Ratings In Schools And Accountability Systems - Research Paper Example

Ratings In Schools And Accountability Systems Teachers who work in schools subjected to such programs report that their worries about the school's status and the shallowness of accountability evaluations consume their time and energy. Over time, these programs tend to generate the three A's, Anxiety, Anger, and Alienation. Teachers feel anxious when their schools face accountability systems--particularly systems that are imposed by higher authorities, and that are used to make important decisions about their lives. They feel anger when they discover that those accountability systems are used unfairly--when they provide rewards or impose punishments on undeserving schools. And when teachers learn they have little ability to change unfair accountability systems, they become alienated--passive-aggressive members of a community, acting as obstructionists for other new ideas that come along. To say the least, this does not sound like a good recipe for improving American education (Vinson and Ross 101). Administrators also feel pressure when accountability systems are adopted. They report that they must spend additional hours defending their schools' competitive standing with parents, teachers, and the media--hours that they once spent more productively (Callahan 1642). In response to these worries and pressures, educators also begin to adjust the focus of their efforts. Over time, their curricula and teaching efforts become more standardized and superficial. Moreover, since they want their schools to look well on competitive tests, they tend to restrict instruction to the topics assessed by those tests. A sad example of how this process works was recently described by sociologists Jere Gilles, Simon Geletta, and Cortney Daniels. In 1993 the State of Missouri created an accountability program designed around a new assessment instrument, the Missouri Mastery Achievement Test. This testwas tied to a new curriculum that had been developed by the state's department of education, and all schools were required to administer it so that it could be used as a "report card"--letting the public know how well their own schools were doing compared with others in the state. As Gilles and his colleagues describe the outcome, results of this [program were most alarming]. Quality programs and textbooks were scrapped in order to replace them with materials that directly taught the test, and an unholy competition emerged between districts and communities over test scores. In some districts a week or more of instructional time each year was devoted to [preparing for] this test (Gabbard 67). Moreover, this was not an isolated incident. As testing specialist George Madaus has suggested, when you have high-stakes tests, the tests eventually become the curriculum. It happened with the Regents exams in New York. Items that are not emphasized in the testare not emphasized in school. That's a fundamental lesson that cuts across countries and across time. Teaching has not changed that much; it's an art form. Given basically the same set of circumstances, teachers will behave in much the same way. . . . But if you go to Europe, to the British Isles, or to Australia and look at comparable literature, [worries about] the external achievement exams . . . appear often. And they write about cramming, about how they prepared for the exams. They write about how, after taking the exams, they purged their minds of the answers that they had learned (Gabbard 59). Somehow, we doubt that most Americans are interested in promoting school learning that is narrow, test-specific, standardized superficial, and easily forgotten--but that is exactly what accountability programs promote. It also takes a great deal of time and money to conduct accountability programs. According to a leading scholar, Arthur Wirth, citing the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, mandatory testing in America now "consumes annually some 20 million school days and the equivalent of $700 and $900 million in direct and indirect expenditures." What this means, of course, is that schools regularly shortchange classroom instruction to give students time to take accountability exams. Also, Americans have to pay additional taxes to support mammoth statewide and national testing programs (Ball 54) In addition, the pressures of accountability programs have led some educators to cheat. School administrators may quietly distribute tests to teachers ahead of time. Teachers may teach only a restricted curriculum that is aligned with test content, teach test questions, or use tests meant for children at a lower grade. And schools may exempt low-achieving students from taking tests or report fraudulent results. As a consequence, accountability data from specific schools may be questionable, and statewide average scores for high stakes accountability tests tend to inflate sharply over time (Robertson 187) Also, the tests used in most accountability programs assess only a superficial range of outcomes and are systematically biased against minority students. We raised these issues in our earlier discussion of the SAT, but we were certainly not the first to have noted the problems. Regarding the superficiality of tests, Tanya Suárez and Nancy Gottovi note that since most accountability programs use tests that assess only lower-level thinking skills for specific academic subjects, such tests do not represent the curricular standards, broad offerings, or teaching performance of American schools. Regarding test biases, Arthur Wirth has recently written that the poor and the nonwhite often score low on standardized testing. Women, who will make up more than half of the work force by the year 2000, score lower than men on certain important tests such as college entrance examinations--yet often perform better in school than men. . . . The simple idea that current standardized tests yield objective scientific facts about learning differences, and that kids who score lower are dumber than kids who score higher, is a myth. All of which means, of course, that accountability programs are seriously biased against innovative schools and against those schools that serve minority students (Bolon 94). Finally, accountability programs are also unfair because they involve competition