While the policy crowd was busy designing and implementing an array of standards-based reforms, a mostly separate group of advocates was winning school-finance lawsuits from coast to coast, wins that yielded a big increase in spending in the 1990s and especially into the 2000s. So let’s give accountability some credit-some, but not all.ĭid we invest our way to better achievement?
But something real did happen, for achievement went up, and not just on the state tests that were used for accountability purposes, but also on the no-stakes National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s probably a mix of all these things, with some schools responding in ways that policymakers hoped while others finagled and cheated in various ways. They reallocated time from social studies and science to reading and math (which is true, though the changes were modest). They encouraged low-performing kids to stay home on test day. They re-assigned their best teachers to the tested grades. The pessimistic-you might say cynical-story is that schools and districts just played games to make their test scores go up. Perhaps schools and districts also responded to NCLB’s subgroup data by doing politically difficult but necessary things to improve outcomes, like assigning the best teachers to the kids who needed the most help or driving additional dollars to schools serving lots of children of color.
The optimistic story is that the new standards and assessments helped clarify what schools were expected to teach, and they aligned their curricula and pedagogy to these new expectations in ways that helped students learn more. (More on that below.)įourth, and perhaps most importantly, even if accountability did raise achievement (in math, especially for low-performing students), we don’t really know why. But then, of course, there was also the Great Recession. Others contend that this type of education reform can only carry you so far in time it plateaus. Some, like Sandy Kress, believe that’s because we essentially gave up on consequential accountability in the late 2000s, as NCLB grew long in the tooth and Arne Duncan issued waivers that let failing schools slip the law’s chokehold. Second, the size of the accountability impacts, though fairly large, wasn’t nearly enough to explain the huge gains made by the lowest-performing students in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Math achievement appears to be much more amenable to school interventions, perhaps because reading is more connected to family background (e.g., being read to, or not, and the vocabulary you hear in the home), or perhaps because our schools haven’t gotten any better at teaching it. This is not unusual in education research. But it’s important that we acknowledge some important limitations.įirst, both studies found impacts on math but not on reading. We accountability hawks tend to hang our hats on these findings when we argue that standards, tests, and school ratings can raise achievement. Later, Tom Dee and Brian Jacob checked to see what happened once the laggards finally starting doing testing and accountability, too, and found that they also got a bump from accountability-and it bumped them to a new, higher plateau. It was Eric Hanushek and Macke Raymond who first conducted such an analysis, and their answer was yes: States that embraced accountability in the 1990s made more progress than those that didn’t. Namely, they could compare the early-adopter states to the laggards, and check to see if the former saw greater progress in student achievement than the latter. This time lag provided researchers with an opportunity to study a natural experiment. Others jurisdictions, however, didn’t get serious about the standards, testing, and accountability tripod until NCLB burst onto the scene in 2002. The real revolution began with Improving America’s Schools Act.īy the mid to late 1990s, some states had the building blocks in place and were starting to put schools on so-called “failing schools” lists. While annual testing, disaggregated data, and a federally-mandated “cascade of sanctions” came later, they came as enhancements, as an evolution. It required states to set uniform standards in reading and math to develop statewide tests to assess students against those standards and to report the results for all schools. Though No Child Left Behind gets all the attention, 1994’s Improving America’s Schools Act put most of the key pieces in place for the “consequential accountability” policies that we now associate with NCLB. Other things were happening back then, too, things that deserve at least some of the credit-namely more education reform and more education resources. Recently, I argued that much of the progress of the No Child Left Behind era may have stemmed from the dramatically declining child poverty rates of the 1990s.