Margaret E. Raymond and Eric Hanushek, Education Next
Summer 2003
In an editorial a couple of weeks ago (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=16#242), I mentioned a forthcoming work by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond that definitively rebuts "studies" by Audrey Amrein and David Berliner purporting to show that high-stakes accountability systems retard student achievement. That work is now available in two forms, and it's powerfully persuasive indeed. The Amrein-Berliner analyses, despite the vast publicity they attracted, are termed "fatally flawed both in design and in execution, rendering the conclusions irrelevant." Indeed, conclude Hanushek and Raymond based on their own analyses and their review of others, "[E]xisting evidence...suggests that accountability is associated with more rapid learning across grades." You can access two versions, a longish paper at http://www.educationnext.org/unabridged/20033/hanushek.pdf and a somewhat shorter article from the forthcoming issue of Education Next at http://www.educationnext.org/20033/pdf/48.pdf.
