It's Time for a New Accountability in American Education
Voices across the country are raising concerns about the new Common Core State Standards. But if you listen carefully to the conversations, the main concern is not about the standards, themselves, but about the consequences of high-stakes tests attached to the standards. And those concerns are well-placed: Trying to implement ambitious goals for deeper learning through an outmoded testing model tied to a long list of punishments for children, educators, and schools is like pouring new wine into old bottles. It will certainly turn sour. The promise of these new standards -- and excellent education for all of America's children -- cannot succeed under the old accountability system because:
- An end-of-year sit-down test cannot capture the broader aspirations embedded in the new standards for problem solving, inquiry, team building, communication, collaboration, persistence, and other challenging skills. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) approach -- which focuses only on English language arts and mathematics scores on primarily multiple-choice tests -- has been shown to narrow curriculum to what is tested and to reduce opportunities for higher-order thinking.
- Implementing the standards well will not be accomplished by targets and sanctions. It will require more adequate and equitable resources and greater investments in professional capacity, especially for currently underfunded schools that serve the highest-need students.
- Raising standards in ways that punish children and educators for not meeting them produces the wrong responses from schools. Evidence shows that, rather than improve learning, sanctions tend to drive out struggling students in order to boost scores, tamp down innovation, hasten the flight of thoughtful educators from the profession, and disrupt learning for students whose local schools are shut down.
If we assume that the goal of accountability should be better education, the test-and-punish approach must be replaced by a support-and-improve model. A It's Time for a New Accountability in American Education | Randi Weingarten: