The results on the Smarter Balanced assessments, the centerpiece of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, or CAASPP , were released on Sept. 9 and showed the vast achievement gaps that decades of education reforms have failed to close. In a series of interviews, EdSource Executive Director Louis Freedberg interviewed several leading education experts about the continuing gap — and what additional reforms are needed to narrow or close it. Part Five is with Marshall Smith, former undersecretary of education in the Clinton administration and senior counselor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in the Obama Administration. Smith, a former dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, also initiated the landmark Getting Down to Facts Project, which examined school finance and governance in California while he was director of education at the Hewlett Foundation. Among numerous books and articles, he co-authored with Christopher Jencks and others the landmark 1972 text, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Impact of Family and Schooling in America.
In light of the continuing achievement gap, did the accountability approach to education reform work?
The accountability approach didn’t work at all, particularly since 2005, during the period when No Child Left Behind was being fully implemented. This is Newton’s third law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. By pushing the notion of accountability so hard, we have created all sorts of problems, which are reflected in the narrowing of the curriculum and the misbehavior of teachers who felt they had to get these scores right. As a result of this, the rate of gain has slowed down over the last decade.
There are many determinatives of this. So it is hard to be definitive about whether something has worked or not. But the notion that there is a magic bullet, that one thing can change the entire system, is probably wrong.
California prides itself on its diversity and is a progressive state. Latinos are in positions of power. But this has not translated into policies that have led to a significant change in the achievement gap.
There has been some movement. If you look at scores on the NAEP in 4th-grade reading between 1998 and 2013, white kids (in California) gained 15 points, from 217 to 232. That is almost a grade and a half gain, which is considerable. Hispanics gained by 22 points, going from 178 to 201. They are still 30 points behind, but they gained 8 points (on white students). So they closed the gap by a considerable amount. That is almost a grade-level gain. Black kids went from 188 to 202. That was only a 14 point gain, which is almost the same gain that white students made, so you don’t have any closing of the black-white gap.
But most of the gains came between 1998 and 2005, and then slowed between 2006 and 2013, when the accountability reforms were being fully implemented.
Read the entire interview with Marshall (Mike) Smith on the EdSource website.
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