Student test scores should not be the only measure of education effectiveness.
By Dorothy Rich
Knight Ridder Newspapers

It’s IN, it’s BIG. It’s what passes for “glamour” in education today. It’s called Accountability.

Right now, accountability is being presented as the great problem solver. Yet, one big problem is that the teacher and the school are the only ones being held accountable. It would be easier if it really worked that way, but it doesn’t. Instead, accountability is an ever-changing mix of many factors including teacher competency, student motivation and parental responsibility.

Accountability has been by and large very narrowly defined, mostly these days by whether schools get high or low grades based on student test scores. There are other accountability measures, but they are more complex and take longer to measure. One of them is whether the student who learns how to read actually does read. Another is how parents become more accountable to help children become successful learners.

Accountability works in different ways and at different levels: one size does not fit all students. Accountability keyed to a rise in standardized test scores is different from accountability for teaching imaginative and critical thinking. Newspapers report on the basic test scores, but how about student thinking scores?

When test prep takes over, there is decreasing room in the school day for subjects vital to success in today’s post-industrial world. Low-skill jobs may or may not increasingly disappear. In any case, they will not pay wages that families need. What’s needed are schools that teach problem solving, encourage imagination and provide practice for critical thinking. These are the job skills for a high wage, technological society.

More parents are becoming aware of the reduction of course offerings at schools because of test-score focus. As a result, there is greater student and parent unrest about these losses. This is especially true in schools that serve widely varying demographics, from very low- to high-income families.

Whereas basic test score rise may be the top goal for children coming from disadvantaged homes, parents from advantaged situations are often seeking what schools are taking away to make way for test prep including art and music and extra-curriculars. There is only so much time in the school day. When administrators take away the so-called extras to concentrate on test scores, there is a real loss to wider teaching needs.

I visited schools in a number of states this fall. All of the schools were being graded. It was letter grades in some states, numbers in others. The overall theme was high anxiety. You could feel it as administrators talked and teachers taught: “We have to have higher test scores, we have to move from a C to a B, from a 3 to a 4.”

Test score accountability is taking a toll not just on students but on teachers and administrators. Why should we care? The answer is that hunger for test scores can lead people to take desperate measures. Cheating is one of them, of course, but it would not surprise me to see schools, in the effort to raise their test score standing, actually compete for high scoring students, in ways similar to how sports teams compete for the best athletes.

I don’t think that this is going to happen tomorrow. But what’s to prevent schools, eager to get a higher grade, from going out and purposely recruiting high-scoring students. Colleges, to have higher ratings, do it all the time.

It’s really too bad that school accountability works only just so far. It is limited by what even good and great schools can do. This is a different scenario from much of the current discussion, which holds that if only teachers were really accountable, then all would be well.

As a teacher and a trainer of teachers, I have a deep commitment to accountability and to what I believe that we can realistically hold teachers accountable for.

Included on this list are:

• A classroom that provides the structure and discipline needed for effective learning.

• Teacher knowledge of the subject, for teaching effectively.

• A teacher’s personal commitment to work hard, to be caring, to be a learner, to be enthusiastic.

• Paying attention to each child and treating each child fairly.

• Working with students’ families to help children learn.

This is what I wish teachers could be accountable for – but they can’t.

• Kids coming to school – adequately fed, rested and in good medical condition.

• Kids coming to school ready to learn with the attitudes and behaviors suitable for success in school.

• Kids coming to school from homes, rich or poor that encourage learning and respect for learning.

That’s why accountability, while generally a useful concept, is a limited one. Too much big stuff happens outside of school, and it determines what happens inside of school and on the tests.

I am not excusing teachers from their responsibilities. And I am certainly not excusing parents and students from theirs. Even the best school can’t do the job alone. Getting everyone on board and accountable, with lots of information sharing and knowing what everyone has to do, and then doing it is the only way to make accountability work.

And so far, that is not what’s been happening.

Dorothy Rich is founder and president of the nonprofit Home and School Institute, MegaSkills Education Center in Washington.

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