Why test-based accountability must be replaced with something better

It is inexplicable to me how the failed policies of test-based accountability continue to be championed as if they have worked in the past and will continue to work into the future. The position of those espousing the effectiveness of test-based accountability can only be valid if at some point in the past all schools were essentially equal, and then good or bad educators created the disparities between what are now labeled “good” and “bad” schools. Then, the current accountability systems might reflect the efforts of those educators and the judgments would be warranted.

Of course, that is a joke. Schools never started at a level playing field. The first time anyone administered a standardized test to the universe of students in America what it showed were the effects of an inequitable society as well as the size and scope of a problem. But it was much easier for Americans to ignore the problem and instead declare that poor children were just dumber than rich children and that the cause of that was the educators in their lives. Pretending that at some point everything had been equal and then it just so happened that all the bad educators migrated towards the bad schools now serving poor children was easier than admitting the truth—that we were a society rooted in inequity and that our approach to schooling reflected that fact.

Reality is a good bit different than the test-based accountability crew would have you believe. The Coleman report pointed out way back in the 1960s that an effective, research-based approach to creating a great educational system for all students required two major policy efforts: address the ravages of generational poverty and make teaching into a position as revered as medicine and the law. So far, more than half a century later, we are 0/2.

Now, instead, we look askance at the schools that serve students who are the victims of generational poverty and who are as a result behind their wealthier peers. We pretend that what we are seeing in these schools is not the consequences of ignoring Coleman, but of laziness and incompetence on the part of the educators in them.

And because test scores of the types used by states are designed to order students from the furthest below to the furthest above average within a content domain as of a certain date (that’s a mouthful—sorry), they make for a beautiful tool for confirming the bias that schools serving poorer children became bad because of bad teachers that just need to try harder. That denies the reality that student exposure to academic content occurs in two places: inside and outside school, and that exposure differs a great deal as a direct result of generational poverty. Make no mistake—schools and teachers matter, as they will account for about 1/3 of the difference in test scores between students (and could account for more with the right supports that do not now exist). But what happens outside of a school will account for almost 2/3 of the difference. Any judgment based on a test score that fails to acknowledge that very real fact is unethical and needs to be dismissed as specious.

As Americans, we have done little to elevate the profession and maximize what can be done when we have students in our schools. The statistics on that are overwhelming.

And almost all our policy efforts regarding generational poverty have addressed the symptoms of poverty, but not its cause. That approach continues unabated to this day.

Yet what is the response of the pro-test-based accountability crew? More of the same and continue to pretend that Coleman never put out his findings. Teachers are the issue and good teachers just happen to mostly be in schools that serve wealthier students and bad teachers just happen to mostly be in schools that serve poorer students.

But what the test-based crew also conveniently ignore is that we have in the world a whole host of organizations that do accountability in a way that focuses on an organization’s primary stakeholders, is good for those stakeholders, helps the organizations get better at what they do, is high stakes, gives policy makers what they need to make great policy, and, put simply, works. What they ignore is the fact that no other profession or organization has ever used or even attempted compliance-based metrics-driven accountabilities for their organizational accountability like what we have in schools. None. My organization has searched now for years and cannot come up with a single example where the model of accountability used in schools has been used to help any business, hospital, non-profit, etc., become great. Zero. None. Zilch.

The reasons for this are easy to see. I’ll list two. First, compliance is always in our rearview mirror, and the best way to be compliant this year is to do whatever you did the last time you were compliant. To repeat the past. If compliance is to, say HIPAA, or some other limited requirement, repeating the past in a limited way won’t harm the organization. But if the entire organizational accountability is based upon compliance with a metric, the entire job of a non-complying organization is to do this year whatever it was you did the last time you were compliant. Not change. Not improve. Not shape your organization for the future. But rinse and repeat the past. Over and over. Which is a recipe for irrelevance and obsolescence.

Second, such a model would create an unfair chasm the moment it was put into place between those businesses deemed compliant and those deemed non-compliant that would be hard to overcome. The compliant businesses would be allowed to excel, focus on the needs of their clients, and do what they could to shape themselves for the future. The non-compliant businesses would have a different job: repeat the past until compliance occurred. A few years down the road you can imagine what would happen: the gap between the compliant and the non-compliant would grow until it became unmanageable and untenable, hurt competition, and make the professions represented in the organizations less respected and less attractive as a career choice. Which is why this model isn’t used for organizational accountability in the business or any other world. It would create lots of problems and solve none.

And yet some continue to double down on this very model in schools. But to what effect? The compliant schools are free to focus on their students, while the non-compliant must hammer away on compliance, which means hammering away on test scores.

Only the test score game is one the schools serving impoverished children will never win. I said a minute ago that the tests are designed to order students from the student furthest below average to the student furthest above average. And that the differences between students (as well as differences in what states currently label “growth”) are due about 1/3 to what happens in school and 2/3 to what happens outside school. So long as what happens outside schools is left to chance, schools that serve poorer children will continue to be at a disadvantage, score lower than their wealthier peers, be declared non-compliant, and told that their job is to get compliant. While schools that serve wealthier students will continue to be declared compliant and be released to do what they think is best for students.

The gap that results—the education gap as it is referred to in much of the current literature—is real, but by seeing it as artifact of bad teaching it allows us to ignore the underlying truth, that it is an artifact of an underlying inequity many would rather not admit to. The harsher reality is that the way we do educational accountability, as seen in the business example above, makes the whole thing worse than it needs to be, exacerbating, supporting, and sustaining the gap rather than doing something about it.

The solution to such a massive problem is surprisingly simple.

1. End the era of test-based accountability once and for all. The evidence of its harm is now well documented, overwhelming, and incontrovertible.

2. Begin an era of accountability based on how effective organizations of all types run their accountability systems. We now have these frameworks available to us. We ignore them at the risk of the future of public education.

3. Admit that generational poverty is a societal problem and that all of America and its democratic and economic future is dependent on solving it in this era of continued globalization and completion.

4. Begin a long-term systemic professionalization of the teaching profession.

The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll get there. But in the meantime, if all we do is stop pretending that test-based accountability is designed to help all schools be great and all children excel, that will at least be a step in the right direction.