In a word, yes! It’s never enough, and there’s no resting on laurels, but we have solid evidence over thirty years in America and beyond that students learn more when they—and their schools—are held to account for what and how well they’re learning. And while testing isn’t the only possible way to gauge this, nor is it a perfect way, it’s efficient, reasonably accurate, more objective than most of the alternatives, and relatively easy to explain and understand.
Accountability in education may be thought of as a tripod, although many prefer the version that adds a fourth leg, called capacity building.
The first leg sets forth the desired outcomes, typically in the form of academic standards that spell out the skills and knowledge that students should acquire at key stages of their progress through the schools. In recent decades, due largely to federal requirements, this has typically meant grade-by-grade learning expectations in core subjects, beginning with English language arts and math. Other desired outcomes, such as high school graduation or college and career readiness, may be added or substituted.
The second leg is the creation and use of measures by which to gauge how well those desired outcomes are (or aren’t) being achieved—by individual students, as well as by classrooms, schools, districts, states, and the nation as a whole. This has most often taken the form of standardized testing of various kinds, especially year-end assessments external to the school itself, generally administered by the state and aligned with its academic standards.
The third leg of the tripod includes the rewards, benefits, sanctions, changes, and interventions that follow from information on how well a student, teacher, school, or district is achieving the desired results. Consequences take many forms, sometimes spontaneous (as when a teacher or school moves to alter its practices or a parent moves her child into or out of a particular school) and sometimes imposed from outside: gold stars and blue ribbons on the one hand, restructurings, probations, staff changes, even school closures on the other.
Not every accountability system adds a fourth leg—often called “capacity building,” sometimes “opportunity to learn”—but when done, this generally consists of efforts to enhance opportunities, foster equity, and strengthen performance, typically by adding expertise, resources, and better-prepared personnel to assist schools to boost their effectiveness. In the last few years, that’s largely taken the form of implementing “high-quality instructional materials.”
Persuasive evidence appears from many sources that state-developed accountability systems of the kind that emerged in the 1990s did boost achievement. As for the federally driven regimes that got serious with enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2001, almost everyone who has looked at the data acknowledges that modest gains followed, most prominently in math and in the earlier grades, and most visibly by some student groups, particularly poor and marginalized youngsters. (Twelfth-grade NAEP scores, however, remained stubbornly flat.)
Reviewing the impact of NCLB as of 2011, Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob found that it had “generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of fourth graders, as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in eighth-grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally-low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles.” (They did not, however, find similar gains in reading.)
Nine years later, an analysis by Bellwether Education Partners reached a similar conclusion: “Standards-based accountability policies have contributed to measurable improvements in student performance.... NCLB-era accountability policies produced meaningful improvements in student achievement, particularly for traditionally underserved student groups.”
They, too, were unable to find similar gains in reading—and acknowledged a leveling off as states got more waivers from the tough accountability requirements of NCLB, and then, in 2015, NCLB was itself replaced by the more pliable terms of ESSA (the “Every Student Succeeds Act”). In other words, as federal accountability pressures eased, the national trend lines flattened, even dipped a bit, then dipped more during Covid.
Some individual states, however, kept their pedals to the metal and their (pre-pandemic) results remained strong. Massachusetts is perhaps the best-known example, with its long-lasting (though now endangered) requirement that students pass the MCAS test before they can graduate from high school, as well as other assessment and accountability feature. Here’s how the Bay State’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education summarizes what happened:
Before education reform and statewide testing in the 1990s, Massachusetts students too often graduated from high school without the basic reading and math skills needed to succeed in life. Today, Massachusetts students are number one in the country in reading and math. So how did this happen? In the early ‘90s, the state passed a law that included high learning standards, consistent funding, more choices for families, and accountability for how well students are being served. Part of that act included statewide assessments to make sure schools are reaching all students.
When scores show students are not meeting basic learning standards, schools and districts can adjust instruction to address those areas. In addition, parents and the public can ask questions and ensure educators are taking action.
Moving from blue to red, Florida also illustrates the impact of a comprehensive (and sustained) approach to education reform that was—and remains—heavy on testing and accountability. Writing in Education Next in 2019, Michael Petrilli summarized what two decades of the Sunshine State’s “A+ Plan for Education” had wrought:
Florida is celebrating the twenty-year mark of the A+ Plan for Education, which brought accountability, parental choice, and evidence-based practices to the state’s schools. And to be sure, it’s an occasion worth celebrating, given the Sunshine State’s strong record of educational progress since then-governor Jeb Bush and his legislative partners ushered in the integrated suite of landmark reforms.
The most compelling numbers come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. The Nation’s Report Card. From the late 1990s until 2017, the reading performance of Black fourth graders in Florida skyrocketed 26 points—equivalent to more than two grade levels worth of progress. For Hispanic students, the gain was 27 points, and for low-income kids it was an astonishing 29 points. The numbers for eighth-grade math were almost as impressive: rises of 27 points for Black, 19 for Hispanic, and 21 for low-income students.
These results—especially in reading—put almost every other state to shame and lifted Florida from the middle of the pack to the top tier. And while much of this progress happened in the 2000s, Florida had the best showing in the nation on the 2017 NAEP in terms of progress over time, too.
No serious person would claim that testing and accountability alone cause children to learn more—but most serious analysts recognize that a policy regimen that (a) expects achievement, (b) sets standards for achievement, (c) measures progress against those standards, and (d) installs incentives for greater progress and consequences for lesser progress, is a regime that fosters stronger performance by students, educators, educational institutions, and systems. Multiple mechanisms are at work here, including more regular and transparent data for educators and parents regarding their students’ progress, better targeting of resources and supervisory attention on situations that aren’t succeeding, marketplace mechanisms that lead families to move their children from lower- to higher-performing schools, and more. There’s no one silver bullet, nor is there a grand celebration to be had that everyone is now learning all that they should and every school is at the top of its game. But creating these conditions nudges everyone in the right direction.
