External Accountability and Schools: An Odd Coupling in America

External accountability for the outcomes of schooling as measured by standardized assessments has been a political football over the years. Surface features of the strategy have changed a bit, but at least as far as I can see the mechanism works the same way across time.

In California in the 1960s it was illegal to publish school-wide standardized test scores in newspapers; the real estate industry was savvy to the impact such information had on the price of housing. Those who ran the state government knew they were playing with fire. They just hadn’t figured out how to do controlled burns.

Not many years passed before the tables turned. Standard practice was (and remains) to disclose test scores in newspapers and media and use them as a whip to force teachers to shape up. NAEP test scores continue to show up for this purpose at the state level.

I visited an elementary school district in the Central Valley in the 1990s where principals posted in public the names of every teacher in a list along with the previous year’s test scores in a draconian attempt to raise the achievement level of children from families of migrant workers.

With the advent of reconstitution, test scores grew sharp teeth. In Chicago where I worked as a consultant at a de facto segregated middle school, the tests themselves were delivered to the school at the appointed time in an armored truck with armed guards to preserve the appearance of fairness—no cheating under the watchful eye of a machine gunner.

Reconstitution meant relieving school personnel from a failing school and scattering them to the wind. New blood would be hired for a fresh start. Failure was defined by a single statistic, and the decimal point mattered.

I taught for a time at a middle school with a Title I designation qualifying it for federal funding earmarked for instructional services for high-poverty children. A reading clinic with individual and small group tutoring had been created in a portable classroom using these funds.

Standardized test scores were employed to determine whether funding would remain or be cut. If there was no improvement, there would be no reading clinic. No sense throwing good money after bad.

With the advent of the Common Core, methods of testing shifted, but the underlying discursive structure did not. State governments continued to hold schools accountable for productivity, but the standardized testing industry was shaken up.

LEAs (local education agencies) in the form of loose associations of schools or traditional school districts became responsible for replacing external tests given once a year with a self-selected menu of formative and summative measures. Pressure to respond to test data has seeped from state headquarters to district headquarters where a more intense local pressure cooker sits on a flame.

These observations share at least three unexamined assumptions. First, the assumption that schools should be legally responsible for weighing and measuring their products accurately using a standard scale once a year (or even more frequently) is embedded in our recent history. It’s difficult for many people to even imagine the possibility that this assumption distorts engagement for teachers and learners alike. The end justifies the means.

Second, the assumption that teachers cannot be trusted to create and sustain opportunities for students to learn has fostered a big brother mentality—always looking over your shoulder—that chips away at teaching as professional practice.

From the WYTWYG mantra of the 1980s (what you test is what you get) to the PLC movement of today (professional learning communities), educators have searched for an antidote, a way to claim the mantle of a professional. But so far political power has crushed reform in this regard.

Third, the assumption that human learning is such a simple matter that it can be measured in coffee spoons is palatable only to those who have no inkling of the epistemic violence and injustice wrought in the minds of children this error creates.

Epistemology—the inner workings of consciousness to patiently build and renew knowledge and expertise across a lifetime—is a precious resource. Once children learn that what they know doesn’t count unless a teacher says it does, epistemology becomes a casualty.

The irony of it all is this: Tests in the name of accountability do more lasting damage to marginalized and high-poverty children than to the offspring of the affluent.

For whom do schools exist?