THE PROB LEMS OF EDUCATION ARE NOT GE NE TIC 329Halley Potter, who studies charter schools at the Century Foundation,
said that “Success Acad emy’s strong test scores tell us that they have a
strong model for producing good test scores,” but she also says, “Th e con-
clusions that can be made from tests are limited.”^13 Th at, it seems, is
consistent with limited goals.
PSEUDO- ACHIEVEMENTTh e other way in which the hidden curriculum of schooling is being
exposed is simple. If school attainment is, indeed, an index of each
child’s learning potential, then we would expect a transfer into sub-
sequent domains of life and learning. We have to remember that a test
score is not just a “mea sure” of an individual’s current status but also of
his/her whole social background. If that background does not change or
changes only a little into adulthood, then some correlation with future
status is inevitable. In spite of that, relationships between the venerated
school attainments and per for mance in later life are weak or diffi cult to
demonstrate.
For example, we would expect that students with good grades or test
scores would also perform better in higher education and the world of
work. Across numerous studies, however, evidence for this is very thin.
Every “mea sure” of ability or potential turns out to be a very poor pre-
dictor of per for mance outside the narrow confi nes of school learning.
Take, for example, the prediction of university per for mance from high
school exam results. In the United States, the latter have consisted of SAT
scores and more recently the Gradu ate Rec ord Examination. Research
has reported only small correlations, usually under 0.3, meaning that
90 percent of per for mance variation in higher education is not related to
high school per for mance. A review, published in 2012, of thirteen years
of previous research found only moderate average associations with uni-
versity per for mance.^14 And of course even that may be due to noncogni-
tive attributes, such as self- confi dence and self- effi cacy beliefs, and other
social background factors, as explained earlier.^15 Indeed, the review by
Michelle Richardson and colleagues, just mentioned, revealed a large
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