Standards-based Accountability Research Articles

Obfuscating systemic racism: A critical policy discourse analysis on the operation of neoliberal ideas in media representation of a school district state takeover

Education reform in the United States has unwisely focused attention on standards and accountability to the state as determined by standardized testing (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Mehta, 2013). Stemming from the emphasis on standards-based accountability are the ideas of rapid school turnaround and the state’s role in this process (Peck & Reitzug, 2014; VanGronigen & Meyers, 2019). The current study employed critical policy discourse analysis to examine the media’s portrayal of the 2019 determination to continue or terminate state control of the Little Rock School District. The analysis highlights two argumentative frames—one that emphasized neoliberal values in support of continued state control of the district and another that focused on systemic racism as the basis for advocating for local control of the district. These frames, along with their implications for future actions within the educational policy making process, guide the discussion. Our findings suggest sustained community and media participation is needed to bring attention to education policy issues while underscoring the importance of taking a critical stance to assess media coverage.

“Are You Saying That We’re Racist?”: Comparing Normative, Political, and Technical Dimensions of Instructional and Disciplinary Policies

Background: In recent years, school districts have experienced a complex policy environment with myriad reforms aimed at addressing longstanding and historically entrenched disparities in opportunities and outcomes between racially minoritized students and White students. One such reform is standards-based accountability, with its emphasis on documenting and addressing racial disparities in testing outcomes. Recently, educators and lawmakers have sought to address persistent racial disproportionality in disciplinary actions. New behavioral policies may be seen as a response to national attention and outrage regarding the “school-to-prison pipeline,” which indicates that school discipline practices contribute to the over-representation of Black men in the criminal justice system. In recent years, local leaders have been tasked with implementing new disciplinary reforms alongside their ongoing efforts at instructional improvement. Purpose: As districts face an increasingly complex policy environment and constrained resources, researchers must understand how district leaders make sense of and manage the varied policies they are tasked with implementing. This study contributes to the knowledge base on K–12 policy implementation by examining how school district leaders manage multiple policies—particularly when some new practices engage beliefs around racial discrimination or structural racism. We contribute to the gap in the literature by asking: What differences emerged in the early implementation processes of an instructional policy and a discipline policy in the Elmwood school district, and what might explain those differences? Research Design: To answer this question, we employ a comparative, embedded case study design and examine extensive qualitative data from a single school district. Oakes’s (1992) framework of technical, normative, and political dimensions of policy change guided the analysis and was applied to rich interview data. Conclusions: Overall, our findings highlight significant differences in how Elmwood leadership implemented the two policies. Our study indicates that though both instructional and disciplinary reforms purport to address racial outcome gaps, district leaders may view discipline in a racialized way that they do not view instructional policy. The perceived racialized nature of discipline policy may significantly influence implementation practices. Ultimately, the data suggests that racialized normative beliefs and values, along with political and technical investments, greatly influence the implementation process and raise larger questions about the role of racism in education reform.

Variation in Student Achievement: Effects of NCLB on Standards-based Accountability in Arizona

Over the years, the United States government has assumed a larger role in educational policy. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is one of the most notable examples of an increase in federal involvement in education. Through the creation of accountability systems, NCLB required states to test in reading and mathematics. Prior research has maintained that states with pre-existing test-based accountability remained relatively unchanged by the passage of the Act. States without test-based accountability measures pre-NCLB may have been more likely to be affected by its implementation (e.g., Arizona). In order to test this claim, I examined student achievement in Arizona pre-, during, and post-NCLB under AZ LEARNS and the A-F Accountability System over certain years (1996, 2000, 2005, 2009, and 2015). Through the use of data from the Nation’s Report Card and the Arizona Department of Education, I sought to answer two key questions: (1) How do Arizona’s achievement scores pre-, during, and post-NCLB compare to other accountability types? and (2) In what way do Arizona school ratings vary during and after NCLB? By conducting a series of independent sample t-tests, I compared Arizona’s state scale scores to states with moderate accountability, and I compared school ratings under the accountability systems. These analyses reject the null hypothesis that there is no significant difference associated with school ratings under the two accountability systems, therefore supporting the prior stated claim. The results offer insight into Arizona’s accountability and are valuable for future evidence-based policymaking.

