President Barack Obama recently announced that states will be allowed to seek waivers exempting their schools from certain provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, the controversial federal education law of 2001. According to some estimates, as many as 44 states, including Illinois, may apply, seeking relief from what some educators view as burdensome testing requirements that offer dubious measures of learning and accountability and a system that imposes stringent penalties on schools that fail to meet federal standards. Katherine Ryan, a professor in the College of Education and expert on educational accountability issues and high stakes assessment, talked recently with News Bureau education editor Sharita Forrest about education reform in the U.S.
State waivers – good idea or bad idea? Are they a way for schools to evade accountability?
The waiver is a good idea in principle because it focuses on students making progress over time, not just test results. What we’ve currently been working with – the NCLB mandate of 100 percent of all students meeting reading and math standards by 2014 – was never a realistic or reasonable theory of action. The Race to the Top initiative, which involves “turning around schools,” is an improvement, but it’s not as comprehensive as we would like.
There will still be an accountability component under the waiver, but it’s a progress-based model rather than a standards-based model. The path for this has been laid for the past five years, and federal funding was provided to explore this as an alternative to NCLB’s standards-based approach. So this is not a surprise.
There will still be accountability and schools identified as needing improvement. And, of course, the waiver involves other requirements, including comprehensive teacher evaluation systems, which are controversial.
The growth or progress model – comparing test scores from year to year and determining if scores have risen – under the waiver does focus on improvement, but it still misses the main point in our educational accountability policy, which is: The U.S. relies on performance testing as an identifier of schools that have troubles, but then in terms of what kinds of resources are available to help them there are few policy instruments. We have not developed robust theories about what to do and how to improve schools.
In the U.S. there’s this assumption that “high stakes” accountability mechanisms are going to stimulate or motivate schools to improve and that all schools have an adequate capacity to improve. This underlying notion that under-performing schools are not trying, and if they would just try … is more complicated. Some of the schools need more than just effort – they are going to need systematic resources and a longer-term commitment.
Current policy assumes that all schools are comparable across contexts, and there’s really no acknowledgment of the local character and context that impacts each school.
This lack of focus on organizational and instructional capacity in schools is really different than what you see internationally, where educational accountability policies almost always contain some kind of school improvement emphasis.
In terms of resources, is the solution providing more funding, more staffing or … ?
The research shows that just more financial resources have not historically been a means to improvement. It’s going to require a robust effort including human resources, financial resources and research oriented in this direction. We are positioned quite well these days – the Institute for Educational Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, is committed to this view. Their director, John Easton, has spent 30 years in school improvement.
How do other countries’ educational accountability programs work?
In some cases, they’re just focused on school self-evaluation. There’s an orientation toward building organizational routines and practices aimed at schools’ continuous improvement. In the U.S., we talk about this, but it’s at the discretion of any school or district. Finland is an example of a country with a vigorous school self-evaluation program.
Then we have other nations, such as England and New Zealand, that have school self-evaluation processes coupled with an inspection program. Inspectors visit the schools, observe instruction, talk with parents and meet with the teachers. The idea is that schools will hold themselves accountable in advance of receiving these inspections.
I was in New Zealand in November 2010 to observe their model. They’ve shifted their focus and now devote more resources to inspecting the 20-30 percent of schools that are low-achieving.
A lot of the criticism of NCLB and standardized testing in general is that the tests are not reliable indicators of attainment. What alternatives are there?
There are efforts under way with these new initiatives to broaden the kinds of assessments that we’re using for accountability. That’s not to say that we should never do standardized testing – it’s in the public interest to know how students and schools are performing. That’s a democratic right and responsibility.
But, on the other hand, to have a broader set of assessments that reflect the deeper and richer student performance and achievement that we’re really interested in, to have assessments that are oriented toward improvement and can actually help schools would be a major step forward. Schools spend time and energy on accountability testing now, and the tests tend not to be formative. They don’t provide a lot of information at the student level; they typically are not designed to do that.
NCLB high-stakes testing and Race to the Top are very much top-down approaches to accountability and school improvement that are “distant interventions.” However, the five school characteristics that are important for improvement – leadership, school climate, professional capacity, curriculum and instruction, and parent-school-community relationships – suggest that improvement efforts ultimately need to happen at the local (school, district) level. I think federal policies need to encourage and support that kind of local work for effective and positive changes to occur.
In terms of developing models of school improvement – determining what we need to do, what are the routines and practices, how can we work toward embedding school improvement processes within schools – the programs used internationally might be one place that we need to look. We couldn’t adapt those models directly to the U.S. educational system, but we need to think more broadly than what we have done.
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