April 2008 — News
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Accountability, Yes. Teaching to the Test, No.
The end result: Administrators and parents would not have clear indicators of what students knew, as letter grades dominated discussions. We all know that letter grades don't tell all.
In spite of school systems developing scope and sequence guides for what should be taught and when, teachers were pretty much left on their own to use those guides or not. Sometimes those guides were put in the filing cabinet, or only reappeared if some administrator asked to see your copy. If a teacher's own conceptual understanding of a particular topic was weak, they'd skip it or minimally address it. Who would know? Typically, I'd see teachers skip probability and statistics chapters in a math text. They'd rationalize that those were not needed for courses in the next year. If they didn't like teaching word problems, many of those were skipped too. In other words, free reign up to a point was often the case, with the textbook serving as the curriculum.
Before the NCLB accountability movement, I saw a different attitude toward standardized testing. I recall several years in spring when students in one grade took a well known standardized test of basic skills. Teachers would say, "Just do your best and keep in mind that the test does not count for anything." And, it didn't. Consequently, some students just filled in bubbles on the answer sheets without even reading the test questions. There was no reliable link from test results to student knowledge; nor were there focused efforts within the classroom to do anything with results. At best students got a printout of their results, if it arrived by the end of the school year. Data were collected, and echoing Stiggins (2007) words, the assessment results informed the grownups who ran the system (p. 29). The district's nuts and bolts were not necessarily in place to ensure that tests measured what had been taught anyway.
The above scenario illustrates a system that was not working the way it should. It was more teacher-centered than learner-centered. Introducing a different slant on accountability was an idea whose time had come. So, what commonality could we come up with to measure what students know? The state mandated standardized test linked to academic content standards, of course. But this time, raise the stakes--link passage to graduation requirements or retaining students in a grade. Again, borrowing from Stiggins (2007), this would change "our 60-year assessment legacy" in which nowhere "do we find reference to students as assessment users and instructional decision makers" (p. 29). They and their teachers surely would be assessment users now.
Accountability
Whether or not you agree with standardized testing, there are positive outcomes from the current accountability movement. School districts and teachers are taking a closer look at curriculum and are developing vertical and horizontal curriculum maps.