Policy Dialogue: Twenty Years of Test-Based Accountability

AbstractSince No Child Left Behind was signed into law, test-based accountability has become a core feature of the K-12 public education system in the United States. The approach, it would seem, is here to stay. Yet that is not to say that anything resembling a consensus has emerged. Over the past twenty years, critics have continued to raise questions about the theory of change underlying test-based accountability, and scholars have detailed a variety of unintended consequences associated with it.If test-based accountability is both likely to persist and imperfect in its design, then it is critical to consider how its shortcomings might be addressed. In service of that aim, and in keeping with the mission of this feature, this Policy Dialogue explores future possibilities by starting, first, with a look at the past. In this particular case, participants were asked to address one simple question: “What have we learned from two decades of high-stakes testing?”As regular readers of HEQ are aware, these dialogues usually feature a historian in conversation with a scholar or practitioner from the world of policy. In this case, the choice of Diane Ravitch was a natural one, particularly given the fact that she is a member of HEQ's editorial board. A research professor at New York University, she is also a former assistant US secretary of education and the author of several books about measurement and accountability.Rather than select a single interlocutor, however, the editors chose to pair her with three leaders who represent the broad range of viewpoints in the field: Denise Forte, Princess Moss, and Paul Reville. Denise Forte is the interim CEO of The Education Trust. She brings to our conversation twenty years of experience in congressional staff roles, including as the staff director for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Princess Moss is vice president of the National Education Association and cochair of the NEA's task force on measurement and accountability. In prior work with the NEA's Executive Committee, she helped develop the group's position on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—from NCLB to the Every Student Succeeds Act. Paul Reville is the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former secretary of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Nearly a decade before the passage of NCLB, he played a key role in the development of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which instituted standards-based accountability across the state.HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

Make Kindergarten “Funner”: Examining how Kindergarteners Made Sense of the Changed Kindergarten

Background/ContextOver the last two decades, policymakers’ standards-based accountability reforms in the United States have fundamentally changed public schooling in general and kindergarten specifically. As this has occurred, little has been learned about how the children themselves make sense of these changes in schooling.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThe purpose of this article is to address this issue by providing insight into how a sample of kindergarteners enrolled in a public kindergarten in Texas made sense of their experiences in kindergarten today in relation to two research questions: a) How did they make sense of their educational experiences in kindergarten?, and b) How would they like to alter kindergarten so that it reflects their understanding of schooling?Research DesignThis is an explorative qualitative, video-cued, multivocal ethnographic research study. Data were generated through focus-group interviews with 19 kindergarteners in Texas. The students were asked about how they made sense of the changed kindergarten through viewing a micro-level example of their kindergarten classroom in Texas. The video the kindergarteners watched and commented on provides a coherent narrative that captured shortened versions of each of the activities they participate in over a typical day in their classroom.Findings/ResultsThe findings shared in this article illuminate these kindergarteners’ understandings of kindergarten as well as whether or not they believed they would be able to succeed in a school system that expects them to learn more academic content and demonstrate their knowledge on an increasing number of standardized tests. These findings also provide insight into the changes these kindergarteners would like to see made to kindergarten to improve their learning experiences in school.Conclusions/RecommendationsThe kindergarteners in this study framed kindergarten as a place they go to learn academic content that they believe will allow them to progress to and through subsequent grade levels. Though they enjoyed kindergarten and had strong relationships with their teacher, they would like more opportunities for physical activity and choice throughout the day, which echo the sentiments of other early childhood education stakeholders and researchers. As these were kindergarteners enrolled in a typical public kindergarten, additional insight into these issues could be gained by seeking out the voices of children in different kindergarten programs (e.g., private, play-based, half-day, etc.) or from these same children at different points in their educational careers.

Side effects and the enactment of accountability: results of a comparative study in two German federal states

The paper proposes to study side effects of accountability in education within the theoretical framework of enactment research. The potential value of this approach for the study of side effects is shown by using the example of the side effect “Dependency on Expert Judgements.” Therefore, findings from the research project “Unintended Effects of Accountability in the School System” (acronym “Nefo”) are presented. The project entailed an analysis of policy documents to describe the accountability contexts under study, as well as a survey study with 2637 participating teachers and principals to examine the distribution of side effects in the no- and low-stakes contexts of the four German federal states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Rhineland-Palatinate. The findings for Berlin and Thuringia are triangulated with the results from a qualitative in-depth group-discussion substudy of the Nefo project on how teachers in Berlin and Thuringia deal with accountability measures. The analysis of policy documents reveals that in Berlin, performance results gain the status of objective data that teachers need to improve their work, while teachers in Thuringia are prompted to judge by themselves the meaning of performance results for their teaching. This suggests that “Dependency on Expert Judgements” is a larger issue in Berlin than in Thuringia. However, contrary to what would be expected, the findings of the survey study indicate that the side effect plays a greater role in Thuringia than in Berlin. To explain this counterintuitive finding, teachers’ responses to standards-based accountability in Berlin and Thuringia are delineated. The paper shows that the study of meaning-making processes, which is central to the enactment framework, must not only be ignored if one tries to understand the processes that lead to the occurrence or absence of side effects. It is also important to prevent fallacies in the interpretation of survey data.

