If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.
-Yogi Berra

Education historian, Sherman Dorn has a new book, Accountability Frankenstein, in which he explores the roots of test-based school accountability. Listen to the preface here (mp3). He compares the testing movement to Frankenstein’s monster, calling it “an obscene marriage of technocracy and democracy.” Despite shortcomings of the current US education accountability framework, Dorn says that he doesn’t see the standards or the goals of accountability as evil. I want to expand on that, and think about what’s worth salvaging in schools as the institution seems to be floundering.

We need Standards
Dorn said that in the current debate about education standards, each side has become entrenched in their position, seeing the other as either villains or fools. He believes that accountability is a legitimate expectation for teachers, but that the current method for gauging it is seriously out of order. Since I’ve been critical of what I call the “standards movement,” I want to clarify my point of view and step away from the ‘fool’ or ‘villian’ labels if I can. Like Sherman Dorn, I don’t see the standards as bad. We need standards.

Standards, whether they’re for education, residential housing, bridges, food, laws, attire, deportment, or anything else I can think of are an expression of values. Aesthetics, usefulness, durability, comfort, and any number of other criteria are considered when making a determination of quality. Standards, like everything else, are created by people, for a purpose. And they differ according to what and who they’re for.

A crew of steamfitters I worked with one summer used to stand back and look at their work, eyeing the flaws, and say, “We ain’t buildin’ Swiss watches. It’s good enough for who it’s for.” I learned a lot from those guys. But that kind of talk doesn’t fly in the front office.

In education, content standards are used as design principles for curriculum development. Performance standards are for lesson planning and evaluation. Education standards aren’t handed down on stone tablets. In my state they’re the result of long and sometimes contentious negotiations, mostly among teachers who met repeatedly over the course many months to decide what skills and knowledge students should have when they graduate. To my knowledge, each US state followed a similar procedure.

There’s talk of unevenness among the states’ standards, and suggestions are being made for national standards. This would be a case of standardizing the standards. And standardization is a problem for anyone with special needs.

The problem with the US standards movement is that quality control mechanisms have run amok, resulting in a reductive effort to quantify quality. This is a consequence of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law that requires annual standardized testing, and an escalating series of sanctions for schools that don’t meet benchmark guidelines aimed at 100% proficiency by the year 2014. I’m not going to recount the abuses. Instead, I want to address the contradiction that standardization of tests and outcomes has introduced to the goal of quality assurance.

Standards v. Standardization
My idea on this is attributable to an article by Paul Murphy on ZDnet, a technology/business site. I have no idea whether Paul Murphy is out to lunch on this matter because I know nothing about the technology business. But the point he made about the difference between standards and standardization got me thinking about how it might apply to US school reform. Murphy’s thesis is that standards offer advantages to consumers, while standardization advantages sellers.

Recognizing that I’m applying a business metaphor, and it may have some holes, I figure that “consumers,” clearly, are families and students who look to the school to provide a service. But then, who would the “sellers” be? School-level personnel don’t qualify because teachers aren’t advantaged by standardized tests unless you believe that they’re useful to them somehow. And nobody I know inside the school system thinks they are. Maybe a few, somewhere, do believe that. But I haven’t met them. Teachers don’t develop standardized tests. We don’t know what’s on them. We aren’t even allowed to look at them. And all we get from them is a number score for each of several subtests. We wait until the end of the year to find out how everyone did. We’re flying blind, and then we climb out of the plane to see where we landed. No advantage to teachers that I can see.

The advantage, clearly, is gained by upper level administration. At the state level, they get to design, administer, and score the tests all in one easy motion. The local districts get easy-to-process numbers fed back to them, making policy decisions simple and matter of fact. Sanctions are spelled out, and all that’s left to do is manage a few contracts and some federal grant money. Contractors and bureaucrats win. Politicians look good because they did something. No need to be concerned with the messy details of what kids are actually doing. They either succeed or fail, and that’s all anyone outside the classroom cares to know. The school is the product. Standardization requires a trade-off between adaptability, and cost and efficiency. That’s a mistake, because adaptability is an essential attribute for anything to remain viable in a complex system such as a classroom.

A better way to ensure accountability is described in this audio recording of a panel discussion last week featuring Sherman Dorn and Doug Christensen, Nebraska’s Commissioner of Education. This is a worthwhile link to save! I’m sending it to my state legislators.

Nebraska developed a performance-based, standards-based, teacher-developed formative evaluation system that both guides and accounts for instructional outcomes. I’d heard of it, but never had any of the details on how it works. Christensen argued that with formative performance-based assessements, reviewed by an outside agency (because you don’t get to judge yourself) a standardized end-of-year summative assessment is redundant. He says they’ve benchmarked their assessments, and Nebraska’s schools compare favorably with those elsewhere.

It sounds like a workable alternative to the top-down model that burdens schools now. At the very least it could serve as a model for others who want to develop something similar. While it might be more challenging to operate, it would also encourage the conscientious attention of teachers to their students’ performance relative to the standards, throughout the year and not at the end, after it’s too late.

I agree that accountability is a legitimate and necessary expectation for teachers. Standardization of the accountablity mechanism, though, serves only the needs of the bureaucracy. Standards give us a goal to head for. A good assessment system would let us know if we’re getting there, and what to do if we need to make an adjustment.