Despite a near-universal call in America to hold teachers and schools accountable for student achievement, two powerful groups of educators are now on record as preferring different methods for enforcing that accountability.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is the largest national teachers union, last month called for a one-year moratorium on any consequences from new tests being developed that assess standards in the Common Core. The Common Core was adopted in 2010 in Maryland and Illinois, as well as about 40 states in all and the District of Columbia. The standards specify what students should know in mathematics and English/language arts at the end of every year, kindergarten through high school graduation.
In addition to teachers, who overwhelmingly support the Common Core standards themselves but say they haven’t had enough time to prepare their students for the new standards, other critics emerged as the standards began making their way into lesson plans and classrooms. People on the conservative side of the political spectrum, such as the leaders in the Republican party, say the standards take local authority away from school boards and take rights of self-control away from states. Some states, such as Michigan, Georgia, and with grassroots initiatives in Illinois, have specifically tried to take actions that would prevent implementation of the Common Core.
Some writers have also questioned Ms Weingarten’s message itself, saying she is arguing that teachers need more time to prepare students for the standards in the Common Core. This isn’t her main point, however, being a peripheral comment at most. What she’s primarily saying is that the tests now being developed by two multi-state consortia aren’t going to work. In other words, the new exams won’t really assess students in the Common Core and thus shouldn’t be used to hold teachers accountable for teaching the Common Core.
At this point, the actual test items the two consortia will use are not available to the public. Publishing them would be illegal. Yet those test items are the elements that will comprise the tests we’re all trying to talk about.
Both multi-state testing consortia, known as PARCC and SBAC, have published a few sample items, though, and if those items are similar in quality to the ones that will be used on the operational tests, Ms Weingarten’s judgement that they’re inadequate is on the money.
In other words, the concern about the amount of time teachers have to prepare students for the new tests isn’t about time at all; it’s about quality. But today, a second very powerful group on the education playing field, Chiefs for Change (website), made up of state education leaders, released a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, saying states should move ahead with plans to use the new tests to assess students and judge teacher performance, the Washington Post reports.
“Recently, some members of the national education community have advocated for pulling back on accountability in our schools,” the group wrote to Mr Duncan. “… [We] reject any calls for a moratorium on accountability. … We will not relax or delay our urgency for creating better teacher, principal, school and district accountability systems as we implement more rigorous standards.”
I find this argument weak. First, nobody’s calling for “pulling back on accountability.” We’ve held schools and teachers accountable for decades, long before President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. Sure, we couldn’t get data on the progress of every single child in every single elementary and middle school grade, but what NCLB did was to shine a light on kids that school officials would sometimes sweep under the carpet. What the law also did, unfortunately, was to create consequences for schools that ended up making troubled schools even worse: they narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects, forced good students to pursue other options for their education, and put schools on a path toward closure.
Scaling back on accountability would be unwise, though, just to avoid certain consequences. Better to fix the consequences so we help our public schools become the best schools they can be, on equal footing and with equal opportunity as other schools in their districts, than to abandon the accountability we have gained over the last 11 years.
Second, Ms Weingarten is not calling for a “moratorium on accountability.” She is calling for a moratorium on the consequences, which are generally detrimental to teachers and schools. Chiefs for Change says they are “committed to putting children first through bold, visionary education reform.” We can’t put children first by putting teachers and schools last, especially those schools that serve minorities and poor students. Rather, an interest in putting children first would be focused on putting children in poor, minority-filled schools first, since they aren’t there yet, as well as maintaining a first-place position for students in affluent suburban schools.
And finally, Ms Weingarten isn’t suggesting we delay our urgency for creating better assessment systems to guide accountability in teacher evaluations or student progress; she’s just saying the tests aren’t quite ready yet. Not enough people have confidence in the new tests or the items that make them up to let a school’s fate, a teacher’s job, or a kid’s chances at college or a career ride on them.
What Ms Weingarten seems to have a problem with is undue haste. To use a commercial analogy, if we will sell no wine before its time, we should consider not making tests operational or consequential until they are known to be ready for that role in our schools.