Broader, Bolder and better
As I wrote in today’s Education Gadfly, this new policy paper by the Broader Bolder coalition on school accountability is “eminently sensible.”
That’s a big surprise, for in the past this coalition has appeared eager to refight old battles about whether schools can be expected to help poor kids reach high standards. Now, however, it’s arguing for a broader look at school success–what might be termed “test scores-plus.” They would keep test-based accountability, tweaked in various ways (with progress-over-time measures, better assessments, a more robust NAEP, etc.) and supplement it with school inspectors. These inspectors would guard against lousy practices, such as “an undue emphasis on test preparation,” and catch schools engaged in good ones, like “a collegial professional culture in which teachers and administrators use all available data in a collaborative fashion to continuously improve the work of the school.”
I don’t know; this sounds reasonable to me. What am I missing?
Related posts:
- Chicago’s anti-violence initiative and a return to the Broader, Bolder debate
- Kidding ourselves
- Great Education Debate: A ‘Broader/Bolder’ Education Reform Strategy
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June 25th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
The only problem with the inspectors is there inspections are not unannounced. Meaning the schools know when the inspector is coming and have time to present a false front. In order for the inspectors to be most impactful the inspections cannot be announced.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
[...] The Broader, Bolder group offers an alternative accountability approach. (Via Flypaper.) [...]
June 26th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Platform appears to have ‘don’t offend anyone’ as design principle. It’s void of strong accountability and silent on choice.
The British Inspectorate makes more sense in a governance structure with a stripped down LEA. It would make sense in the policy environment envisioned by Hill or Tucker (i.e., all charter).
A light weight online NAEP supplemented by state approved district/rnetwork/coalition assessment systems would give groups of schools to innovate.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Yesterday, we interviewed BBA member Chris Cross about the accountability recommendations: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/christopher-cross-describes-broader-bolder-approach-accountability.
Today, we’ll publish an interview with Diane Ravitch about the same subject.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:56 am
In reading the interview with Chris Cross, there doesn’t seem to be any cost control or even a cost accountability component to the BBA inspection plan. If anything, this has some of the earmarks as a being the “justification” mechanism for pouring yet more money into the public education system without any evaluation on how the money already pouring in is being spent. I envision poor inspection reports being followed by calls for more spending as the fix.
“PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: The other question people will probably ask is, how on earth does one pay for this richer system?
CROSS: That’s not an insignificant problem, by any means. The federal government needs to be putting up some of the money. It needs to be funding some models of what inspection or accreditation systems should look like. Then it needs to be working with states to support [their development].”
I have an idea. Let’s fund it by “squeezing the excess out of the system.” That seems to be the catch phrase of the day.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Provide for the inspection of districts and schools to ensure their contributions to satisfactory student performance in academic subject areas, as well as in the arts, citizenship, physical fitness and mental and physical health, work and other behavioral skills that will enable them to achieve success in a pluralistic society and complex global economy.
So who trains the K-12 citizenship inspectors? Ed schools? Speaking of institutions in need of an accreditation fix…
June 26th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Eric,
If I didn’t know better, I’d have guessed that your quote was straight from some Soviet or former Eastern Block country education handbook.
So now they are also defining “success” and the right “behavior skills”. I guess we should expect a monolithic system to produce monotonous results. Scary days ahead.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Here in Ohio, we already have people charged with similar (although less intrusive, bureaucratic, and monolithic) responsibilities. We call them school board members. We elect them. They are required to meet in public. They have two direct employees: a district superintendent and a district treasurer.
Our school boards are even charged to “ensure that the principles of democracy and ethics are emphasized and discussed wherever appropriate in all parts of the curriculum for grades kindergarten through twelve.
One wonders why friends of Bill Ayers waited for President Obama’s administration to offer help…
June 26th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I believe that they specify that the Feds will train the inspectors. Sounds like a really huge workforce to me.
Be that as it may–and I am not opposed to inspection. It was one of the things in Strickland’s dream back in January that was appealing. Without someone regularly setting foot in a building to do a reality check on the documentation…well..let’s just say, documentation ain’t always reality. But, there were a few other flag raisers for me. One is the dogged insistence that all state tests are of poor quality, not to be trusted for accountability purposes. Not sure that has been introduced into evidence. Another was the pumping up of NAEP for accountability purposes. Until I read further, I almost thought that the intent was to have NAEP replace state tests. In other words, report only at the state level. There was also the throw-away about current levels of federal “micro-management” in education. There are those who would say that a great weakness of NCLB is that it left too much to the states (who then left too much to the districts). And then things got really muddy when accountability reporting was discussed. The “form” of reporting should be left to the states, although a “default” federal model could be provided which would disaggregate by SES, ethnicity, etc. An alternate suggested was to report by quartiles, with an expectation of growth in each, although not necessarily of equal magnitude. Then it got really interesting. Throw out the proficiency demarcation–which may accurately encourage uneven focus on the kids closest to the mark. OK, still with me? Next it sounded perilously close to recommending various acceptable scores for various kids. Any guesses about who might lose out on that one?
There are some eminently respectable people who have signed on to the BBA. I wouldn’t for the world question their intelligence. But I remain mistrustful. If you think that performance standards are all over the place now–when they only consist of declaring a cut score on a single test (which can be compared state to state via NAEP), imagine what we will have when we begin to interject fifty sets of demographic reporting schemes, multiple performance standards across a single state and some yet to be defined “qualitative” indicators laid out in fifty different ways.