Opportunity to Learn and the Accountability Agenda

Abstract

When failure to a test can result in retention, mandatory remediation, or the denial of a diploma, making sure that all students have had a real opportunity to learn the material tested and to demonstrate their learning becomes paramount, Mr. Starratt argues. THE ISSUE of opportunity to learn (OTL) is most often debated from a policy perspective, namely, how to balance federal and state demands for accountability with policies ensuring that students have an opportunity to learn.1 If all students are to be held to the same standards, the argument runs, then they must have equal access to high- quality instruction. More specifically, all students should be able to attend schools that provide high-quality course offerings, instructional materials, and technologies; strong professional development opportunities for teachers; safe and secure school facilities; active nondiscrimination policies; and teaching that is both aligned with state standards and targeted toward higher-order thinking rather than memorization. Another way to address OTL is to focus on the current environment of high-stakes testing. Questions have been raised about flaws in assessment technology and how they affect conclusions drawn from the tests, about the distortions involved in reporting aggregated scores, and about the negative effects of high-stakes tests on various student populations. Although often implied, questions regarding the ethics of high-stakes accountability systems and their effects on students and teachers are seldom raised explicitly in the research on OTL. In this article, I want to demonstrate that imposing such accountability systems without fully addressing the issue of OTL is a violation of social justice. One critical moral issue related to the high-stakes testing systems currently operating in many states -- in which failure to a test can result in retention, mandatory remediation, or denial of a diploma -- is whether all students have the opportunity to learn the material on which they are being tested. My argument is not with testing, nor indeed with any particular form of state tests. Rather, my argument is with states that require students to tests or face high-stakes consequences (and the public humiliation and shame that accompany such consequences) but fail to provide adequate opportunities to learn. I would argue that such an accountability system is a form of victimization. INJUSTICE AT THE GROUND LEVEL While deliberations at the policy level can be conducted relatively dispassionately, in the classroom one can witness injustice firsthand. As an extreme example, suppose a class of 25 ninth-graders were exposed to one minute of instruction on how to solve quadratic equations. After one minute of instruction, they were given a test to solve 10 quadratic equations. Of the 25 students, two solved seven equations, thereby passing the test. These two students were the children of engineers, and their abilities had been enriched by exposure to mathematical games and puzzles in the home. Of the remaining 23 students, two solved two of the quadratic equations, indicating that they had learned some of the material (or had guessed their way into a correct solution) but had not become sufficiently proficient to pass the test. When asked why they didn't solve the other quadratic equations, they said that they ran out of time. The remaining 21 students failed to solve any of the quadratic equations. Given these test results, it is clear that most teachers and parents would say that it is unreasonable to expect one minute of instruction to provide a legitimate opportunity to learn how to solve quadratic equations. They would say that more instructional time and more time to practice solving quadratic equations would constitute a more reasonable opportunity to learn. In addition to questioning the educational inputs the students received prior to testing, the teachers and parents might ask about the length of time allotted for the test. …