New visions don’t fit in old structures: A response to Dynarski and Santelises

New visions for educational assessment inevitably provoke questions that are grounded in beliefs about the benefits of our current accountability-driven system. Mark Dynarski and Sonja Santelises both raise important concerns about what might be lost if we changed that system. For the past two decades, accountability assessments supported comparisons among students, schools, and students. These tests promised to shine a light on racial inequities and thereby ensure equal access to ambitious learning goals for all students. We will come back to the vision outlined in the original article, but first we address Dynarski and Santelises’s concerns.

We agree with Santelises that our public schools ought to help all students meet broad aims for education. But one problem with today’s approach to accountability is that testing has significantly narrowed the curriculum (Au, 2007). Because only reading and mathematics are tested, students get less time for social studies, science, and the arts. And because many schools affected by accountability pressures are schools with high concentrations of students of color, the narrowing of curriculum can exacerbate inequities in opportunities to learn (Diamond & Spillane, 2004).

Despite good intentions, the current test-based accountability system alone cannot achieve civil rights goals. Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have improved only modestly, and achievement gaps have not narrowed appreciably. Further, reviews of test-based accountability policies show that they have had minimal effects on achievement (National Research Council, 2011). To the extent that NAEP scores have risen at all, the gains are more readily attributable to improvements in instructional capacity and teacher salary levels (Lee & Reeves, 2012).