This year marks the twentieth edition of Education Week’s annual “Quality Counts” report, but not much has changed from the nineteenth—or other editions of recent vintage. Massachusetts is still the tops—with a handsome 86.8 out of a possible hundred points—and the nation’s only B-plus state for education. Maryland, New Jersey, and Vermont are next in line, each earning a B. The nation at large earns a C, as do most states—thirty-two of them registering somewhere from C-minus to C-plus. The biggest gain in the standings was accomplished by the District of Columbia, which jumped from thirty-eighth last year to twenty-eighth this year and earned an overall C.
Perhaps more unpredictable days are ahead. To wit, of particular interest in Education Week’s package is Edie Blad’s piece on California’s so called “CORE districts”—six school systems that received the only local-level waiver from some NCLB requirements. The districts, which include Los Angeles, San Francisco and Fresno, adopted an accountability system that includes “suspension rates; school-climate survey responses from parents; and measures of traits related to students' social development and engagement, like self-management and social awareness,” in addition to traditional test scores to monitor schools. In short, the CORE districts are at the forefront of the kind of non-academic accountability measures that are ostensibly encouraged by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Not surprisingly, emerging trends in accountability dominate the report, with several pieces examining “how new state and federal strategies are transforming the assessment of school performance and reshaping the consequences for poor results.” Andrew Ujifusa weighs in with a piece on the “Innovation Lab Network,” a twelve-state effort to “rethink, redesign, and lobby for changes to instruction and accountability” incubated in districts with the potential to evolve into statewide accountability systems.
The first “Quality Counts” was issued in 1997. Its point, then as now, was to track state progress in implementing the then-novel idea of standards-based-reform. The new year promises to usher in a new era of state dynamism, particularly on accountability. Perhaps that will shake up things in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping a handful of new Massachusettses will emerge in the brave new world of ESSA.
SOURCE: “Quality Counts 2016: Called to Account,” Education Week (January 2016).
