Judging Success and Failure of Schools and Districts: Whose Criteria Count?
The dominant standard used by most policymakers, media editors, and administrators to judge success is effectiveness: Have you done what you said you were going to do and can you prove it? In a society where “bottom lines,” Dow Jones averages, sports statistics, and vote-counts matter, quantifiable results determine success. No Child Left Behind and its focus on standardized test scores is effectiveness on steroids.
Yet even before No Child Left Behind, policymakers had relied on theeffectiveness standard to examine what students have learned by using proxy measures such as state test scores, college attendance, and other indicators. For example, in the late-1970s policymakers concluded that public schools had declined because scholastic aptitudes test (SAT) scores had plunged downward. Even though test-makers and researchers repeatedly stated that such claims were false—falling SAT scores fueled public support for states raising academic requirements in the 1980s. What mattered most to decision-makers and media were numbers that could be used to establish school rankings, thereby creating easily identifiable winners and losers.
Note, however, that test results in some instances proved unhelpful in measuring a reform’s success. Consider the mid-1960s’ evaluations of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). They revealed little improvement in low-income children’s academic performance thereby jeopardizing Congressional renewal of the program. Such evidence gave critics hostile to federal initiatives reasons to brand President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs as failures.
Low test scores, however, failed to diminish the program’s political attractiveness to constituents and legislators. Each successive president and Congress has used that popularity as a basis for allocating funds to needy students in schools across the nation including No Child Left Behind.
Popularity, then, is a second standard that public officials use in evaluating success. The spread of an innovation and its hold on the imagination of voters, has meant that fashionableness can translate into political support for reform. The rapid diffusion of special education, bilingual education, accountability, and computers in schools since the 1980s are instances of innovations that captured both policymakers’ and practitioners’ attention. Few educators or public officials questioned large outlays of public funds for these popular reforms because they were perceived, at least at first, as resounding successes.
A third standard used to judge success is assessing how well innovations mirrored Judging Success and Failure of Schools and Districts: Whose Criteria Count? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
