Assessment-Driven Reform: The Emperor Still Has No Clothes.

Abstract

Confusion about the role of standards and assessment in the current policy movement, coupled with the huge political capital expended on mounting this policy initiative, has created an obstacle course fraught with pitfalls and gold mine crammed with possibilities within the education system, Mr. Ramirez notes. WITH THE exception of Iowa, every state in the union claims to have developed, or to be in the process of developing, state-level academic standards.1 Without exception, these same states also insist that their new academic standards are rigorous. Furthermore, state after state is attempting to institute new systems of assessing student learning that are tied to the new academic standards. The movement in education policy to academic standards and related assessment is sweeping in scope and depth. As long ago as February 1998, Education Week reported that 32 states and 34 big-city school districts had instituted accountability systems based on student testing.2 This drive has the potential to become one of the major reform efforts in American education in this century, perhaps equal in impact to such movements as the development of the comprehensive high school or the racial integration of public education. However, efforts to improve curricula and create improved measurement systems to evaluate learning are not new. They have been common in the history of education and throughout the world.3 During the latter part of this century in the U.S. there have been repeated attempts to add rigor to the curriculum and to use student testing to measure the results. These attempts can be seen in such movements in education policy as the use of standardized testing for college admissions, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, or the to basics movement of the Seventies. They were all popular in their time, and all held the promise of higher levels of learning for more students. Yet despite these and other efforts, discontent with our school system persists. In Public Agenda study cited in the 1998 edition of Quality Counts, it is clear that no consensus exists on how well the schools are doing. The study found that an overwhelming majority of the end users of the products of American high schools judge graduates as not necessarily proficient in basic academic skills. Specifically, the study found that 76% of professors, 63% of employers, 32% of parents, 26% of teachers, and even 22% of high school students said that a high school diploma from their local public schools is no guarantee that the typical student has learned the basics. And when asked if graduates have the skills to succeed in the workplace or the college classroom, 52% of college professors and 68% of employers said no!4 Findings such as these are nothing new, and the policy shift in response is not new either. Each generation routinely expresses dissatisfaction with the outcomes of public education. Perhaps such dissatisfaction is even normal, and so are the policy initiatives designed to overcome it. Assessment-driven reform is not new idea either. Examples of this policy approach can be traced back to the origins of public education. In an article on the historical and policy foundations of assessment, George Madaus and Laura O'Dwyer recount how in 1845 Horace Mann and his confidant Samuel Gridley Howe recognized that school-by-school test results would give them political leverage over recalcitrant headmasters.5 Today we see the same policy strategies being employed for very similar reasons. The underlying assumptions that drive the current standards-and-assessment-driven reform movement are familiar and disturbing. Some of these assumptions are: * that students are unmotivated and need more immediate consequences tied to their learning; * that teachers are either inadequately skilled or lack the motivation to inspire students to higher levels of learning; * that local communities, school board members, and superintendents don't know what their students should be learning or to what degree they should be learning it; and * that accountability through testing will pressure the system to improve. …