Editor's note: Read more about this topic in Finn's essay in National Affairs, "The Accountability Challenge."
True “accountability” is fast vanishing from K–12 education in the U.S., whether we’re talking about results-driven accountability for schools or performance-based accountability for students. It’s definitely exited from the priorities of today’s reform leaders and policymakers. We are replacing academic achievement, gains, and gap-closings with whole-childism, “multiple measures,” holidays from testing and certainly from consequences, and we’re engaged in a myopic emphasis on “supporting” schools and “building their capacity” without also holding them to account for their performance or lack thereof.
Like a golfer who over-corrects his swing, we’re now missing the green, and likely to keep doing so.
I say over-corrected because, as I’ve acknowledged before, our original conception of school (and student) accountability—a tripod of standards, assessments and consequences—didn’t pay enough attention to “capacity.” We assumed that the skill needed to make things better—to turn things around—already existed within a school, a district, a CMO, even a state agency, and what was lacking was the will to change. So early accountability focused almost entirely on revving the will, the motivation to change, via an elaborate set of rewards for success and interventions (and embarrassment) when goals were not met. Very behaviorist.
We now know that that was partly wrong. A lot of places didn’t just lack the incentives to do things better, but also lacked the capacity to make that happen. “Capacity” is a loose term that spans many elements from knowledge to money, from time to energy, from organizational structure to leadership and “running room,” i.e., the freedom or autonomy to make big changes. Some places understood what they should do differently but were hemmed in by regulations, union contracts, politics, or plain old inertia. (Which begins to get us back to “will.”)
All those issues arose long before the pandemic, as did backlashes against testing and top-down efforts to change familiar institutions. Thus the easing of NCLB accountability for schools via waivers, then via ESSA, even as states backed off from end-of-course exams for students, colleges grew skittish about SATs, and grades inflated. The resurgence of “whole child” concerns such as social and emotional learning further drained whatever energy there was for an incentive system keyed to reading and math scores.
Recall that those scores had improved during the early NCLB years. I can’t prove that the easing of consequential accountability for schools and kids caused the leveling-off that followed, but they did coincide.
Then came the pandemic. Testing and accountability “holidays” became the norm. Nobody failed. We were pleased when schooling occurred. We were grateful when teachers and students showed up in school. But much learning time was lost forever and scores have plummeted. And the backsliding continues, long after the Covid emergency has passed, thanks to chronic absenteeism and other problems that pre-dated the pandemic.
All of which, you might think, adds up to the clearest possible sign that it’s time to revive old-fashioned results-driven accountability and put the tough back into tough-love. That’s where I am.
But that’s not what’s happening most places. Instead, we’re continuing to soften.
Consider two live examples.
First in New England, where a big contributor to the impressive if incomplete “Massachusetts miracle” over three decades has been the Bay State’s commitment to student-level accountability by requiring high schoolers to “pass the MCAS” in order to graduate. (You can read about it in an excellent account by former state education commissioner and Fordham board member David Driscoll.) Yes, accountability via students, combined with a lot of transparency for school performance, some school and district “takeovers” for non-performance, a soupçon of school choice, and a bunch more money.
Today, however, the MCAS graduation requirement is under assault from multiple directions, and there’s a fair chance that lawmakers will do away with it.
The argument won’t surprise you. As stated by Northampton legislator Joanne Comerford, “a single test shouldn’t determine if a student graduates from high school…. This is a test that disproportionately fails our most vulnerable and at-risk students…. We need to bring an end to punitive high-stakes testing.”
“Punitive high-stakes testing.” Now shift to the Midwest where the same argument caused Ohio legislators the other day to put a stake through the heart of the Buckeye State’s “third grade reading guarantee,” the requirement that kids pass a reading test before being promoted to fourth grade. Going forward, they won’t be “held back” unless their parents consent, which it’s fair to predict won’t happen very often. (I should add that the multifaceted state budget bill containing that setback also did great stuff on other K–12 fronts.)
Understand that neither the MCAS graduation requirement nor the third-grade “reading guarantee” (found in several states, including Mississippi with its own recent “reading miracle”) is cruel, insensitive, or rigid. Tough, OK, but accompanied by work-arounds, exceptions, second chances, and remedial arrangements for kids who for various reasons just can’t pass the standardized test on schedule. The point isn’t to punish. It’s to ensure that youngsters moving on to the next stage of their education—or their life—have learned the essentials that they will need to succeed there. Be tough about that now or they’ll run into tough problems later.
The same principle holds for school-level accountability, which was the essential element of NCLB—and earlier efforts by a handful of states to focus on the results achieved (and gains made) within individual schools and sometimes classrooms. Praise and reward success—but also intervene in ways that force changes in event of failure.
The interventions and turnaround efforts took many forms, often not too threatening or disruptive—and therefore often not too successful. Takeovers of districts by states seldom led to academic gains, while districts were loath to intervene in schools in drastic ways: replacing the staff, replacing the education plan, outsourcing the school, even closing it entirely and moving its pupils to better schools. Instead, interventions often took the form of plans and promises, of meetings and “technical assistance” and paper shuffling. Which is to say, not really tough.
Are we at a point in time when a renaissance is possible, when the woes of student achievement and pandemic learning loss could relaunch a regime that’s both tough and loving—well, let’s say skill-developing and capacity-building—for schools that aren’t cutting it? Can we get that balance right? Or are we totally gun-shy when it comes to “tough”?
A worrying sign is a brand-new report on “The Path Forward for School Accountability” from the generally-estimable National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. Its sixteen pages are long on helping, stakeholder engagement, “principled design processes,” “support systems,” “improvement planning,” and “comprehensive” approaches. Nothing in it is objectionable, and much is worth taking seriously. But you will search in vain for consequences, for interventions, for what to do to or about a school that may lack the will even when it possesses the skill.
As I said up top, we’ve overcompensated. Perhaps, as in so many other realms of modern American life, we’ve also gone soft, forfeiting the will to deal with “will” by compelling changes that people don’t much want to make?
It’s not easy in a free society. Make too many people do things they don’t want to do and you’ll probably get voted out of office.
But it’s not impossible. Restaurants get shut by the health department if they have vermin. Pilots and bus drivers get grounded if they can’t pass the licensing test. Swimming pools and water systems are supposed to get shut if contaminated. You can’t cross bridges that fail safety inspections or inhabit a house that doesn’t meet the fire code.
It’s not impossible. We can be tough when health and safety are at stake. Why would we keep a school open when its students aren’t learning? Why would we “license” a kid for fourth grade or graduation who cannot pass the test?
We need a rebirth of accountability in American K–12 education—while also still taking “capacity” seriously. Skills for sure. But when the will isn’t there, consequences must follow.