Authority and Control: The Tension at the Heart of Standards-Based Accountability

In this essay, Jack Schneider and Andrew Saultz offer a new perspective on state and federal power through their analysis of authority and control. Due to limitations inherent to centralized governance, state and federal offices of education exercised little control over schools across much of the twentieth century, even as they acquired considerable authority. By the 1980s, however, such loose coupling had become politically untenable and led to the standards and accountability movement. Yet, greater exertion of control only produced a new legitimacy challenge: the charge of ineffectiveness. State and federal offices, then, are trapped in an impossible bind, in which they are unable to relinquish control without abdicating authority. Schneider and Saultz examine how state and federal offices have managed this dilemma through ceremonial reform, looking at two high-profile examples: the transition from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, and states’ reaction to public criticism of the Common Core State Standards.

“Where’s the Joy in the Classroom?”

Over the last 2 decades, policymakers’ standards-based accountability reforms in the United States, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, have fundamentally changed public schooling in general and kindergarten specifically. As this has occurred, little is known about how families make sense of these changes in schooling. By sharing findings from a video-cued multivocal ethnographic research study, this article addresses this issue by providing insight into families’ sensemaking about the changes that have occurred and continue to occur in public schooling. These findings reveal how family members were concerned about what kindergarten has become and were worried this increased academic focus in schooling may negatively affect their children’s social and academic development. Such findings can assist education stakeholders such as teachers, school administrators, teacher educators, and policymakers in working with these primary stakeholders to develop an education system that will prepare their children for success in school and the larger society.

Making the Body Ready for School: ADHD and Early Schooling in the Era of Accountability

BackgroundAlthough concerns about unintended negative consequences of standards-based accountability (SBA) reform for children's socioemotional development have been raised, few studies have systematically examined early childhood teachers’ perceptions of and practices for children's behavior and bodies under such policy. This study was conducted against the backdrop of the intersection of the accountability policy and the increasing prevalence of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) among children, including preschoolers.PurposeThe study investigated how early childhood teachers’ perspectives of and practices for the behavior and bodies of children considered at risk of being identified with ADHD later in schooling were related to the increasing concern over school readiness under SBA reform.Research DesignData for a qualitative case study were generated through multiple methods, including video-recorded observations in two African-American children's pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms, interviews with their teachers, and artifact collection.ResultsThe focal children's teachers appropriated the authoritative discourses of ADHD and readiness for school to perceive the children's bodies as uncontrollable and unready for school. The teachers taught the children a variety of bodily techniques to enculturate them in public school and to develop docile student bodies. Keeping their authoritative practices intact, the teachers hardly incorporated the children's areas of strengths into the curriculum and instruction. School was introduced to the children as a carnivalesqueless place, and both SBA reform and ADHD contributed to disembodiment in the public early childhood education settings.ConclusionsThis study suggests the need for reframing the notion of school readiness; bringing teachers’ folk theories about children's behavior and bodies to their critical awareness; and intentionally balancing serious, rigid parts of the daily classroom routine with relaxed, pleasurable moments.

Lessons learned: how parents respond to school mandates and sanctions

AbstractOver the past three decades, a reform movement bent on improving schools and educational outcomes through standards-based accountability systems and market-like competitive pressures has dominated policy debates. Many have examined reform policies’ effects on academic outcomes, but few have explored these policies’ influence on citizens’ political orientations. In this study, using data from an original survey, I examine whether and how No Child Left Behind’s accountability-based architecture influences parents’ attitudes towards the government and federal involvement in education. I find little evidence that diversity in parents’ lived policy experiences shapes their political orientations. However, the results of a survey experiment suggest that information linking school experience to policy and government action may increase parents’ confidence in their ability to contribute to the political process. Understanding whether and under what conditions parents use public school experiences to inform orientations towards the government can improve the design of future reforms.

Using Testimonio to Bring Children's Worlds Into a Standardized Teaching Context: An Example of Culturally Relevant Teaching in Early Childhood Education

Since its birth in the 1960s in Latin America, testimonio has emerged as a genre of literature that gives a “voice to the voiceless” and acts as a medium for marginalized individuals to communicate their experiences. Described as a form of resistance literature, it has been defined as “an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation, such as violence or oppression.” Although such a seemingly intense approach may feel out of place in an early childhood classroom, this article demonstrates how one teacher successfully employed testimonio as an instructional strategy with her preschoolers. In doing so, she broke away from the constraints imposed by standards-based accountability reforms and created an enriching learning experience with a direct impact on her students' lives.

