Why We Need a New Accountability: “Our Competitiveness Will Be Based on Our Creativity”
After asking a packed ballroom to build a duck with a handful of Legos, Stephan Turnipseed surveyed the room: “We’ve established that none of you will have a duck that looks exactly like my duck, so therefore you have all failed.”
This harsh message, the president emeritus of LEGO Education North America argued, is what an education culture centered on high-stakes assessment tells students. LEGO, and other leading companies, see the result. Creativity is one of the key traits they seek in new employees, but they have trouble finding U.S. candidates who fit the bill. Turnipseed warned: “Our competitiveness will be based on our creativity….If we cannot find the creative people we need, [industry] will go where they are,” whether in the U.S. or not.
Turnipseed noted industry was not blame-free. The Total Quality Management movement that originated in the manufacturing sector in the late 1980’s prioritized testing and quantitative analysis. Since, companies have sometimes applied this approach too harshly to their human capital.
He closed his speech with the story of the woman sitting next to him on the flight to the SCOPE-organized Rethinking Accountability conference in Washington, D.C. Lacy is a 17-year-old woman from Alabama who is on a delayed enlistment in the Army. After completing basic training, she’ll return to high school for her senior year. Asked about her greatest fear as she contemplates a military career, Lacy replied, “My greatest fear is returning to take my exit exams.”
SCOPE Faculty Director Linda Darling Hammond, in opening remarks to attendees of the daylong conference, framed the conference speeches and panels as explorations of new accountability systems organized around an “accountability triangle” of meaningful learning, professional capacity, and resource adequacy.
Turnipseed’s remarks were bookended by speeches from Rep. Raul Grijlava (D-AZ) and Zakiyah Ansari, Advocacy Director for the New York State Alliance for Quality Education.
Grijalva argued for “accountability tempered with flexibility”: a system that takes a broader view what data is meaningful in evaluating schools and districts, and the steps that will actually support school improvement, given local conditions.
He summarized the ESEA reauthorization debate in the House — “tepid at best” — as Democrats fighting to defend the remaining positive elements of the No Child Left Behind Act, rather than the parties deciding together on a strategy that would yield long-term improvements in public education. Similarly, he said, new federal education funding has gone to competitive programs, ignoring the need to build a solid resource base and capacity for sustaining improvements.
Ansari issued a passionate plea to involve more students and parents in decision making processes related to education. She challenged the notion that accountability has ever been present in poor and minority communities, arguing that leaders have never held themselves accountable to the needs and desires of members of those communities. As a result, “school deserts” are now emerging in cities across the country. A first step toward new accountability, Ansari argued, is for advocates to turn a mirror on themselves, assessing what they and their communities need and want, and deciding together how to press for this shared vision of the future.
Encouraging Meaningful Learning through Accountability
Opening a panel discussion on accountability for meaningful student learning, Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA) outlined a number of strategies for ensuring all students graduate high school ready for college and career: Alignment of high school exit exams with the demands of credit-bearing college work, encouraging more high schoolers to enroll concurrently in college courses, and creating means of capturing Pell Grant and other financial-aid funding to support high schoolers who seek to take college courses early.
Paul Leather, New Hampshire deputy state superintendent, followed, discussing his state’s bold gambit: “We’ve bet the farm on performance assessment.” All students in the Granite State now take locally developed, competency-based performance assessments. These tests provide rich feedback to students and teachers on the progress of learning and teaching, supporting continuous improvement. In fact, Leather recommend that states move away from every-year, every-grade tests for school-accountability purposes, suggesting testing students only every few years.
Gemma Venuti recently completed the New York State performance assessment process, an alternative to the state’s Regents Exams—a process that was meaniful and enriched her learning. For example, to demonstrate her science proficiency, Venuti studied the effects of stress on memory. She conducted experiments, reviewed the scientific literature on her topic, interviewed experts, and presented her findings.
Dallas Dance, superintendent of Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS), outlined a “vital, but limited” role for the federal government: to hold states accountable to their plans for uses of federal funds, while giving them room to respond to state-specific concerns. BCPS is part of the Large Countywide and Suburban District Consortium, which is advocating accountability systems that emphasize alignment of state, district, and community partners, backed by high-quality assessment and federal “guard rails” for chronically low performing schools and districts. See the consortium paper, “21st Century Education Accountability: Recommendations for a New Federal Framework,” at this link.
Barbara Chow, director of the education program at the Hewlett Foundation, which advocates for attention to problem solving, collaboration, and creativity in education (called deeper learning by the foundation), moderated the panel.
