The December 19 edition of Education Week published an interesting article regarding the U.S. Department of Education’s recent policy shift towards allowing schools to be sanctioned or rewarded based on student’s academic growth. The article states that this policy change enjoys strong support from researchers, policymakers and educators as the accountability debate for the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) continues to fester.
This measure of accountability, called the growth model, is a stark contrast to the current policy, called the status model, which judges schools based on the number of students deemed proficient in a specific subject area. Critics of the status model argue that the model overlooks students who are demonstrating growth towards proficiency and occasionally failing to penalize high-achieving schools where significant numbers of students are not proficient. Additionally, accountability decisions are based off a comparison of test scores of a group of student compared to the previous year, a metric that is open to sampling bias. As a result, the growth model is gaining support among policymakers, educators and researchers because it tracks the academic progress of individual students over time. Growth model supporters argue that its “value-added” measurement of academic progress is a more accurate measure of whether schools are helping its students.
However, while the U.S. Department of Education recently announced it would approve all growth models that met the criteria for a 2-year pilot project while gaining widespread support among education professionals, implementation of these growth models exposes a number of significant concerns, including the following items.
1. To be able to implement the growth model, states must have data systems in place that are able to track individual students’ progress via test scores over time. Specifically, data systems need three items to implement the growth model: a unique student ID number, assurance that proficiency levels are consistent across grade levels and information why certain students were not assessed. Currently, only 34 states (including Minnesota) have data systems that have those items to track every student. It may take states several years to develop data systems able to collect this data adequately to implement growth models.
2. For these growth models to achieve the NCLB mandated goal of universal proficiency by the end of the 2013-2014 school year, experts believe that many schools will need large rates of annual growth to meet that goal. Under the NCLB, schools need to demonstrate progress towards achieving the proficiency mandate each year for all students.
3. While growth models may show the significant gains for individual students in schools with low achievement levels, designing growth models for high achieving schools presents significant challenges. These schools generally fare better under the status model since a high proportion of students are deemed proficient according to the mandated benchmarks. However, under the growth model, high-achieving schools will likely have low rates of academic growth. Education experts disagree on how to address this issue.
While the NCLB reauthorization continues beyond its original due date in 2007, accountability measures are here to stay. In my opinion, the introduction of growth models in education presents challenges and opportunities that evaluators should explore. Some areas to explore include the effects of these measures on minority and disadvantaged students, the effects in different regions and the specific elements of education programs where large rates of academic growth has occurred.
Do you have any reactions to what’s going on with accountability in education?
