A Few Quick Fixes For School Accountability Systems
Our guest authors today are Morgan Polikoff and Andrew McEachin. Morgan is Assistant Professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Andrew is an Institute of Education Science postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia.
In a previous post, we described some of the problems with the Senate’s Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, based on our own analyses, which yielded three main findings. First, selecting the bottom 5% of schools for intervention based on changes in California’s composite achievement index resulted in remarkably unstable rankings. Second, identifying the bottom 5% based on schools’ lowest performing subgroup overwhelmingly targeted those serving larger numbers of special education students. Third and finally, we found evidence that middle and high schools were more likely to be identified than elementary schools, and smaller schools more likely than larger schools.
None of these findings was especially surprising (see here and here, for instance), and could easily have been anticipated. Thus, we argued that policymakers need to pay more attention to the vast (and rapidly expanding)
In a previous post, we described some of the problems with the Senate’s Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, based on our own analyses, which yielded three main findings. First, selecting the bottom 5% of schools for intervention based on changes in California’s composite achievement index resulted in remarkably unstable rankings. Second, identifying the bottom 5% based on schools’ lowest performing subgroup overwhelmingly targeted those serving larger numbers of special education students. Third and finally, we found evidence that middle and high schools were more likely to be identified than elementary schools, and smaller schools more likely than larger schools.
None of these findings was especially surprising (see here and here, for instance), and could easily have been anticipated. Thus, we argued that policymakers need to pay more attention to the vast (and rapidly expanding)