Digging Into “Accountability”

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate, October 24, 2011 at 6:00 am

No Child Left Behind is on the way out. Everybody's got a plan: Republican senators have proposed a slate of bills that would dramatically alter it, the Obama administration has maintained its own blueprint for a revised federal approach to education, and now the bipartisan Harkin-Enzi Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) revision – which would replace NCLB – is on a fast track to debate and voting.

The bill, hundreds of pages long, went from proposal to markup within a week. Amendments could be submitted to the committee through Wednesday, and several of these have fueled even more debate and posturing around what was already a hot topic.

A lot of the debate, perhaps unsurprisingly, revolves around teachers. Some of the more hotly contested topics have revolved around teacher “accountability,” evaluations, and licensure.

I've put scare quotes around “accountability” deliberately, as most of the current policies under the “accountability” banner are so poorly designed as to undermine the real principle of using student outcomes to drive teacher improvement. The most common approach to “accountability” is to link teacher pay, evaluations, and retention to student test scores.

Now, New York tried this for three years and abandoned the policy after a report from the RAND Corporation found that no gains in test scores could be linked to the practice. Considering that test scores are a poor means of evaluating teacher impact to begin with, this is a pretty damning indictment of systems that pay or retain teachers based on test scores.

The achievement gap is a real problem that requires action, and the goal of providing all students with an excellent education must be our leading priority. However, using bad tools in pursuit of a noble goal is not the right answer. I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but I also don't want the bad to besmirch the name of the good.

Many pixels and column inches will be mobilized in favor of and in opposition to the various NCLB alternatives. Our responsibility as progressives is to make sure the principles of sound education are not trampled in a reckless stampede towards whatever policy uses the right buzzwords. Just because it calls itself “accountability” doesn't mean it's a good solution.

Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education  NCLB  Race to the Top  Student Assessment  Teacher Assessment