Lots of smart folks have lately been writing about new approaches to assessment and (sometimes) accountability for schools and (rarely) for students. This is happening in tandem with Oklahoma’s request to waive federal ESSA testing requirements and ample evidence from many places that the country’s longstanding push for results-driven school accountability is slackening, if not reversing. Even the weak-kneed version in ESSA—focused on the lowest-performing 5 percent of Title I schools in a state—lacks energy, oversight, and impact. In recent years, state after state has eased or abolished some of its own tests, graduation requirements, and grade-to-grade promotion rules.
Today’s push to ease off comes from both left and right, the former on equity grounds (and fealty to teachers unions, which loathe accountability), the latter because of its view that schools of choice, particularly the private variety, ought to be regulation-free and accountable only to the marketplace.
No, it doesn’t help that the Trump administration, despite occasional use of words like excellence, pays no attention to academic achievement—and has defenestrated the National Center for Education Statistics while attempting to defund various K–12 programs. But the neglect didn’t start on January 20. The Biden team was just as heedless, and ESSA happened under Obama. Any Congressional achievement-and-accountability champions are certainly lying low. What’s popular in Washington today is defunding universities and using overwrought (dare I say Trumped-up?) civil rights and free speech arguments to wage culture wars in and on educational institutions at every level. Uncle Sam, in short, is AWOL or worse, save for a recent nudge to school choice. (It’s also said that they’re going to rebuild at least the parts of NCES that are responsible for the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP).)
Perhaps Washington’s slackening attention to K–12 achievement has created a window of opportunity for scholars, analysts, and think-tankers to focus on how—someday—assessments of schools might be done differently and better. They seem well-intentioned and generally start with an important reality: The multiple-choice tests in general use today, although familiar, efficient, relatively economical, and seemingly objective, tap into just a portion of what schools do and what kids learn. And while they’re better than pre-NCLB assessments—and vastly superior to the norm-referenced variety of yesteryear—they’re also technologically archaic, imprecise at both ends of the learning spectrum, and better at retrospective, summative judgments than at helping teachers gauge, diagnose, and improve upon what kids are (and aren’t) learning during the school year.
So it’s no bad thing for smart folks to devise possible improvements and alternatives. As Van Schoales of Colorado’s Keystone Policy Center recently wrote in Education Week:
[W]e have more than 50 years of research on what makes an effective school. We know the key indicators—strong leadership, clear mission, effective teaching, monitoring of student progress, safe environment with high expectations, family connections, and data-driven decision-making. In short, we know what to look for when evaluating school quality. Given dramatically changing roles at the federal Department of Education and a growing likelihood that states gain even greater flexibility to define and measure their own school-quality progress, the moment is ripe to build evaluation systems that far better reflect how schools are serving students.
Sounds great, but this silver cloud has a dark lining: the risk that, as we seek better ways of gauging how schools serve students across an ever-growing menu of domains, we’ll stop pressing them to improve in the realms that they’re most explicitly responsible for—core academic skills and content.
We also cannot be sure that information about school performance across a wide array of metrics will itself yield better performance. What’s the mechanism whereby more information yields changed behavior and better results? There’s long been a big divide between, on the one hand, those who trust that school leaders, faced with good diagnostic and analytic information about what is and isn’t working in their classrooms, will muster the vision, capacity, and guts to make big changes, and—on the other hand—those who see complex organizations like schools seldom improving unless forced to.
Nobody likes the forcing part, neither those pushing nor those receiving, and it doesn’t always work. States and districts generally opt for the mildest possible push on a low-performing school and typically lack the capacity and will to engage in a thorough reboot. “School turnaround” efforts have a spotty success record (to put it generously). Shutting a school and reconstituting it from the ground up—perhaps turning it into a charter or outsourcing its management—is deeply unpopular, politically risky, and success is not guaranteed.
Which brings us back to the dream of today’s smart rethinkers: that dramatically better ways of gauging and reporting on the many strengths and weaknesses of existing schools will lead to their improvement. And to an unavoidable counter-question: might we not be wiser to concentrate on what sorts of policy changes, school interventions, and alternative options would result in more kids reaching “proficient” on state tests of reading and math?
Let me pause for a couple of the more impressive rethinks, starting with Georgetown’s FutureEd’s “Quality Check: The New, Best Way to Measure School Performance.” The awesome Lynn Olson brought it out in April, jointly with Van Schoales’s center, and she and Tom Toch discussed it on The Education Gadfly Show.
It itemizes 14 “metrics for judging school quality” and organizes them in five sensible clusters: “growth in student achievement,” “access to rigorous instruction,” “effective school staff,” “supportive school climate,” and “postsecondary outcomes.”
They all make sense for purposes of a holistic, 360-degree review of school performance and I can picture a competent team of school inspectors or accreditors looking at these very things during a visit.[1] But what is to be done with this information after they depart? And absent some sort of inspectorate, what is the school team—or its district, its authorizer, its board—to do with this information after receiving it? Because Olson acknowledges that just four of the 14 metrics are currently suitable for accountability purposes—they’re measurable and reasonably objective—the rest are best thought of as grist for the school improvement mill. Which assumes that the will and capacity exist to make changes on the basis of them. Where will that come from? And will the impulse to improve on 14 different metrics not reduce attention to the schools’ core mission of academic skills and knowledge?
I have the same apprehension about efforts to rethink school evaluations by another solid outfit, Scott Marion’s Center for Assessment. They’ve been at it for a long time. To date, they’ve been strong on accountability, urging that states persist with it even if Uncle Sam slacks off—are you listening, Oklahoma?—and, like FutureED, they’re working to devise improved means of judging school performance in more comprehensive ways. The latest is a provocative blog post by the Center’s Laura Hamilton that has me both stimulated and concerned. Consider this key passage:
[D]ata gathered from teachers, parents, students, and the general public show support for a more holistic approach to student development, one that includes providing supports for students’ social, emotional, and civic learning in addition to core academic instruction. Employers highlight the importance of competencies like collaboration, communication, resilience, and adaptability—skills that go beyond what traditional achievement tests measure. As these data show, Americans broadly endorse attending to outcomes beyond academic test scores.
Of course we want young people to acquire all those skills and attributes, want them to be emotionally strong, socially competent, civically prepared—and to possess the “soft skills” that employers want and that successful adulthood usually features. Those are all legitimate goals for the next generation.
But how much of all this should we push onto K–12 schools with their 180-day years, their five-day (and shrinking) weeks, their six-hour (if you’re lucky) days? How many of those competencies and learnings should they be expected to impart—and held to account for? How much can they manage along with the Three R’s (that most kids still aren’t getting much of) plus science, history, and phys-ed? How much can they be expect to counteract the oft-negative influences of neighborhood, peer group, social media, televised role models, and family?
As we broaden the scope of what we will judge schools for without radically expanding their footprint on the lives of children, are we not setting everyone up for failure? A triple failure, if you will, for aren’t we likely, at one and the same time, to (a) find schools doing a weak job of all those other responsibilities while (b) dinging them for doing an even worse job of basic academics and (c) letting other institutions off the hook on grounds that “the schools will handle it”? And will we not also—inevitably—put even less weight on the four objective measures that FutureEd says are valid accountability metrics and slack off, perhaps with federal backing, on the modest versions of results-driven accountability that we’re barely managing to hold onto today?
Think about it.
[1] Indeed, one of the 14 proposed metrics is “comprehensive school ‘inspections’ by trained evaluators.”
