Second Look at Tougher Accountability Yields New Results

Washington

Two years ago, a pair of Stanford University researchers published a study suggesting that students’ math scores were rising faster in states that had put stronger pressure on schools and students to raise academic achievement than existed in states with weaker school accountability programs.

But last week, the researchers presented new findings suggesting that, over the long run, the achievement picture for those states may be a bit more complicated.

For their new study, researchers Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb tracked students in all 50 states over a longer period of time and added data from federal tests in reading as well as math. In most of the states with high-pressure testing systems in place, they found, the mathematics improvements that the researchers had documented in the late 1990s tapered off from 2000 to 2003. And in students’ reading scores, it seemed to make no difference whether a state had attached high stakes to the...