Building Professional Capacity
Leading off a second panel, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, discussed the original intention of teacher-evaluation systems, and the context in which such systems are now being implemented today. Evaluation systems, he said, should have a goal of providing opportunities for teachers to grow as professionals, rather than to find bad teachers. Instead, these systems are often implemented in a heavy-handed, punitive way in a system in which many teachers are unlicensed to teach, or are teaching out of field — contexts which simply do not exist in nations with leading education systems.
With more than 100 districts still under desegregation orders, the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) has its work cut out for it. Leticia Smith-Evans, who leads the education practice at LDF, described the organization’s process of monitoring these desegregation orders, going line-by-line through personnel plans to evaluate hiring and placement decisions in light of equitable distribution of teaching talent. Sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, LDF attorneys still find many Title I school districts that choose to spend disproportionately on schools in wealthier ZIP codes. For Smith-Evans, this is largely a product of working within a system that “was never designed to serve all children.” It is in this context that she evaluates comparisons to other nations’ education systems: “Unless you mention South Africa to me, there’s no place that you can compare the history of where we’ve been and where we are today.”
Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, recently told Marc Tucker, president of the National Center for Education and the Economy, that he can see “no improvement in student performance, for the country as a whole or the groups of vulnerable students for which it was intended” as a result of NCLB. But, to Tucker, this isn’t surprising. No high-performing nation’s education system has anything like NCLB. These countries considered NCLB-like approaches and rejected them. In fact, our system produces the outcomes it was designed to produce: basic literacy instruction, delivered by minimally prepared teachers. It’s “pointless to chase the blame,” Tucker said, arguing forcefully that politicians must avoid seeking solutions that will pan out during their immediate term in office. He urged a long-term shift away from a “blue-collar mindset” that treats teachers as line workers who perform a task to specification or are fired, and toward one in which teaching is a selective profession filled with autonomous practitioners who hold themselves to a high standard.
Ormond Beach (FL) teacher Sarah Rebecca (“Becky”) Pittard is a National Board Certified Teacher and winner of a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. She brought a hopeful tone to the session, calling for the “depression about American education to fade.” She’s seen an increasing openness to the teacher voice in policy conversations and wants her teaching to be assessed, provided evaluations yield productive feedback. She has one clear “ask” for all policymakers, though: “we need time to think, to prepare, to collaborate.”
Retooling for 21st Century Aspirations
"Six decades after Brown [the Supreme Court desegregation ruling], millions of black and brown young people have been offered a school system that is separate and inadequate to meet the needs of the 21st century," said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund. Henderson blasted school districts for placing the most inexperienced teachers in the neediest schools, and protested the low percentage of minority students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
"We must examine what systemic changes are necessary to ensure that STEM learning is engaging and equally accessible so that all our children have the tools to adequately prepare" for good jobs in these fields. Henderson also called the Common Core State Standards "the single most significant change to our education system" since desegregation. "The Common Core, if implemented properly and cautiously, can start us on a path of truly meeting the promise of Brown.
“The era of pick-and-shovel jobs is long gone,” Henderson declared. Instead, advanced coursework in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is needed to secure a middle-class life in the 21st century. Yet only about 3 percent of African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans earn postsecondary degrees in the natural sciences or engineering by age 24. This could be due to the fact that one-quarter of high schools serving high concentrations of black and Latino students don’t offer Algebra II. One-third of similar schools don’t offer chemistry. The cities with these schools are “preparing for failure.”
Henderson described recent setbacks, such as the recently issued Vergara v. California teacher-tenure court decision in California and an ongoing battle to force Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas to comply with a state court order to create a more equitable education-finance system. But he also recalled an uplifting conversation he’d had recently with a Comcast executive in Philadelphia, where the company is building a new tower to house 2,000 highly paid employees. While few of those employees will come from Philadelphia public schools, the executive feels invested in finding ways for business to improve local public schools.
Henderson was introduced by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who praised his reputation, forged over decades, as a tenacious advocate and negotiator. She also noted the similarity of the missions of the Leadership Conference and AFT and the interconnection of all issues related to civil rights: education, immigration, poverty, desegratation, and civil liberties.
