Skills Management Systems: A Critique.

Abstract

THE NOTION of accountability in education seems to be gaining more and more popularity. As more states pass accountability laws and conduct statewide assessments of reading achievement, and as the fed eral funding programs begin to de mand achievement growth as a con tingency for refunding, one cannot help but conclude that accountability is here to stay. The question that naturally arises is, What is it that teachers of schools ought to be held accountable for? Because of our educational sys tem's penchant for testing and as sessment, it is likely that some form of assessment will provide the data base for future accountability schemes. Given this constraint and the focus of this paper, the question of accountability in reading becomes, Does a skills management system provide an accountability scheme that is preferable to some alternative scheme, for example, a standardized reading test or an index of the num ber of volumes checked out of school or community libraries? The answer to that question can best be achieved by analyzing the na ture and underlying assumptions of a skills management system for read ing instruction. That analysis can then be compared with one's own conception of the nature and goals of reading instruction in order to eval uate the utility of a skills manage ment system (SMS) as an instrument of accountability. The commercially available sys tems and the locally developed sys tems with which we are familiar share these components: 1) a sequen tially ordered set of behavioral objec tives for the various reading skills monitored by the system, 2) a set of subtests (or a set of test items) with

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