Charting a democratic course for global citizenship education: Research directions and current challenges

This article outlines research directions for global citizenship education, by emphasizing the centrality of democratic goals for schools in the 21st century. Despite a significant shift in educational policies and practices towards addressing education that respond to the conditions of globalization, there is not a clear vision regarding its role in schools. Furthermore, curriculum reforms such as global citizenship education inevitably face the issue of whether to adapt to neoliberal tenets of privatization, high stakes testing and standards-based accountability, or to resist and challenge these policies with alternative, democratic visions of schooling. This article argues that for global citizenship education to reach maturity, there is a need for a programmatic research agenda that addresses the complex dynamics that globalization has introduced to schooling, particularly the challenges to teaching and learning for helping youth to make sense of the world and their role in it. An analysis of recent advances in research and practice in civic education is used as a starting point to advance directions for global citizenship education. Two key directions are suggested: to gain a more secure foothold in schools and the need to focus on a shared conceptual focus that helps researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders to access the same body of practices and knowledge.

Developing Instructional Managers

Significant educational ideas endure, but they also evolve over time. In the 2013s, "instructional manager" became the dominant paradigm for organization managers after researchers noticed that effective organizations usually had managers who kept a high focus on curriculum and instruction. In the first half of the 2012s, attention to instructional manager seemed to waver, displaced by discussions of organization-based management and facilitative manager.But recently instruction has surged back to the top of the manager agenda, driven by the relentless growth of standards-based accountability systems. Explicit standards of learning, coupled with heavy pressure to provide tangible evidence of success, have reaffirmed the importance of instructional manager.Nevertheless, despite general agreement that instructional manager is a critical skill, few managers and superintendents have had in-depth training for that role, especially in a standards-based environment. This Digest reviews the demands of today's instructional manager and discusses steps that universities and organization districts can take to help managers develop the necessary skills.

Professional Learning and the Unfinalizable: English Educators Writing and Telling Stories Together

Standards-based education reforms and intensified accountability regimes are now a feature of most countries’ agendas to improve the quality of their teaching workforces. One of the direct consequences of these reforms is a requirement that teachers demonstrate their ongoing participation in forms of professional development or professional learning throughout their careers. Along with this, there has been a narrowing of what is acknowledged by standards-based accountability regimes as discipline-based professional knowledge and ‘valuable’ professional development. This essay is a dialogic, reflexive account of a professional learning and writing project for English teachers and teacher educators in Australia, begun in 2013, called the stella2.0 project. The project builds on the groundbreaking work of the STELLA project in Australia from the turn of the century, and some other models of teacher writing projects across the world. Drawing on Cavarero, we critically scrutinize writing and storytelling in the dialogic professional community of the stella2.0 project, and in the process ‘speak back’ to standards-based reform policies that undermine English educators’ agency and professionalism.

Taking and teaching the test are not the same: a case study of first-year teachers’ experiences in high-stakes contexts

Background: Policymakers’ use of high-stakes exams to improve students’ academic achievement affects teachers and their tenure in the field at all levels of schooling. Novice teachers now being inducted into the field have been educated almost exclusively in these high-stakes learning environments. Yet, how their familiarity with these contexts combined with their experiences in their own classrooms affect novices’ induction into the field of teaching has not been fully examined. Aim: This article presents findings from an investigation into the experiences of two first-year teachers who were educated and trained to be teachers in the same high-stakes education system in which they taught. It examines how these first-year teachers viewed policymakers’ reforms affecting their teaching and tenure in the field. Methods: This qualitative case study centers on the experiences of two first-year teachers working in the same high-stakes standards-based accountability teaching context in which they were educated – the case. This study provides insight into the issue of how novices’ familiarity with high-stakes reform combined with their experiences in their own classrooms impacts their conceptions of their teaching and their tenure in the field. Outcomes: The findings from this case study reveal how policymakers’ high-stakes reforms impacted the development of these novice teachers in significant ways. Not only did they have to learn how to teach as they taught, but they also had to ensure they were teaching all of their students to pass the high-stakes exams. Their varied experiences also demonstrate how these high-stakes exams can ‘test’ beginning teachers out of the classroom. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that first-year teachers’ familiarity with policymakers’ high-stakes reforms is not enough to prepare them for the expectation that they immediately improve students’ academic achievement on high-stakes exams. Such findings not only challenge what it means to be a educator in these contexts, but they also shed light on how larger political and economic forces impact the teaching and tenure of novices. To support new teachers, teacher educators and mentors should rethink the education and induction processes while helping novices understand as well as prepare for the role context plays in their teaching and development as professionals.

