or in a new way, or for the teacher to perhaps assess differently.

In theory, there is nothing wrong with standardized tests and scores, especially when they are used to triangulate with other measurements of student performance. But in practice what we have seen is that they are constructed not really with the education of students in mind, but rather towards a financial and political “bottom dollar.” Sadly, our current assessment approach is established within an economic context of the commercial, profit-making enterprise of selling educational materials and tests to schools, supported by a policy environment looking for simple metrics above all else.

This reality makes it all the harder for parents who just want to know either how well their child is learning what they should be learning or if a given school is going to do right by their child. Test scores should be one reliable piece of information along with others, but for now and for the foreseeable future, they are a volatile, uncertain indicator that parents should look at in combination with visits to schools to observe classroom teaching and discussions with current parents about how their children are doing.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend Everett Middle School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.