The Great Accountability Fallacy
The rising controversy over "high stakes" testing masks an underlying consensus about accountability that is, for schools, even more debilitating than the test fad itself. Despite their strong differences, conservative and liberal reformers alike have come to embrace the Great Accountability Fallacy, the notion that the school, alone, should be held responsible for student achievement. They differ sharply about how to improve outcomes, but they are certain that improvement is uniquely up to the school.
To testing proponents, mostly conservatives who see public schools as inadequate and irresponsible, accountability is a straightforward proposition: A school, like a factory, turns out a product; if the product is subpar, the factory must be at fault. Schools' products are manifestly subpar. Testing is key to promoting higher standards because it will dramatize schools' weaknesses and motivate improved results by teachers and pupils--provided it is accompanied by tough consequences (low-scoring schools placed on "watch" lists or threatened with state takeover, students who fail denied promotion and graduation, and so on).
Liberal reformers agree readily that there are performance problems in schools, but attribute these to the very kinds of instruction and assessment conservatives want to reinforce. For them, the whole standards-and-testing enterprise is misguided, unfair, and cynical. It rests on a primitive, punitive notion of motivation, assuming that teachers and students are lazy ("raising the bar" can't make people jump higher unless they haven't been trying hard enough). It targets the wrong goals in the wrong ways, aiming at the recall of facts, figures, and formulas instead of the ability to apply knowledge in real-life settings. Often, the exams themselves are full of design defects. (Massachusetts' recent statewide exam is a classic case: It lasted an exhausting 15 hours; covered much material students hadn't studied; required 8th grade reading skills on its 4th grade test; and did not begin with the easiest problems and move gradually to the hardest.) Such tests don't raise the bar, they punish the victims--especially poor, minority, and non-English-speaking students. Indeed, punishment, not assessment, often seems precisely the point: The tests are intended to magnify public schools' shortcomings and bolster the conservative case for...
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