The measurement of student achievement can be a useful determinant of educational policy and reform. But not if it is folded into a scheme of high stakes accountability that promotes aggressive individualism in America’s schools. Reformers have yet to face up to the fact that the complexity of their task has far more to do with not destroying the very features that make education an uplifting, noble endeavor than it has to do with perfecting their devices for measuring and judging individual performance.
It’s a flat, one dimensional, an d potentially toxic approach to educational reform. At the same time, it is also an important ingredient of reform, one of the very few metrics that stakeholders far from the classroom can employ. It can be a valuable indicator of how factors that should be irrelevant to learning—such as race and ethnicity—affect student achievement. That accountability has these benefits does not in any way detract from its problems as a one dimensional, potentially toxic instrument for educational reform.
These descriptions apply to the currently popular version of accountability; the version that holds classroom teachers and school administrators accountable for student achievement, with such high stakes consequences as increased pay or promotions on the one hand, or reduced pay, censure, or dismissal on the other hand. This version of accountability appe ars to be the centerpiece of the current reform movement, as is well illustrated in Steven Brill’s recent article in The New York Times Magazine (“The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand,” May 23, 2010, pp. 32-47). Brill suggests that the teachers’ unions are on the ropes, stymied by the juggernaut of the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top initiative and its multiple manifestations at state and local levels.
This initiative places teacher and administrator accountability at the center of the Obama administration’s educational reform efforts. It uses money, a lot of money, to get its way. And it has legions of policy wonks, governors, philanthropic foundations, legislators, and school superintendents cheering it on. How does something so one dimensional and toxic gain such adherence and enthusiasm? A few of the many re asons are worth exploring here.
First, it’s something that can be measured with a fair degree of reliability—at least in such school subjects as reading, mathematics, and the sciences. Second, the results (if properly disaggregated) can be used as an indicator of inequities in student achievement arising from such factors as race, ethnicity, and social class. Third, this form of accountability can be readily employed by geographically distant policy overseers and regulators to make vexing decisions about how public money is to be divided and distributed. Student achievement data brings a measure of comfort to fiscal decision making, imbuing the process with a semblance of rationality.
Finally, and a good deal more specul atively, the current accountability movement is one of the many manifestations of the long-cherished value of individualism in American life. (We almost said “rugged individualism,” that variation on individualism so prized by Herbert Hoover and Frederick Jackson Turner, but there is pitifully little that is rugged about this form of individualism—inasmuch as the ruggedness required to succeed falls far more on the backs of teachers and administrators than on the students.) In the context of the school, individualism is manifest as a focus on the student, taken one by one. With high stakes accountability, each student is considered separate and distinct from other students; each student is assigned scores on tests that the student completes alone. Where deficiencies are found, a plan may be devised for each student, with each student treated separately in an effort to raise his or her achievement scores.
Let’s call this “aggressive individualism,” noting how readily it is sustained by high stakes accountability initiatives. Accountability rooted in aggressive individualism can be quite toxic, because it compels teachers to view their classrooms, not as small communities or settings (in that wonderfully evocative sense of “setting” used by Seymour Sarason in The Creation of Settings and Future Societies), but merely as a collection of individuals. In so doing, high stakes accountability diminishes the teacher’s opportunities to nurture social relationships that foster moral development, aesthetic sensibility, and democratic character. These three features of any education worthy of the name have almost no traction in the current reform climate.
This absence might not be tragic if aggressive individualism did not suck the relational life out of the classroom. That is, if the all-consuming attention to high stakes accountability did not make it so very difficult to treat the classroom as a setting where moral virtue, aesthetic sensibility, and democratic character are intentionally nurtured by teachers, and where the school administrators are rewarded for an organizational climate that encourages these prized educational ends. The pursuit of these ends requires classrooms that have the characteristics of a coherent community, where teacher-student and student-student relationships are fostered in ways that promote mutual regard, reciprocity of interests, and a shared pursuit of goals believed to be for the common good. It is in such settings that we can make significant contributions to moral, aesthetic, and democratic enlightenment.
Alas, such settings are made ever so much more difficult to attain in the face of an aggressive individualism spawned by high stakes accountability. The irony here is that reformers press high stakes accountability because of their recent discovery that teachers are a powerful factor in determining student achievement. Yet, in their pursuit of this form of accountability, they increase the difficulty of teachers promoting the values and ideals that brought so many of them into the profession and that sustain so many through the tribulations that mark their careers.
In his New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks offers a fitting conclusion to our position on high stakes accountability: “The first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds.&# 8221; This rule is followed by another: “Try to use policy to establish basic relationships” (May 4, 2010, p. A25). A quarter century earlier, the philosopher Thomas Green warned us of the irreparable harm that can be done by “those whose conscience is merely technical and limited to the skills of managing the political apparatus, but who are rootless in their souls” (The Formation of Conscience in an Age of Technology, 1984, Syracuse University School of Education, p. 27).
The measurement of student achievement can be a useful determinant of educational policy and reform. But not if it is folded into a scheme of high stakes accountability that promotes aggressive individualism in America’s schools. Reformers have yet to face up to the fact that the complexity of their task has far more to do with not destroying the very features that make education an uplifting, noble endeavor than it has to do with perfecting their devices for measuring and judging individual performance.
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