Time for a New Approach

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate, December 23, 2011 at 8:30 am

You have to go pretty far back to find a time when we weren't buzzing about our struggling education system and the need for more accountability from our schools and teachers. At the very least, the decades since 1983's A Nation at Risk report have been filled to bursting with rhetoric and posturing around the nebulous notion of “accountability.” The most recent result was No Child Left Behind's standards-and-testing regimen, but new research is suggesting “accountability” may already have peaked as a tool for getting results.

The study (PDF) was published by the Fordham Institute, a group that has put a lot of energy into education reform topics. The author, a former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, looked at math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test over the past couple of decades. He looked at scores from Texas (which implemented a “beta” version of NCLB when George W. Bush was governor) and the country as a whole.

The key finding was that NCLB-style accountability mechanisms correlated with a small but significant gain in math scores for fourth and eighth graders across several student groups (African-Americans, Latinos, low performers, and high performers), and no significant change in reading scores.

The math gains come with a couple of caveats, however. First, the author acknowledges that the increase in scores could have come at the expense of instruction in untested subjects (a phenomenon that we have seen play out here in Minnesota). Second, after the initial set of gains, performance leveled off again. In other words, even if accountability measures did produce an increase in academic performance, the scope of that increase is decidedly finite.

In other words, accountability alone will not finish the job (if it contributes to getting the job done at all). This should be another humbling reminder to reformers that there's more to improving education than rewarding or punishing teachers and schools based on test scores. It also raises the question of whether the gains made justify the narrowing of the curriculum that likely resulted from the push for accountability. Progressives can and should ask these questions without malice; instead, we should identify the limitations of what has come before and learn from them when crafting our next attempt at supporting educational progress.

Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education  NCLB  Student Assessment  Teacher Assessment