Beyond Standardization in School Accountability

Abstract

Any system of educational accountability in the United States should be guided by two essential, and equally important, aims. First, it should be informative: It should allow the public to know the status and progress of students ’ knowledge, skills, and understanding within and across schools. Second, the system should be cognitively constructive: It should advance all students ’ learning and enable educators to improve instruction (see Fredericksen & Collins, 1989). Neither of these aims is being met under the No Child Left Behind Act, as Part I of this paper explains. Part II uses the groundwork of informative and cognitively constructive aims to eliminate ambiguities in the meaning of multiple measures. Such ambiguities have impeded substantive uses of multiple indicators. Part III describes the components of a system of multiple measures. This system would not be simple or easy to build, but it stands a far greater chance of producing genuine benefits across a wide range of students than a system based on a single high-stakes test. Part IV provides some policy recommendations that may be useful in revising NCLB, so that it can begin to address informative and cognitively constructive aims.

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