Effective accountability systems are as important as ever after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results-based school accountability has been the linchpin of education reform in the United States for at least two decades. This follows from the conviction that schools are responsible for the extent to which their pupils are meeting their states’ academic standards. In recent years, achievement growth has been joined with academic proficiency in judging school performance. The idea is that it’s fairer and more accurate to use growth measures to appraise the performance of schools, especially those enrolling many disadvantaged pupils. That way, schools get deserved credit, even when proficiency is still a reach, as long as good progress is being made toward that goal. Accountability measures may also adjust for other important variables, such as high levels of student mobility. And other metrics of school performance, such as high school graduation, may be factored into such calculations and judgments.

These kinds of results-based accountability measures have been the focus of federal K-12 education policy since passage of the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) in 1994 — and that policy has had teeth since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law in 2002 and reworked as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015. The federal focus for accountability in recent years — starting earlier in some states — has been on school-level and, to a lesser extent, district-level accountability. But accountability need not necessarily be confined to schools; it may also apply to individual students, educators, school systems, even entire states.

Results-based accountability has never been popular among educators, many of whom view it as embarrassing, punitive, a rejection of their professionalism, and far too cramped a definition of school quality and student learning (see, e.g., FairTest, 2017; Hout & Elliott, 2011; Ravitch, 2014). Understandably, they often bridle at attempts from outside to alter or intervene in their schools, even when those schools are performing poorly — and the more forceful the intervention, the greater the resistance.

That school — and sometimes teacher — accountability has depended heavily on test scores has fed further resistance and a testing backlash among not just educators, but also parents and a number of elected officials. Many are concerned that schools (and districts and states) often lack the resources and capacity to make improvements that the accountability metrics show to be needed.

Accountability interrupted

Along with much else in American life, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted school accountability in several ways: the dearth of assessment data, spotty pupil (and teacher) attendance, weak or nonexistent metrics for gauging the impact of virtual schooling, and the widespread sense that schools ought not be held to account for results when so many factors that contribute to those results are beyond their control. But we shouldn’t discard the accountability baby just because it’s sitting in a puddle of murky water that we’re eager to drain off. This baby needs to be cared for!

School accountability is important not just because it is required (for Title I schools) under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). A more fundamental and enduring reason is that without some form of accountability, our education system would revert to having no consequences for failure nor any reward for success. Beyond the goodwill and professionalism of individual educators, there’d be little incentive to rectify shortcomings, to close achievement gaps, to accelerate the pursuit of excellence, or systematically to remedy major learning losses. Schools would once again be judged by their inputs, their promises, their programs and facilities, and their reputations rather than by their success in moving their pupils to readiness for successful participation in our society, our economy, and our polity, as well as in their own communities. Were that to happen, long-standing gaps would remain, failings would be hidden, the pursuit of equity would be hindered, and many children would be ill-served, as would their families and those whose taxes pay for their schools.

We shouldn’t discard the accountability baby just because it’s sitting in a puddle of murky water that we’re eager to drain off.

Given the capacity challenges that schools faced during COVID-19 shutdowns, the testing waivers and accountability holidays made sense. But it’s urgent that federal and state leaders do not turn their backs on school accountability in the long term, especially not when so many schools and students have so much catching up to do. As is painfully clear from a host of recent studies and reports, including new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), all the challenges that have long faced U.S. education were amplified when tens of millions of children spent a year or two trying to learn at home and online (Kuhfeld et al., 2022; NAEP, 2022; NWEA, 2022). And it’s already well known that the greatest learning handicaps — and most severe learning losses — have befallen low-income and Black and brown children who were already the focus of equity concerns and policy priorities.

Requirements for effective accountability

We must not abandon accountability, because accountability works. Which is to say, both experience and research have shown that states and nations that employ results-based accountability in their primary-secondary education systems show stronger student achievement (Gill, 2022; Raymond & Hanushek, 2004).

Advocates of school accountability often depict the mechanism of effective accountability as a tripod consisting of academic standards; assessments to determine how well schools are attaining those standards; and “consequences” for schools depending on whether their pupils meet, exceed, or lag behind the standards. It has gradually become clear that a well-conceived accountability system must also attend to the capacity of schools, districts, and states to rectify shortcomings and implement consequences (Cohen & Slover, 2022). Each of these elements must have certain qualities for the accountability system to work well.

Standards

Rigorous academic standards must clearly set forth the knowledge and skills that children should acquire and that schools should systematically impart to them. Every U.S. state now has such standards for math and English language arts. Most states also have standards for other core subjects, such as science or social studies. Sometimes these are organized by grade level or grade band, sometimes by individual courses. Unfortunately, as reviews of standards by the Fordham Institute and others have shown (e.g., Griffith et al., 2018), they are not always rigorous, well organized, and easily applied by curriculum developers, teacher educators, test-makers, or classroom instructors.

