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Accountability in Education

Search by tag : Assessment and Accountability in Theory, Assessment and Accountability in Action

Timing is a different problem for high schools

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For many teachers and administrators, buying time is the only action that makes sense for high schools. Unless the standards are phased in, grade-by-grade, reaching them seems impossible. They talk frequently, and intensely, about what we came to call “behindedness”-the huge gap between what the standards demand and the skills their students have (see Lemons, Luschei, and Siskin in this volume). While elementary schools may have students scoring two or three years below grade level, high schools have students who may be as many as five or six years behind.

In New York, where high-stakes testing hit the high schools very rapidly, a teacher complained that “they really hit kids over the head very hard with it. I think it was not phased in.” Another explained it as a problem of social promotion, of underpreparation, the problem that the standards movement is actually intended to fix: “That's why they're changing the standards. And they should be making them higher, but they've got to start at the very bottom, with kids in kindergarten, and they are now. But then, they're going and giving us the tests in high school…the kids haven't been prepared.”

Teachers describe the problem as the long-term absence of standards and accountability in the system-a system that has historically promoted students to high school without providing them with the education they need to succeed in academic work. In the most optimistic view, gradually phasing in standards-based education would create a self-correcting system: students taught to standards at “the very bottom, ” in kindergarten or third grade, would carry the reform with them, raising skills as they rise through the grades.

But the hope of teachers in new systems like New York's are challenged by the more skeptical comments of teachers in Kentucky and Texas, for in those states the high school students of today are the students who have been participating in standards-based accountability systems since they were in kindergarten (see also Haycock and Huang 2001; Marks 2000). At our target school in Kentucky, the principal reminded us several times of the challenge of teaching in a high school where “seventy-five percent of our ninth graders are scoring in the first, second, or third stanines.” A math teacher told us of helping his sixth grade niece with her math, and realizing that most of his tenth grade students were not performing at that level. Another estimated that several of his students are working at a second-grade level.

That problem is compounded by the question of just what grade level means in high school, and when an accountability system should assess whether students have reached it. If the purpose is to measure what students are expected to learn in high school, should an exit exam be given at the end of high school-when they have had the full opportunity to learn it? What would schools do with twelfth or fourteenth graders who have not passed? Would high school seniors remember what they had learned in ninth grade biology to take a high school science test? Alternatively, should they instead choose, as most states have, to test in tenth grade-so students have more opportunities to retake the test (even if they haven't yet taken the geometry class)? The risk of two, or even three years of “senioritis” in students who had officially met graduation standards as sophomores may seem like a relatively small problem, but for some schools it seems risky indeed. High schools need to address the challenges of timing. Doing so means rethinking high schools as organizations.

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In high schools, students play a central and active role in the reform

Finally, but foremost in teachers' minds, students themselves are a central element in the particular challenge of the high schools. They play multiple roles in the process and products of standards-based accountability: they are the bottom line and the intended beneficiaries, a resource and a result (see Chabrán in this volume).

High schools differ in critical ways from elementary schools, not simply in the early hour at which the school day begins, or the larger size of physical and organizational structures; they are full of adolescents, and the interactions between teachers and teenagers are quite different from those with younger children. High school students are not like younger students who “can be compelled to perform, ” explained a music teacher, who splits his time between teaching elementary and high school classes. Instead, as young adults they see a teacher as “more like a peer, ” so that “[teachers] have to earn their respect” and students have to be “convinced” that there is a reason to engage in schoolwork. Nor, a principal observed, are high school students quite like adults: “they don't react like us.”

Timing is a different problem for high schools

The stakes are higher in high schools

In high-stakes accountability at the elementary and middle school level, schools are the principal objects of sanctions. But in high school, high stakes are also aimed at students. State accountability policies are moving to make diplomas contingent on externally set exams, or on demonstrated competencies in externally set performance reviews (Goertz and Duffy 2001). As an English teacher in New York reminded us, when scoring a high stakes test, “You're looking at a paper; that's a human being. That's a kid reading or trying his best to get through state requirements.” Ironically, in a system theoretically designed to benefit students, high school students may be the only people held directly accountable as individuals for achievement scores.

How the Pieces Fit Together

The view of accountability that emerges from our research is that schools vary in their responses to external pressure depending on their level of internal accountability, the way they manage their internal structures, the ways in which they define and distribute leadership, and the ways in which they address the knowledge and skill requirements of the new demands of policy. Capacity inheres not in the presence or absence of these factors, but in the relationships among them. Accountability policies produce variable responses among schools based both on the initial capacities of schools and on whether schools increase or improve their capacities as they are responding to the requirements of new policies.

Accountability and Capacity

The central message of this article is that educational accountability systems work-when they work-by calling forth the energy, motivation, commitment, knowledge, and skill of the people who work in schools and the systems that are supposed to support them. Accountability systems themselves do not directly “cause” schools to increase the quality of student learning and academic performance. At best, they set in motion a complex chain of events that may ultimately result in improved learning and performance. Our work suggests some ways that policymakers and school professionals might think more powerfully and systematically about the relationship between accountability systems and the results they produce in schools.

The Impact of Accountability Policies in Texas High Schools

Making schools accountable through state testing was the preeminent educational reform of the 1990s. Thirty-nine states now administer some form of performance-based assessment; twenty-four states attach stakes to their tests; and forty states use tests scores for school accountability purposes (Stecher and Barron 1999). Proponents argue that using student scores on curriculum-based tests as a measure of school effectiveness encourages teachers to teach the curriculum. It sets a minimum standard against which schools can be judged; and it quantifies school “quality” in a way that parents and politicians can easily understand. By setting student improvement goals for schools, the state can motivate school personnel to reach continuously higher, while also identifying those schools unwilling or unable to meet the prescribed goals.

Multiple Means of Motivation

In our study, “with remarkable consistency, across the states and types of schools, teachers and administrators struggle with the short term, and immediate problem of how to motivate students to perform on the tests” (Siskin and Lemons 2000, 6). Approaches to this problem were varied, but two motivating factors that surfaced frequently and which also resonated with our conversation with students were (1) having a sense of school pride and (2) having a culture of “community” found in our orthogonal schools or in a particular subject area, such as music and band, where teachers talked about students as having real ownership of their learning.

When Stakes Are Located Elsewhere

Both Kentucky and Vermont are states where the consequences of the assessment system are focused somewhere other than on the students, if at all. In Kentucky, stakes are felt at the school level, and in Vermont, it is less clear that the effect of a school's performance on the state assessment, which is published, is felt by any particular actor. In speaking with teachers and administrators in both these states, it became clear that one of their main challenges is getting students motivated for the courses or the state assessment when these forms of accountability do not hold any meaning for them.

The New Accountability

High Schools and High Stakes Testing

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