Preparing for a hiking trip brings you face-to-face with the world of trade-offs. You weigh, literally and figuratively, every ounce of what you put in your pack, trying to decide if the comfort something might bring in camp is worth the discomfort of hauling it up there in the first place. Designing a state accountability system is like that, but even more complicated because there are more dimensions to take into account and the trade-offs more complicated.
For instance, to take just the one dimension of teacher accountability and evaluation. Do you ensure that all teachers are accountable, not just those in the two core subjects? If yes, welcome to a world of tests from gym to art—or worse, state test measures in math and English applied to folks who don’t teach those two subjects (try explaining that to teachers or, for that matter, your neighbor). But if you say no, ask yourself who would want to teach math and English when you can keep far away from test-based accountability in other subjects? Perhaps you avoid that conundrum by getting rid of test-based accountability altogether? Then say hello to subjective evaluations by school administrators, who likely don’t know a thing about at least some of the subjects being taught. Is anyone at the AFT or NEA for that, or do they prefer mashing everything into a pseudo-scientific weighting system in which you back-engineer how much evaluations and test results count to ensure that no one/a small percentage is found deficient? Or do you simply not evaluate at all?
It’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and give up. But the stakes are too high to do that. So, since we can’t wash our hands of this, the only thing to do is engage and discuss, and then discuss again until we get to more satisfactory and necessarily imperfect answers. That engagement needs to be broad, debating with those with whom we agree, and those with whom we disagree. It must be an open conversation with anyone, though, and this caveat matters, only so long as they accept what is not really a debatable policy and political proposition: that you cannot spend approximately two-thirds of a trillion dollars of taxpayer money every year on public education, and, to boot, rest the hopes of a nation’s economic and civic future on it, without knowing how well our students are being educated and moving every lever we have to make the system work better for more students.
The initial work that the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have done in laying out guidelines for a new generation of state accountability plans is a good first step. It is by no means perfect; the authors readily admit to that. It leaves most of the “hard rocks” still to be decided, which is appropriate at this point. But it provides an important entry point for what can hopefully be a reasonable and productive set of conversations and debates. And if this happens, we are more likely to stumble and feel our way to more solid ground on an issue of almost singular importance.
James Merriman is CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.
On tomorrow’s blog: Joanne Weiss, independent consultant and former chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
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