The Failure of Test-Based Accountability

By Marc Tucker on
February 27, 2014 8:17 AM

Excerpt:

"Imagine what a good doctor would think if he or she were told that the problems in our healthcare system would be solved if only doctors were publicly branded with an A, B or C grade by some external authority using only numbers generated by computers based only on two absurdly limited dimensions of healthcare outcomes.  Suppose all the talk of improving healthcare came down to getting rid of bad doctors, but the government was doing almost nothing to improve the quality of new doctors.  What do you think young people at the top of their high school graduating classes would think of the medical profession as an option if they saw all these punitive actions being taken against doctors, if they saw that, increasingly, doctors had less and less control over their work and young doctors were not making enough money to support a family?  What do you suppose doctors would think if hospital administrators got together and decided that the answer to the country's healthcare problems was to use a 49-page evaluation rubric to evaluate all the doctors admitted to practice at that hospital?

Test-based accountability and teacher evaluation systems are not neutral in their effect.  It is not simply that they fail to improve student performance.  Their pernicious effect is to create an environment that could not be better calculated to drive the best practitioners out of teaching and to prevent the most promising young people from entering it.  If we want broad improvement in student performance and we want to close the gap between disadvantaged students and the majority of our students, then we will abandon test-based accountability and teacher evaluation as key drivers of our education reform program."