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IN MY VIEW

by William G. Wraga

CurtailAccountability,CultivateAttainability

William G. Wraga is a Professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy, College of Education, University of Georgia. His research interests lie in the areas of curriculum theory, development, policy, and history.

By effect, apparent intent, and even definition, the current accountability movement is an inappropriate approach to improving public education. A more constructive approach to school improvement, one that fosters a culture of attainability in our education system, is in order.

The current test-driven account-ability movement, codified in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ([NCLB] 2002), was a misguided

is familiar: states were required to adopt “challenging academic content standards and challenging student academic achievement stan-dards” (1444–1445), implement “a single statewide State accountability system” (1445), define “adequate

idea that will have the effect not of improving the education of children and youth, but of indicting the public school system of the United States. To improve education in the United States, politi-cians, policy makers, and education lead-ers must discard the debilitating scheme of accountability and implement a constructive approach to school reform that fosters a culture of attainability.

Accountability DefinedBy now, the approach of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002) to the improvement of school programs

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yearly progress [AYP]” (1446), and “ensure . . . [that] all students . . . will meet or exceed the State’s proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments” by 2014 (1447–1448). Although some discretion was left to the states on these matters, that the assessment would be some type of standardized test based on the state curriculum standards was obligatory.

Clues to the inherent debility of accountability measures in NCLB are found in the definitions of the word itself. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus defines accountable as “subject to giving an account” and provides the following synonyms: “answerable, liable, responsible.” The fourth edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary defines ac-countable as “liable to being called to account; answerable.”

According to the fourth edi-tion of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the verb form of account can mean “to furnish a reckoning (to someone) of money received and paid out,” “to make satisfactory amends for [he will account for his crime],” “to give satisfactory reasons or an explanation for [can he account for his actions?],” “to be the cause, agent, or source of: with for,” and “to do away with as by killing: with for [he accounted for five of the enemy].”

Notice that definitions of the word accountability generally evoke neither positive nor constructive con-notations. By definition, accountabil-ity assumes liability, implies culpabil-ity, and anticipates amends; it can even denote killing. To hold someone accountable for their actions is to presuppose they have done some-thing blameworthy, not something praiseworthy. That is, the current accountability movement begins with a presumption of wrongdoing, of

damages committed, of guilt on the part of public schools and the educa-tors who work in them.

Hostile TakeoverIf the definition of the word account-ability implies liability, the account-ability mechanism of NCLB seems rigged to compel public schools to incur it. Recall that this approach to accountability emerged from a school reform movement that, beginning in the 1980s, persistently misrepre-sented the performance of public schools by manipulating achieve-ment test data (Berliner and Biddle 1995; Bracey 2002). The lengths that “reformers” would go to discredit the schools were remarkable. These efforts included, in the George H. W. Bush administration, not only the suppression of evidence in the Sandia report that public schools were per-forming relatively well (Tanner 1993), but also the misrepresentation of test scores. When the National Assess-ment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores showed steady improve-ment, the “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced” performance levels tied to NAEP scores were arbitrarily set in such a way that achieving anything beyond “basic” would become a rare occurrence (Glass 2008).

The accountability mechanisms of NCLB (2002) can be understood as part of this effort to discredit pub-lic schools in order to “prepare the battlefield” for choice and privatiza-tion. As we know, the law stipulates that in the event a school fails “to make adequate yearly progress” for “two consecutive years” (1479), the local education agency must “provide all students enrolled in the school with the option to transfer to another public school served by the local education agency, which may include a public charter school” (1479). If

the school continues to fail to make adequate yearly progress, the conse-quences escalate to include closing it and “[r]eopening the school as a pub-lic charter school,” “replacing all or most of the school staff,” and “[e]nter-ing into a contract with an entity, such as a private management company,” to run the reopened school (1485).

So choice, charter status, and privatization are the consequences for failing to demonstrate adequate yearly progress toward 100 percent proficiency in academic achievement of all students by 2014. And such failure is nearly assured by the techni-calities of the law. NCLB requires that schools report “measurable annual objectives for continuous and sub-stantial improvement” not only for all students, but also for students in the following subgroups: “economically disadvantaged students,” “students from major racial and ethnic groups,” “students with disabilities,” and “stu-dents with limited English proficien-cy” (1446–1447). If students in any one of those subgroups fail to make adequate yearly progress, the entire school is labeled as failing and is sub-ject to the escalating consequences. That is, if for two years 95 percent of the students in a public school make AYP and students in a single subgroup do not, then the school is subject to choice, charter status, and privatization. This is a frame-up.