Engaged leaders develop schools as quality organisations

Purpose – This paper explores the question, “what does it mean to be an engaged school leader in an educational context that promotes standards-based accountability as a model of quality development?” Specifically, what drives educational leaders? What do they do to lead schools as quality organisations? and How do they lead schools as quality organisations? Design/methodology/approach – An ethnographically grounded theory case study was conducted with 16 principles in Sweden, USA and Finland, who participated in a three-year project to lead schools as global learning centers. Findings – Findings showed that school leaders used a variety of leadership styles as they developed worked cultures grounded in a value system, to support student learning and development. Also, work cultures that engaged members of the school and community were critical for leading schools as learning organisations. Research limitations/implications – The small sample may not be generalizable to all educational systems. Practical implications – This study provides evidence about the complexities for school leadership today that are not currently addressed in most principal preparation programs. The findings can serve to help inform further development of principal preparation. Originality/value – The experiences shared in this study provide an alternative perspective about what it is that school leaders do and think about amidst a high-stakes testing context of school development. The grounded theory nature of this study, combined with an ethnographic approach, provides deep insights into the daily working life of engaged school leaders to learn first hand from their dialogue about what it takes to lead schools as quality organisations.

Measuring Opportunity to Learn and Achievement Growth

The related constructs of opportunity to learn (OTL) and achievement growth are fundamental aspects of the current large-scale assessment and accountability system in operation in the United States. For purposes of this article, OTL is defined as the degree to which a teacher dedicates instructional time and content coverage to the intended curriculum objectives emphasizing high-order cognitive processes, evidence-based instructional practices, and alternative grouping formats. Both OTL and achievement growth, although frequently talked about by education policy makers and teachers, are actually difficult to measure. Much of my research, in collaboration with other colleagues, over the past decade has concerned the measurement of these constructs in ways that facilitate teachers’ understanding of them and to advance sound policies regarding the instruction and assessment of students with disabilities (SWDs). In this article, I examine both the measurement of OTL and achievement growth, share recent research on them, and outline an agenda for future research on these two important aspects of standards-based accountability systems for all students.

Equity-Oriented Reform Amid Standards-Based Accountability

Intermediary organizations increasingly provide support for schools serving marginalized students. Some attribute this trend to growing ideological support for market-based strategies to further the public good. This article investigates one intermediary that marketed equity-oriented instructional goals for schools serving high numbers of students of color and English Learners. Drawing on critical policy studies and political science, we analyze its behavior amid a high-stakes accountability environment, its reasons for adopting certain reforms, and the consequences for instruction. We use qualitative comparative analysis to show how policy forces shaped reforms and content in its schools, but not pedagogy specific to students of color or English Learners. We discuss the implications for the research on intermediaries and the democratic control of public education.

The principal as instructional leader: Guiding schools to improve instruction

School leaders are increasingly being challenged to take a more instructionally focused role in their schools. As pressure for improving student performance in the current standards-based accountability environment swells and test results are increasingly scrutinised, school principals are being urged to focus efforts on the core business of schooling – teaching and learning. This article focuses on school principals who are successful in improving teaching and learning in their schools. Six principals contributed their time, stories and experiences as instructional leaders as well as how they have improved teaching and learning in their respective schools. The article describes the strategies of principals who practise exemplary instructional leadership, and how these principals have influenced teaching and learning. The principals in this sample sought to focus their time and efforts on instructional improvement by shifting their priorities towards teaching and learning. Literature on instructional leadership was the primary source of information used in the construction of interview schedules. The interview schedule was semi-structured to provide flexibility for the respondents to give detailed responses. The article also gives a summary of the findings and recommendations.

Teacher resistance against school reform: reflecting an inconvenient truth

In this article, the contexts, forms and consequences of teacher resistance against school reforms based on quality assurance policies are discussed. The problems are demonstrated by recurring on research devoted to the acceptance and/or resistance of (German) teachers against standards-based accountability policies. These results demonstrate that the majority in the teacher force ignores, misinterprets or misuses the feedback information from standards-based performance tests aiming at a data-driven development of classroom teaching. Only a small part shows an adequate usage of feedback information, especially those schools that already have developed a culture of internal evaluation. In general, the success or failure of educational innovations is difficult to estimate, because it is a matter of interpretation and post hoc reconstruction.