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Blog: FCAR
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Accountability
By Marion Brady
*November 21, 2001
When the politicians and business leaders took over the education reform
movement, the term "accountability" began to get really good press. Now, its
popularity is right up there with motherhood, the flag, and apple pie.
Accountability IS a very good thing. It’s been a mainstay of educator thinking
for as long as there have been educators.
Unfortunately, for much of the public, "accountability" has pretty much come to
mean just one thing---mandatory, standardized, high-stakes testing. In Florida,
that mandated high-stakes test is the FCAT—the Florida Comprehensive Assessment
Test.
The enormous emphasis on this narrow, simplistic measure of teacher, student and
school performance is ripping the institution apart—driving some of Florida’s
most capable educators out of the profession, dumping dropouts on the street
without assistance programs, and dumbing down what many people think it means to
be educated.
Unfortunately, most teachers and administrators appalled by the FCAT are afraid
to speak up—afraid of being punished for political incorrectness, afraid of
being accused of not wanting to be held accountable.
Aware that many think educators oppose high-stakes testing for self-serving
reasons, five professional organizations asked Dr. W. James Popham, Professor
Emeritus of the University of California, to pull together experts not connected
with K-12 education to study the situation. The five organizations were the
American Association of School Administrators, the National Association of
Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School
Principals, the National Education Association, and the National Middle School
Association.
Popham assembled a nine-member panel from seven states. They studied state
standards and the high-stakes tests based on those standards, and in a
just-released report say:
1. There are far too many "standards" to teach and test. (For example, Florida’s
Sunshine State Standards hold 8th graders responsible for meeting about 325 in
just four subject matter areas—math, science, language arts, and social studies.
Many of the standards deal with topics so broad an entire test could be written
to check performance for just one.)
2. States need to decide which standards are most important. (Florida hasn’t
done that.)
3. High-priority standards need to be clearly and thoroughly described. (Florida
hasn’t done that.)
4. Results of state testing should be reported standard-by-standard. (Florida
doesn’t do that.)
5. To keep schools from "teaching to the test" and neglecting non-tested fields
of study, tests should be available for all subjects. (Florida provides none.)
6. A single paper-and-pencil test can’t accommodate the range of student
cultural differences, learning style variations, learning disabilities and so on
that students bring to the test, so optional ways of measuring should be
available. (Florida offers none.)
7. It takes a minimum of three years to develop a valid test. (Florida’s test,
and the scoring system, constantly change.)
8. Teachers need special training to make use of test results. (Florida provides
no such training. It doesn’t even provide useable feedback from FCAT.)
9. States need to weigh the benefits of testing against its costs. How, for
example, does it affect the dropout rate? Teacher morale? The overall quality of
instruction? (Florida doesn’t do that.)
In addition to the five organizations that commissioned the study, the national
professional organizations representing teachers of reading, English, math,
humanities, social studies, and science have all taken formal, on-the-record
positions opposing high-stakes testing.
Thoughtful educators almost universally condemn the present education standards
and accountability "reform" movement. They consider it simplistic, shortsighted,
misguided, counterproductive. Why, then, is the movement so popular with the
general public?
Chalk it up to the general lack of respect for teachers and the teaching
profession. The opinions of politicians, business leaders and other education
amateurs carry more weight with the public than the opinions of professional
educators.
Chalk it up to the media’s inability to deal with complex issues. It’s
convenient to believe that it’s possible to sum up a school’s performance with a
single letter grade, convenient to go along with the conventional wisdom that
says competition—student, teacher, school, system, state—can cure what ails
education.
But maybe, most of all, chalk it up to the power and appeal of the word
"accountability." Behind that banner, the federal and state governments have put
in place a tool—high-stakes testing—which, although utterly crude, is altering
for the worse the course of untold numbers of young lives. Parents should back
into a corner those who exploit that word and demand that they explain exactly
what they mean when they use it.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
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