Resources that Set the Stage for Success
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), in prepared remarks to the conference, urged a move "toward equity and excellence, and I would argue you can't have one without the other." He described legislation he was preparing to introduce —S. 2557, the Core Opportunity Resources for Equity and Excellence Act, which would set expectations for the conditions of education in school districts that receive federal funding. He offered Title IX as an example of effective accountability that goes beyond superficial measurements: Schools that have the same number of athletic teams for males and females, but do not provide resources equitably to the teams, are not in compliance with the law.
John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, began a panel discussion that followed Sen. Reed’s remarks with a provocative question: Should schools “own” the responsibility for dealing with the side-effects of poverty? If schools are to live up to this demand, which has been implicit for decades, what wrap-around services and resources would it take to truly equip them for this job? Surely, he said, “Common Core standards demand Common Core supports.” Unfortunately, most states don’t have the capacity to implement support systems, or even accountability systems, with fidelity. He ended with an exhortation to agitate, going so far as to say that advocacy organizations should have a “bail money” line item in their budgets.
Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, followed, arguing that “equal is not equitable” and that policymakers need to own up to the fact that some students need significantly more support than others. Here, he drew a comparison to the civil-rights movement, in which a federal role was essential in ensuring that states and localities did the hard work of integration. “Devolving [authority] has not worked” over time, Saenz said, and he sees as a new challenge the fact that most growth of English learner populations is happening in areas where policymakers have little experience with immigrant populations and feel little political pressure to serve them well.
Deputy California state superintendent Richard Zeiger picked up the theme of equity, noting that while his state has embraced educational equity as a state responsibility, there are over 1,000 districts in California and each will implement the state’s new, more progressive funding formula differently. (See an overview of the Local Control Funding Formula at this link.) The “leap of faith” is that districts will get additional resources to the students who need them. Still, these are promising developments, the environment for which was created in a surprising way, by the failure of California to secure a waiver from the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Zeiger recalled a conversation with panel moderator Carmel Martin, executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and formerly an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, in which it became clear that his office and federal agency were not going to see eye-to-eye. It was “a blessing,” though, to not get the waiver, because it freed up California to experiment.
John Affeldt, a civil-right litigator with Public Advocates in California, emphasized differences in implementation among California districts and the question of whether additional supports will actually reach needy students. He said that there are still a lot of holes in California new financing structure: California is only on pace to return to 2007-2008 funding levels in eight years, districts will have “an awful lot of discretion” in where to put resources, and it remains to be seen exactly what interventions will be applied and how to schools that are failing.
Next Steps Toward New Accountability
Linda Darling-Hammond returned to the stage to moderate the final panel for the day. Richard Carranza, superintendent of San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), got right to the point: “My biggest issue is that we’re working within a system that has historically been set up to disadvantage certain students.” In SFUSD, black students are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with a behavior disorder as white students, and 10 times less likely to take an AP class. Therefore, “we’re not interested in system improvement, we’re interested in system change.” SFUSD is one of the California CORE Districts, a group of 10 school districts that have a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education, and is piloting a new accountability system in which 40 percent of a school’s score is determined by measures of socioemotional learning and school climate. Another innovative element is a school pairing activity, in which leaders from successful and struggling, but demographically similar schools, work together to learn from and support each other.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, discussed why she had called for a moratorium on implementation of accountability systems tied to the Common Core a year ago. Parents and teachers, she argued, needed time to “roll up their sleeves” and figure out how to make standards work, so it was important to delink testing from the new standards. “I love the work that CORE has done,” she said, because the system attempts to pull in all data relevant to student progress and success, not just reading and math. In fact, AFT leadership is planning to present an accountability paradigm modeled around the “accountability triangle” of meaningful learning, professional capacity, and resource accountability at its annual convention this year.
Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, noted that his organization has for 10 years been identifying gaps between what state standards call for and what’s required to succeed in postsecondary education and high-paying jobs. The business leaders he works with, he said, are worried to see “more conflict and less progress” in K-12 education, and are very focused on ensuring the Common Core is implemented with fidelity.
Phillip Lovell, a vice president at the Alliance for Excellent Education, finished the panel by highlighting the economic case for high expectations: The percentage of jobs requiring some postsecondary education has doubled in 40 years and in the “next few years” two-thirds of jobs will require some postsecondary education. Currently, the United States is about 3 million workers short of demand for high- and middle-skill jobs. He quoted Bob Wise, president of the Alliance, who says, “if the Bible isn’t a good enough reason, the billfold ought to be.” Lovell sees progress, though: more state waivers are incorporating deeper learning and 21st century skills, and the Senate’s ESEA reauthorization bill would incorporate deeper learning into language describing the purposes of Title I funding.
