Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right

This book is quite out dated and narrow-minded. No one believes we can achieve more in education by testing students MORE.

This book is a great example of what education should be.

This is on my short list of books about education that everyone should read. I presume that EPI has put it in the hands of everyone in Congress, but it might be worth, after reading it yourself, passing it on to a local school board member. Whereas a lot of criticism of NCLB amounts to little more than an unbalanced rant and I would say that most criticism is unconstructive, Grading Education offers a comprehensive, compelling, and constructive critique. It's comprehensive in that it places NCLB within a (very interesting) discussion of the history of evaluation of schools, and constructive, not in the sense that it suggests a way to fix NCLB (that, the authors say, is impossible) but rather by offering a sensible alternative framework for "getting accountability right". The authors believe (rightly) that accountability is important, and (again rightly) that the particular method of democratic accountability through locally elected school boards simply doesn't work. (They do not ask whether NCLB, with all its flaws, when superimposed on a system of local democratic control is superior to local democratic control on its own, which I suspect it might be, but their aim is to influence future policy). The book ought to have a lot of influence over the debates around the re-authorisation, revision, or tacit abandonment of NCLB which, presumably, we'll start to have at some point.I hesitate to say too much about it, for fear of releasing you from the obligation of reading it. But the basic argument is as follows.Whereas NCLB has focused very narrowly on reading and math test scores, not only have Americans historically cared about a much richer set of goals for education, but they (including parents, school board members, and politicians) still do. They offer 8 goals or aims of education: promoting basic academic schools, critical thinking skills, appreciation of arts and literature, social skills and work ethic, Citizenship and community responsibility, physical health, and emotional health, they and enlist various thinkers from Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, through Horace Mann to Eisenhower and Nelson Rockerfeller (and contemporary surveys) in support of this richer conception. (If I can be forgiven a bit of self-promotion, I'd welcome feedback on how these goals fit with the goals I set out and defend in On Education ). In contrast to this rich view of the aims of education, we have developed measurement tools that are very crude. As one well known defender of progressive educational causes from the seventies (Richard M Nixon) put it: "To achieve this fundamental reform it will be necessary to develop broader and more sensitive instruments of learning than we now have. The National Institute for Education would take the lead in developing these new measurements of educational output. In doing so it should pay as much heed to what are called "immeasurables" of schooling (largely because no one has yet learned to measure them) such as responsibility, wit, and humanity as it does to verbal and mathematical achievement... From these considerations we develop another new concept of accountability."There's a wonderful chapter on NAEP, which shows that in the early days NAEP, which is now a focused only on the measurables, attempted to measure the "immeasurables" (even emotional health) too (though sensibly without specifying what would count as proficiency), and there's a nice, Diane Ravichy, account of how these became untenable - that the hostility of various political correctness groups of left and right to items that show any kind of bias make it impossible to include questions the right answers to which might suggest some sort of bias. (I started to giggle when I read the short list of factual questions torn out of NAEP by the sensitivity and bias committee, such as the passage abut how owls eat rodents which was left out because owls are associated with death in the Navajo culture).It's not just the relentless focus on the measurables that is problematic; the authors elaborate the long list of problems that are familiar from other critiques, offering actual studies that suggest these really are problems. What's nice about these discussions is not just that they have mined the literature for real evidence, but that they are thoughtful about why this might be happening. Think about the problem with bubble kids - because schools are rewarded for increasing the numbers who achieve proficiency, they focus on kids who cluster around the level of proficiency to the detriment of the kids who are never going to get there. Now, this clearly happens, but technically there is an incentive not to do it, because the aim is to get EVERYONE to the level of proficiency by 2014. So why does it happen anyway? Well, because everyone knew that the target of 100% proficiency by 2014 was absurd, and everyone knew that the act would be revised, renewed, or abandoned by 2008 (well, you know what I mean), so everyone assumed that the goal, being absurd, would be abandoned at that time. Quite apart from the fact that it is hard to be thinking about goals that are a decade off when you have no idea whether you'll still be working in the school at that time.Now, some opponents of NCLB either think, or are just content to suggest by their silence, that accountability is bound to be a disaster or, worse, that accountability is some sort of impingement on the autonomy and freedom of teachers and principals. One refreshing thing about Grading Education is that the authors understand that a massive institution that consumes more public funding than any other project other than defense, everyone has a stake in ensuring sensible accountability (might be nice to have it for defence, too) Also refreshing is their observation that most other wealthy countries have longstanding systems of national accountability and their suggestion that Americans might learn something from both the successes and failures of those other countries. Rothstein and his co-authors recommend shifting responsibility for accountability onto the States, with the Federal government playing the role of creating fiscal equalization and gathering valid and reliable State-level information using the richer information provided by an updated version of "early NAEP" tests, and using representative, age-level, samples. They also argue for an inspection regime, adapted from OFSTED 1993-2005 (Brits reading this part of the recommendation will be surprised to learn that Rothstein is widely regarded as being on the left, and perhaps more surprised that he arrived at this recommendation after talking to Chris Woodhead's bete noir).There is a lovely chapter called "Accountability by the numbers" which skewers the claim that in other industries accountability using only quantitative data works well; they start with a nice summary of Ridley and Simon's Measuring Municipal Activities, and run through a series of examples of perverse incentives introduced by, and gaming triggered by, crude accountability schemes not unlike that proposed in NCLB. Worth reading just for that.Finally, the authors make the revolutionary suggestion that school boards should "concentrate their energies on insisting that these consensus outcomes be met, and in turn delegate administrative decisionmaking to superintendents, their staffs, and their teachers." Boards meddle too much in administration (except where Superintendents are highly skilled at manipulating them, but in that case a lot of the time and energy of a capable Superintendent is absorbed by that task) and "abdicate" their responsibility to hold educators accountable for achieving the rich set of goals Rothstein et. al., and, ironically, most school board members, support.My proposal: require that your school principal, your district superintendent, and anyone standing for your local school board, has read Grading Education

Every now and again I read a book that fundamentally how I think about things. This is one of those books.I realize the target audience for this book will be rather narrow, but if you are looking for a book that explains the nature of educational accountability systems, I do not think you could find a better source. (The above sentence could possibly be one of the geekiest thing I have ever written.)The book is US-centric, though the international sections were useful in providing some comparisons--I would note that he speaks highly of the UK inspection system which is something I have not heard much praise for myself over the years. His chapter on the difficultly of implementing accountability systems in the social sector was fantastic.Overall, Rothstein is a good writer and an even better 'sense maker'. Together this makes the topic very accessible and the read an interesting one.