If the hostile intent of the NCLB provisions is not apparent enough, subsequently a former George W. Bush administration official confirmed it. Susan Neuman, who had served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education under George W. Bush, revealed in an interview with Time that members of the Department of Education in that administration “saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda—

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a way to expose the failure of public education and ‘blow it up a bit,’ she says. ‘There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization’” (Wallis 2008).

More recently, Chester Finn, who had served as the Assistant Secre-tary for Research and Improvement in the Department of Education in the George H. W. Bush administra-tion, and under whose watch the disparaging NAEP performance labels were fashioned, responded to the suggestion that policy makers should abandon the choice and privatization agenda and instead support the exist-ing public school system with the remark, “I say let’s blow it up” (Dillon 2010), the “it” referring to the Ameri-can system of public education. The fact aside that in post-9/11 United States Finn’s is a very poor choice of words, his and Neuman’s state-ments expose the hostility toward the American public school system that lies behind the current accountability movement.

Fostering AttainabilityTo replace the American public school system with charters, choice, and privatization would, to borrow language from the 1983 Nation at Risk report, constitute an act of “unilateral educational disarmament” (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983, 5). Public school systems are fixtures of industrial de-mocracies. Countries that have imple-mented market-based reforms, such as charters and choice, have higher levels of educational inequity in terms of increased variation of academic achievement among subgroups of stu-dents, than countries without market-based reforms (Green and Wiborg 2004). Moreover, available evidence indicates that overall in the United States, charter schools and even

private schools do not outperform public schools in terms of student achievement (Lubienski and Lubienski 2006). Privatizing public schools in the United States may provide a new revenue source for avaricious inves-tors and, in the process, skim resourc-es for profit that under public control would have been reinvested in the schools; but there is no evidence that privatizing will improve the education of the American people.

Policymakers should abandon the insidious accountability scheme that NCLB imposes on the public schools and instead enact reforms that foster a culture of attainability. A culture of attainability sets realistic and challeng-ing goals for educational progress that invigorate program improvement, professional growth, and student ac-complishment. A culture of attainability in school reform would be character-ized by:!" A commitment to revitalizing pub-

lic schools, based on the recogni-tion that the biggest educational bang for the buck is achieved by pooling public resources and in-vesting them in public institutions that serve the greater social good.

!" The development and continu-ous improvement of a broad, comprehensive curriculum appropriate to educating well-rounded students who are pre-pared not only for employment and post-secondary education, but also, importantly, to dis-charge the duties of citizenship in a democratic society.

!" Substantive teacher participation in developing curriculum and instruction for the actual stu-dents they teach, in the contexts in which they teach.

!" A comprehensive system of eval-uation that mitigates the limita-tions of standardized tests with

appraisals of student products and performances, that employs proven classroom assessments that accumulate into increasingly valid profiles of student learning, and that are used primarily to improve teaching and learning.

!" Availability of sufficient resources and of substantive technical support in all of these areas from federal and state education agencies.

!" A reform culture animated not by fear of punishments, but by incentives and provisions for ac-complishments.

The culture of compliance, intimidation, and debilitation contrived by the current test-driven accountability movement should be replaced by a robust educational culture of performance, develop-ment, and attainment. This would constitute a unilateral act of educa-tional advancement for schooling in the United States.

ReferencesBerliner, D. C., and B. J. Biddle. 1995. The manu-

factured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Bracey, G. W. 2002. The war against America’s public schools: Privatizing schools, commercializing educa-tion. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Dillon, S. 2010. Scholar’s school reform U-turn shakes up debate. The New York Times, March 2. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html.

Glass, G. V. 2008. Fertilizers, pills, and magnetic strips: The fate of public education in America. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Green, A., and S. Wiborg. 2004. Comprehensive schooling and educational inequality: An inter-national perspective. In A tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and democracy, ed. M. Benn and C. Chitty, 217–42. London: Continuum.

Lubienski, C., and S. T. Lubienski. 2006. Charter, pri-vate, public schools and academic achievement: New evidence from NAEP mathematics data. New York: National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. 1983. A nation at risk: The imperative for educa-tional reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. 2002. Public Law 107–110. Washington, DC: U.S. Congress. Available at: www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/107-110.pdf.

Tanner, D. 1993. A nation “truly” at risk. Phi Delta Kap-pan 75(4): 288–97.

Wallis, C. 2008. No Child Left Behind: Doomed to fail? Time, June 8. Available at: www.time.com/time/ nation/article/0,8599,1812758.htm.