among schools that are not playing on a level field. Earlier, we noted that America exhibits great extremes of wealth and poverty and that public schools serving impoverished children are often given a fraction of the funds given to public schools in rich suburbs. Naturally, poorly supported schools that serve our most disadvantaged children are also the schools that are most likely to "lose" in accountability competitions. Indeed, who would expect any other outcome? In fact, when considered from the perspective of America's neediest children, accountability programs are little more than ceremonies for awarding prizes, honors, and extra finances to America's best-supported schools, which serve its most privileged students (Robertson 187) To address these concerns, some accountability programs try to make the competition fairer by basing their judgments not on average student achievement scores for schools but rather on average "gain scores." In such programs, schools "win" if their students gain more in average achievement over the course of a certain period--say an academic year--than do the students in other schools. To the uninitiated this may sound more equitable, but it turns out that the "gain score" procedure is also biased. Students (or schools) with high initial achievement scores are also more likely to generate high "gain scores," and this means that those schools with the highest early achievement scores are also more likely to "win" in gain-score accountability schemes (Bolon 94). Statistical methods have even been proposed to handle this last problem. Some statisticians have suggested that schools should be clustered in such a way that they compete only with other "similar" schools, but no one has yet developed a foolproof way of judging whether or not schools are truly "similar." Other methodologists have recommended that schools' gain scores be weighted to take account of key attributes that are known to be associated with students' achievements--for example, the proportion of students who are bilingual in the school or the percentage of parents enrolled in its PTA. However, no one yet knows how to assign such weights fairly (Hoover 90). In short, nobody yet knows how to make a fair accountability program for American schools. Perhaps if a lot more were known about various student groups and about how school funding truly affects opportunity to learn, a fair procedure could be devised for the competitive assessment of school performance. But such procedures are not now available, and given the widely diverging levels of support provided to schools serving rich and poor students in America today, there is no defensible way to prevent the biases and unfair impact of accountability programs (Bolon 92). To summarize then, accountability programs cause enormous problems, and one wonders why they have proved to be so popular. One reason may be that such programs represent yet another poor strategy for applying outdated, conservative economic ideas to the complex institution of education. For untutored legislators, accountability programs also seem to hold out the hope of "improving" public schools without having to spend additional dollars. And, for those who accept the tenets of the Manufactured Crisis, and believe that America's schools are in deep trouble, accountability programs might be conceived of as a way of achieving control over those failing schools. However, accountability programs simply do not address the real problems of America's schools. Rather, they are radically unfair and place serious and unnecessary burdens on America's best administrators and most dedicated teachers (Hoover 90). This does not mean, of course, that America's public school teachers and administrators should not be held responsible for their conduct. No society should tolerate thieving politicians, vicious policemen, incompetent firemen, careless surgeons, or clergy who prey on vulnerable youths. Similarly, no society should long put up with teachers who cannot instruct or administrators who cannot run schools. In fact, there is nothing wrong with accountability in theory, it is the practice of accountability that is so difficult to organize. To be fair, a person should be held responsible for what he or she does, for the actions that the person actually takes. (Politicians must be caught stealing; policemen must be observed to beat up innocent persons, and so forth.) And this means, if one is fair, that the competency of educators should also be judged by gathering careful information about their professional conduct. But gathering information about the behavior of individuals always costs money, and spending additional money is exactly what most proponents of accountability programs are trying to avoid. So, instead, they propose to base educational accountability on outcomes, as indicated by student achievement scores. The shaky reasoning and known biases of such procedures are not tolerated in America's courts when applied to other public servants or professionals, and Americans should be no more tolerant of them when it comes to education. Works Cited Apple, Michael. The State and the Politics of Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2003. Ball, Stephan. Education Reform: A Critical and Post-structural Approach. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1994, p. 54. Bolon, C. Significance of Test-Based Ratings for Metropolitan Boston Schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 9, no. 42 (October 16, 2001), http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v9n42/. Callahan, E. Education and the Cult of Efficiency Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); and Joel Spring, American Schools, 1642-2000. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Gabbard, David. Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum, 2000. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notes (New York: International Publishers, 1971. Hoover, R. Forces and Factors Affecting Ohio Proficiency Test Performance: A Study of 593 Ohio School Districts, http://cc.ysu.edu/∼rlhoover/OPT/index.html Robertson, Susan. A Class Act: Changing Teachers' Work, the State, and Globalization New York: Falmer Press, 2000. Vinson, Kevin and E. Wayne Ross, Image and Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2003. Read More