A Public School Evaluation System That Fails to Account for What We Value
What really matters in public schools? There are some very different definitions of the purpose of schooling. Proponents of business-driven, standardized test-based school accountability, the system mandated for two decades by the federal government, say we must use data to measure the quality of the student products turned out at high school graduation. Educators—and I believe parents and children—agree that what matters is students’ experience of learning while they are in school.
In these months when our children are at home because the pandemic has closed their schools, parents, children, and teachers have all been talking and writing about what they are missing—what is most important for them in the daily experience of of formal schooling. But lots of education policy wonks seem worried about whether schools can quickly get back on schedule with the standardized testing regimen we’ve come to expect since annual testing was mandated in 2002 by No Child Left Behind.
In an important new reflection in The Kappan, Educational Accountability Is Out of Step—Now More than Ever, two professors of education, Derek Gottlieb of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and Jack Schneider of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell reflect on what today’s school closures are teaching us about the value of schooling. Gottlieb and Schneider worry: “State governments… may have waived standardized testing this year, but once their public schools reopen, they’ll go right back to measuring them by the same few CONTINUE READING: A Public School Evaluation System That Fails to Account for What We Value | janresseger
