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Test-Based Accountability: Failure of a Promising Reform
Unless the quality, processes, and reporting of test-based accountability
improves, support for the ambitious goals of NCLB is likely to disintegrate
even further. At every hearing, youth and adult witnesses alike revealed their
frustration, sometimes to the point of anguish, about the current impact of the
accountability policies. They all want accountability. But they also want a better
system for achieving it.
All states, with the exception of Iowa, use state assessments to hold schools
and students accountable for achieving certain standards. States had worked
out measurement systems to satisfy previous federal requirements under
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. NCLB, which reauthorized
this 36-year-old law, introduced tougher accountability provisions and
stringent standards to move all students toward the proficient level by 2014.
But its punitive impositions – such as the labeling of schools as “needing
improvement” and the eventual “reconstitution” of schools – have radically
changed the testing environment, according to testimony given at the PEN
hearings.
It is significant that Texas, the state with the longest experience in
implementing the kind of test-based accountability embodied in NCLB, was
the site of the hearing that produced the most anguished testimony about
its effects. According to those witnesses, Texas parents and teachers are
giving up on the public education system because of the impact of testing
on teaching and learning. But witnesses at all hearings had objections to the
testing environment as summarized below.
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The pressure to avoid sanctions causes teachers and administrators to
narrow the curriculum to subjects that are tested, devote an inordinate
amount of time to test preparation, and use only instructional strategies
that are thought to boost test scores. A California teacher, certified as
exemplary by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, said
he was forced to drop his enrichment strategies and focus on the test.
“All I do is hand out ditto sheets,” he said. Even students enrolled in highperforming
schools or taking advanced classes said they were practicing
test techniques instead of studying English literature. Laws do not empower
students, said a Columbus, OH, student. Teachers do—if “they are free to
be creative and rigorous as opposed to drilling us to pass a test that has
no bearing on my ability,” said Lakita Williams of the Brookhaven Leadership
Institute.
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Students in schools labeled “needing improvement” feel the most pressure
and experience the worst narrow, drill-based curriculum. A Pennsylvania
student in such a school said students felt discouraged about real learning
because teachers were more interested in “threatening” students than in
teaching them. Eric Mar, past president of the San Francisco school board,
told the hearing panel in his city that, even though the purpose of NCLB and
state mandates is to raise achievement, “the law is doing just the opposite
for the vast majority of low-income children of color...”
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The pressure imposed by NCLB’s accountability mandates is limiting course
offerings, especially in regard to occupational classes, and is resulting in
“pushouts” and dropouts. These largely anecdotal findings were mentioned
so frequently, in so many places, that they deserve to be addressed.
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Students and parents were aware of the inequities in resources that affect
student test scores. Those from the inner city told of broken computers,
unheated and overcrowded classrooms, shredded and outdated textbooks,
and no science laboratories. Students from high-performing schools were
“shocked” at the lack of access to Advanced Placement classes in lowincome
schools. One Boston student took the absence of basic resources as
a personal insult: “I don’t feel as if I’m wanted. Just because I go to a public
school doesn’t mean they can’t fix the toilets.”
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The AYP system does not take into consideration even significant progress
toward meeting improvement goals. If NCLB benchmarks are not reached,
no amount of improvement can put the school in compliance with AYP.
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Labeling schools that do not meet AYP goals demoralizes students and
teachers, causes the schools to lose community support, and does not
guarantee interventions based on best-practices research. Nonetheless,
there were reports of some communities that rallied around schools
threatened with sanctions because of low test scores.
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The public receives information on test scores and school performances
from different sources. In most instances, this information is generated by
state accountability systems, though they also receive the federal calculation
based on the percentage of students moving toward the proficient level. The
two systems often do not mesh, causing great confusion.
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The NCLB mandate to include children with disabilities and English-language
learners in regular testing programs is seen as unfair and unwise. One of
the country’s leading legal advocates for children with disabilities, testifying
in Boston, faulted Massachusetts for severely limiting the use of alternative
assessments with students whose disabilities hamper their performance.
Children with special needs, said a school board member from Florida, “are
their own worst enemy.” One-size-fits-all testing demoralizes them.
Similarly, witnesses said that testing requirements were contributing to the
dropout problem among English learners. Wayne Ho, executive director of the
Coalition for Asian American Children and Families in New York, challenged
the hearing officers to study Chinese for one year, then make a passing
grade on a content test required for graduation in that language. A bilingual
education leader in Texas said the requirement to test ELL students has
caused school districts “to implement very, very poor hurry-up-and-learn-English
classes.” Texas had experience with immersion programs up until the 1970s,
commented Elena Izquierdo, vice president of the Texas Association for
Bilingual Education, “and our Hispanic graduation rate was about ten percent.”
Students offered a number of alternatives to current assessment practices:
greater reliance on portfolios or other ways of demonstrating student work,
differentiated assessments for students with disabilities or limited-English
pro.ciency, use of grade-point averages, and end-of-course exams rather than
high school exit exams. They pointed out that exit exams often ask for discrete
facts that were covered in classes taken two to three years ago. Adults
favored using testing for diagnostic rather than punitive purposes and/or using
a value-added/progress model rather than the static goal model of NCLB.
Several witnesses criticized using the same grade-level tests for children with
disabilities, especially if there are no accommodations, and testing Englishlanguage
learners on English skills before they have had time to learn the
language.
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