Quality assessments and other metrics

Standards are of little value without reliable means of gauging how well individual students, groups of students, schools, and school systems are meeting (or exceeding) those standards. Toward that end, metrics are necessary. These most commonly take the form of standardized tests, which federal law requires for reading and math in grades 3-8 and for science. Many states have developed their own standards-based assessments in other subjects and grade levels, including end-of-course exams, “reading guarantees,” and high school exit exams.

No matter how it’s done, standardized testing remains an incomplete measure of the skills and knowledge that students acquire — and should acquire — in school.

Many states also are moving beyond the pass/fail mode under which one is either “proficient” or not. Going forward, it’s desirable for every state to deploy a range of performance levels (“basic,” “proficient,” “advanced”), much as NAEP does and as many states do when awarding schools grades from A to F or stars from one to five. As with children’s report cards, having a range of marks is far more informative to parents and the broader public than pass/fail. Intuitive schema such as letter grades or stars are far clearer to readers than clumsy phrases such as “progressing toward proficiency.”

No matter how it’s done, standardized testing remains an incomplete measure of the skills and knowledge that students acquire — and should acquire — in school. And it fails to capture many other important attributes and qualities that we want schools to impart to their pupils (e.g., character, citizenship, tolerance). Hence, much work is underway — and should continue — to develop sound means of monitoring other valued school outcomes. Many states already include gauges of school quality or climate in their ESSA plans. These are often based on surveys of school staff, students, and sometimes parents. A widening array of such school climate indicators is becoming available, along with gauges of students’ social and emotional well-being. These indicators should be used with caution, as most have not yet been demonstrated to be valid and reliable and some are vulnerable to manipulation. Yet they have considerable potential to round out the picture of school effectiveness. Even when such an indicator has not yet been proven sufficiently reliable or valid to incorporate in formal accountability algorithms, it may still be included in a school report card where parents and others may find it of interest and value. Meanwhile, states may confidently include more objective indicators such as student (and staff) attendance, chronic absenteeism, and student safety in their school accountability regimes.

Consequences

This is the hardest part, both politically and operationally. It’s hard politically because nobody welcomes being told — or forced— to change, so the pushback is often intense. But it’s also hardest operationally because the consequences don’t always yield the desired improvement. For example, the most frequent consequence for a low-performing school is an effort by the district or state to “turn it around.” Yet the track record of such interventions is mixed (Smarick, 2010; Stuit, 2010). Adding to the challenge is that the forms of intervention that tend to work best are the most drastic or severe — such as replacing a school’s leaders and instructional team or outsourcing it to another organization to run — and those are the most fiercely resisted.

Intervention isn’t the only possible consequence, however. A chronically low-performing school may be shut down altogether, or its students may receive “exit visas” and the means to attend different schools. Yet any effort to close a school inevitably encounters fierce resistance from those whose school it is, including parents, teachers, alums, and neighbors. And the school-choice policies and programs needed for “exit visas” to work well are hugely uneven from state to state — a problem compounded when some of the alternative schools turn out to be no more effective than the schools that students were allowed to exit.

It’s important to note that consequences aren’t always negative or disruptive. Accountability systems also yield recognition, accolades, and sometimes other rewards for successful schools and those who lead and teach in them.

Capacity

It’s not part of accountability per se, but the key players in any well-functioning accountability regime require the know-how, the means, and the leverage to make bad schools get better and new schools succeed. As the excellent work of Anthony Bryk (2020) and others reveals, capacity is not just about resources. It encompasses many different forms and applies to so many levels of the education system that I cannot do it justice here.

Improvement science is a fast-growing field that’s making important contributions to a fuller understanding of the capacities needed if schools are to produce stronger outcomes (Barber, Moffit, & Kihn, 2010; Bryk, 2015). In short, the designers of responsible accountability systems also should attend to whether their schools (and districts and states) possess the human, fiscal, and political wherewithal to discharge their responsibilities successfully, including by continuing to improve when results are good and by diagnosing and remedying shortcomings when necessary. They’ll need also to develop, apply, and enforce the kinds of professional standards that we take for granted in hospitals, transit systems, airline operations, engineering firms, and securities markets.

A map for the future

What does the future hold? As accountability holidays end, states and districts are returning to ESSA’s requirements — and in due course, we may assume (or hope), federal policy makers will revisit that law, too. It’s not too soon to begin thinking beyond ESSA to the kind of accountability system that might better serve U.S. schools, communities, and states going forward. In so doing, we realize that most of the features we would like to see in the future could actually be incorporated into present-day practices, both within and in parallel to ESSA.

