by Jeanne Allen, President, Center for Education Reform
January 3, 1994
Background
Standards-Setting in Action
The Clinton Agenda
Ongoing Efforts
Conclusion
The national drive for school accountability is a huge concern to many parents and policy makers today. Accountability pertains to the need to provide students with benchmarks for learning, the demands of the public to be able to assess school improvement on the basis of quantifiable results, and the need to make clear what children should be prepared to know and to do as they face ever increasing challenges in a competitive marketplace.
The United States has only one real method of uniform national assessment for education. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) randomly surveys American students in selected grades to determine their level of mastery of specific subjects. Both national and international assessments commissioned by the National Assessment's Governing Board (NAGB) have shown that U.S. students routinely perform less than adequately, and fall behind their counterparts in other industrialized nations in most subjects.
NAEP is limited, however, in its usage. While the results are published and widely distributed, state by state comparisons are strictly voluntary. In order to draw the most instructive and comprehensive conclusions from the routine information gathered by NAEP, the federal prohibition on comparing state outcomes would have to be lifted, and the rules governing NAEP would have to be modified to allow district-by-district comparisons. This seem unlikely as NAEP has been much maligned by education groups who fear such comparisons. Their stance has even led to a decrease in funding from Capitol Hill that will necessarily limit NAEP's scope in the coming years.
The accountability and standards movement stands at a crossroads. Work done in standards development has come from the education establishment, and mainly focuses on pedagogy (methods) and social behavior (cooperative learning), not on subject matter knowledge. This brief overview of the standards movement will provide the reader with a look at the scope and tenor of the movement. While much is unclear, one thing is certain: as a nation, the U.S. has failed to set clear standards for standards-makers! Thus the drive for accountability is fragmented, influenced by the desire in some cases to make standards low enough so that all children seem to excel, and very much limited to the ivory towers of academia and Capitol buildings.
There is some cause for hope. The most promising efforts are at the state level, where plenty of dedicated state policy makers are interested in seeing real academic standards and assessment adopted. However, in many cases, the standards debate has been mired by calls from education consultants for measurements of "achievement" in non-academic subjects. Many groups have been able to set the course of their state on the right path, but proposed standards for social behavior threaten progress throughout the nation.
Several states have begun to lay the groundwork for objective statewide assessment:
At least eight states, including Kentucky, California, Vermont, Maine, Delaware, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Colorado are implementing standards linked to performance levels, and 25 other states are considering doing so. Most noteworthy of these, California has for years used statewide achievement tests, and recently has moved toward more portfolio assessment and in-class evaluation. Vermont has moved to a portfolio assessment for fourth and eighth graders that gives students immediate feedback. Arizona has just completed a ten-year effort to test every third, eighth and 12th grader. The tests will begin to be given annually, with each school's results reported. And Kentucky, much watched by education reformers, is testing fourth, eighth, and twelfth-graders with a mix of multiple choice tests, portfolio evaluation and other assessment tools geared to establishing statewide performance rankings (novice, apprentice, proficient, and distinguished).
On the national level, the drive for accountability and standards commenced formally in 1989 as a result of the Education Summit, when then-President George Bush met with the nation's governors and developed national education goals. A byproduct of that event was the establishment of the National Educational Goals Panel, which began to compile anecdotal reports on progress toward six national education goals. Several private and quasi-government efforts grew out of this. First, the Bush Administration helped fund efforts by several private organizations to set standards in each of the main academic curricular areas, including science, history, civics and the arts. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics was charged to set math standards; science standards are due in 1994 from the National Academy of Sciences and others; history standards are expected in 1994 from the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA; geography standards will be developed by the National Council for Geographic Education, and English standards will come from the National Council of Teachers of English. (See attached literature regarding where to write for additional information on these specific efforts).
At the regional level, the New Standards Project, codirected by the National Center on Education and the Economy in Rochester, New York, and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, in 1992 began with private funds to develop an assessment system for math and literacy in 17 states. The Council of Chief State School Officers has tried to guide standards development in workplace readiness and other areas, and the Education Commission of the States holds regular conferences to exchange ideas on standards and assessment.
President Clinton has proposed a major reauthorization of the federal elementary and secondary education (ESEA) law to seek a new focus on educational outcomes, ratcheting up the federal aid tied to school improvements intended to enhance performance, encouraging states to adopt national standards by subject matter, and encouraging development and use of national standards for workplace skills. A key element is Clinton's proposed National Education Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC), which would oversee existing efforts to develop content and performance standards by subject area. NESIC would also oversee the Administration's much-maligned "Opportunity-to-Learn" (OTL) standards, intended to provide measures of school performance by which the taxpaying public could evaluate the quality of education provided in their community (presumably so that they could apply political pressure for improvements). But the so-called improvements envisioned by authors of OTL standards , as they stand today, relate to measuring inputs, such as money spent on the schools, student-teacher ratios, and so forth, rather than outputs.
The standards debate of the 1980s was driven in large part by the public's dissatisfaction with business as usual, and focused on measuring how well schools did by the amount of money and resources they had. However, when research that proved that little or no correlation exists between the inputs (spending) and outputs (results) was widely publicized, the debate shifted focus to performance only, adopting the theory that any monetary rewards for schools should be based on achievement, and, consequently, that monetary punishment should follow poor performance.
The obsession by Congress with OTL standards demonstrates that the accountability debate has been derailed by education groups arguing that evaluation of results must be tempered by a consideration of the resources provided to a particular school. Most accountability proponents believe that if schools are held strictly accountable for performance, and rewarded strictly on that basis, the U.S. education system will be on a successful course for high achievement. Conversely, groups such as the National Education Association believe that judging a school's performance solely on the basis of academic achievement overlooks many schools' social and monetary limitations. Thus the Clinton proposals have been praised for advancing accountability , but also lambasted for reverting to a focus on inputs and spending levels at the behest of the education establishment. Many observers are concerned that NESIC could turn into a national school board and undermine state and local autonomy - although the NESIC is primarily an advisory group, many believe that having the federal government's imprimatur can sometimes wield just as much influence as having full authority to act. These arguments will come into full swing in 1994 when the Education and Labor Committee resumes full consideration of the Clinton bills.
Other ongoing standards-setting efforts are largely consistent with the original work of NCEST (National Council on Education Standards and Testing), a bipartisan group of educators and public officials that, under the auspices of the National Education Goals Panel, strongly endorsed national standards and a voluntary system of exams tied to those standards. The real issue is whether federal (or state) law will be used to enforce hard, objective standards with district-to-district, school-to-school, or classroom-to-classroom comparisons. This now seems unlikely at the federal level, but could happen in some states.
School accountability for educational results is a dominant theme in education reform today. Like most education jargon, "accountability" means different things to different people, ranging from 'back to basics' objective testing to equalization of school financing. Yet at the core of the accountability movement lies a common concern: the need for agreed-upon, easily understandable, readily adaptable measures of how well our schools are doing, and how student achievement in the U.S. today, from district to district and state to state, compares with foreign competitors and our own historical record.
There seems clear agreement that standards should not be federally mandated, and that they should be meaningful for the workplace and for international comparisons. Beyond that there is wide disagreement. Parents should demand that academic standards be adopted and that results be made available to them to allow them to judge how their children perform and how their school fares in relation to others. Political and business leaders should work for state (or local) laws requiring objective testing in key subjects, but should leave it to private competitors to come up with the best tests and market them directly to the public and to school authorities. So far the political process has not begun to yield any consensus on accountability: perhaps the markets, with a strong nudge from political and civil leaders, can do the job.