An Educational Contrarian

For a word used with ease in educational policy circles, accountability is a term that is surprisingly misunderstood and misused. Seeing this is relatively simple. Ask an audience to brainstorm a list of terms they associate with accountability and a pattern will quickly emerge. Many of the words will be positive such as: Transparency Effectiveness Responsibility Outcomes And many of the words and phrases will be negative, such as: Feet to the fire Testing due to lack of trust Blame Shame If you list these words in two columns on a sheet of paper what you will be observing are the two sides to accountability. The negative terms represent what happens when an organization refuses to be accountable and/or is perceived as failing. In that case, accountability is something imposed on that organization by outside stakeholders for the purpose of bringing the organization in line. Such an accountability focuses the organization on failure prevention at the expense of everything el...

Standardized test is the name most people assign to the tests used in state accountability systems, commercially available norm-referenced tests, and college admittance tests such as the ACT and SAT. I have long encouraged folks to drop the term “standardized,” since that merely refers to the conditions under which tests can be administered, rather than what this narrow family of tests are and do. Instead, I prefer to call them predictive tests. This describes what they are intended to do. I have also strongly encouraged a more critical use of vocabulary regarding predictive testing. This is because of the massive confusion that results from the plethora of terms now applied to testing that don’t mean what most people think, such as standards-based, or criterion-referenced. What sets a predictive test apart from all other forms of testing is its ability to produce predictive scores. Simply (and crudely) put, if I am slightly above average this year you can predict that I will probably ...