I hope that tomorrow’s accountability systems will be geared less to short-run gauges of “proficiency” and more to students’ true readiness for college, career, citizenship, and adulthood.

I hope that tomorrow’s accountability systems will be geared less to short-run gauges of “proficiency” and more to students’ true readiness for college, career, citizenship, and adulthood. Essential elements should include:

• Kindergarten readiness. Although this measure ought not be used for school accountability, entering kindergartners should be assessed on their readiness to succeed in school, including but not limited to their preparedness to undertake the study of reading and arithmetic. Such information creates an essential baseline for all that follows.
• English language arts (ELA) and math prowess. States should continue to test students in ELA and math. It would be better to start in grade 2, rather than 3, and to continue through grade 8, perhaps testing in alternate grades rather than every child every year. Reasonably accurate growth estimates can be based on alternate-year testing, and states may prefer to reduce the annual testing burden in light of the additions suggested below.
• End-of-course (EOC) exams. States should add capstone exams in core subjects during both middle and high school, aligning these with high-quality curricula in those subjects. Courses with EOC exams should include career and technical subjects as well as the traditional academic core.
• Diplomas that mean something. With EOCs in place for key high school courses, requiring that they be passed at a satisfactory level becomes an excellent way of ensuring that diplomas attest to actual accomplishment. For accountability purposes at the secondary level, states should weigh a school’s success in getting all students to the passing level on the EOCs (and thence to graduation) and its success in getting as many as possible to the college- and career-readiness threshold and beyond.

Although testing is a crucial element of any accountability regime, test scores will never be comprehensive indicators of school performance. Other metrics, such as those related to school climate, safety, and attendance, can help provide a fuller picture of how schools are doing. And if they are proven valid or reliable, such metrics may be incorporated into school accountability regimes.

Still and all, student achievement and growth should remain core criteria for evaluating school performance. I recommend continuing with ESSA-style data gathering on student learning, based primarily on external exams developed by states and aligned with their academic standards. Results should continue to be disaggregated by student group and reported at the school, district, and state levels, as should growth.

States also should continue to participate in NAEP and should demand state-level NAEP data for 12th grade in addition to 4th and 8th grades. Schools should continue to be assigned ratings based on their performance, and easily grasped information about that performance should be made public on websites, report cards, and dashboards.

As for the “consequences” leg of the accountability tripod, in the future a range of them should be considered. Truly weak schools cry out for top-to-bottom overhauls. Schools with some shortcomings may need additional resources, professional development, or expert consulting. Moderately successful schools may need help developing and applying “continuous improvement” or “good to great” stratagems. In other situations and settings, the soundest course of action may be to rely on parents to make the informed choice to place their children in schools that are better suited for their children. No single approach is foolproof, but each is better than leaving ineffective schools untouched with students confined in them.

When all is said and done, federal and state leaders should recommit to results-based school accountability adapted to a post-pandemic era. They should have a greater focus than ever on equity as well as excellence, on growth as well as achievement, on the swift rectifying of recent learning losses as well as further gains, on the individualization of student progress, and on college- and career-readiness as well as citizenship as the foremost goal of K–12 schooling.

References

Barbar, M., Moffit, A., & Kihn, M. (2010). Deliverology 101: A field guide for educational leaders. Sage.

Bryk, A.S. (2020). Improvement in action: Advancing quality in America’s schools. Harvard Education Press.

Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L.M., Grunow, A., & LaMahieu, P.G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.

Cohen, M. & Slover, L. (2022). Unfinished agenda: The future of standards-based school reform. FutureEd.

FairTest. (2017). The case against high stakes testing. Author.

Gill, B. (2022). What should the future of educational accountability look like? Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Griffith, D., McDougald, V., Friedberg, S., Barone, D., Belding, J., Chen, A., . . . & Shanahan, T. (2018). The state of state standards post-Common Core. Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Hout, M. & Elliott, S.W. (2011). Incentives and test-based accountability in education. The National Academies Press.

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Lewis, K., & Morton, E. (2022). The pandemic had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up? Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Reading and mathematics scores decline during COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. Department of Education.

NWEA. (2022). Exploring the educational impacts of COVID-19. Author.

Ravitch, D. (2014, December 19). The wisdom of teachers: A new vision of accountability. Diane Ravitch’s Blog.

Raymond, M.E. & Hanushek, E.A. (2004). Shopping for evidence against school accountability. In W.J. Fowler Jr. (Ed.), Developments in school finance: 2003 (pp. 117-130). National Center for Education Statistics.

Smarick, A. (2010). The turnaround fallacy. Education Next, 10 (1).

Stuit, D.A. (2010). Are bad schools immortal? Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

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This article appears in the November 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 12-17.