Test-Based Accountability Proponents On Defensive After Atlanta Scandal

As acknowledged by Fordham Foundation's Mike Petrilli in the Daily News:

For those of us who support academic standards, testing and accountability as strategies to improve public education, the Atlanta cheating indictments are sobering. Here was a system where dozens of employees, over the course of almost a decade, racketeered to rig results (or so it is alleged).

And while one can hope that Atlanta was an outlier in terms of the scope and longevity of its cheating conspiracy, it’s hardly an isolated case, as examples from El Paso, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other locales demonstrate.

As expected, test critics are having a field day, using Atlanta as evidence of why all this must go. They yearn to throw the accountability baby out with the testing bathwater. But they’re wrong. The better approach is to “mend it, not end it.”

Petrilli goes on to write that without test-based accountability, public schools would look like this:

The result: In our most affluent communities, little would change. Schools would continue to drive toward the real-world standard of college acceptance at elite universities, via Advanced Placement exams and high SAT scores.

At schools serving both rich and poor kids, we would probably see a return to the 1990s, when achievement gaps were overlooked, wealthy students were guided toward rigorous coursework and “college readiness,” while poorer pupils were shepherded into easier classes with less challenge and weaker teachers.

And in high-poverty schools — the main target of 20 years of reform, and the primary drivers of America’s improved student achievement since the 1990s — a few might keep pushing students toward college and good jobs, but many would return to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and be satisfied with getting their students to graduation day, whether or not they learned much along the way.

Petrilli says he can't prove this would happen, but says "the burden rests on those who want to eliminate testing and accountability to provide assurance that the system won’t revert back to its bad old ways."

Actually the burden rests on test-based accountability proponents like Mike Petrilli to show us how the current test-based accountability reforms have helped students in high-poverty schools.

With the test score gains in Atlanta now proven to be fraudulent, with the test score gains in D.C. certainly suspect (and probably at least in part fraudulent, as evidenced USA Today and Frontline investigations), with test score gains in NYC erased after the Regents/NYSED ended the score inflation, with 80% of students coming out of the NYC school system needing remediation classes when they go to CUNY, where exactly have high-poverty schools in this time of test-based accountability improved in getting students "college and career-ready"?

Petrilli is trying to put the burden of proof on the critics of the high stakes test-based accountability system without ever showing how the current reforms have helped students in high poverty schools.

Narrowed curriculum, endless test drills, arts and music and physical education replaced by test prep, a generation of students who cannot think critically because they have been taught how to respond by rote to the battery of standardized tests they have to take throughout their school careers - these have not helped students in high poverty schools.

And unfortunately this is the legacy of the high stakes test-based accountability era.

Petrilli makes some suggestions for change to the current testing system, including lowering the stakes on some.

But in an era of APPR, VAM, Danielson and turnarounds used as a bludgeon against teachers and schools, it's hard to see how any of these come to pass.

Testing is being used as a weapon by the education corporatists and Freidmanites to bring about the end to public schooling.

That is not going to change because of Atlanta or some suggestions either Mike Petrilli makes in the paper.

As a reader wrote yesterday on this post:

The curriculum, teaching and learning is not relevant. It is all about the test being used to control outcomes: closing schools and firing teachers.

 That is exactly right.