Last week, California’s State Board of Education took another step toward a new school accountability system, including the launch this spring of new tests that call for higher order thinking skills. At the same time, the board detached the tests from automatic high-stakes sanctions (federally mandated under the No Child Left Behind iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA) and toward a new continuous improvement approach. The new system uses multiple indicators of learning opportunities and student outcomes to guide investments and action.
While Congressional deliberations on ESEA are tied up over how and how often students should be tested and what should be done when schools have low scores, California has moved ahead with a pragmatic, less rancorous approach to strengthen its schools.
Washington could do the same if Congress could focus on obvious points of agreement and stop looking for wedge issues. We know this is true because we have done it.
In summer of 2014, two separate groups of scholars and policy experts convened to rethink educational accountability. We represented different reform “camps” across a wide political spectrum, and there was no reason to expect us to draw similar conclusions. So when we read each other’s reports we were surprised at how much we agreed.
We agreed that tests were taking up too much school time and that the results were being misused. But we also agreed that high-quality assessments are necessary, as a way of tracking progress and identifying student learning problems so they can be addressed in a timely way.
We also agreed that if parents and public officials pay attention only to standardized tests, they get a distorted picture of what children are learning and where improvement is needed. More information about schools and student outcomes is needed to diagnose what’s happening and what should be done.
We agreed that public officials have a responsibility to intervene when a group of students are not learning what they need to finish high school, succeed in higher education, and become fully self-supporting adults. But we also agreed that actions toward a particular school – whether to invest more money in it, change its staffing and methods, or replace it and let families choose other schools – should consider more than just test results. Actions should depend on whether the school is improving or declining, and whether there are better alternatives for the students.
Finally, we agreed that if schools are to be held accountable for results, their leaders must control hiring and budgets and be free to choose methods that best match the needs of their students. School leaders, not distant federal officials or data systems, should decide how to evaluate, pay, and promote teachers and other educators.
Starting with these points of agreement, we have written an unprecedented consensus report, focused on the pending reauthorization of the ESEA, which you can find here and here.
Read the full article at The Hill.
Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.
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