Accountability and Public Education

What is the measure of a good school?

For many years, accountability through testing has been the name of the game in public schools. It was a bipartisan desecration. The No Child Left Behind Act passed by a wide margin in 2001. The mechanism for boosting academic performance was to require standardized testing in math and English. The federal education law was updated in 2015 but the testing requirement remained.

Two decades after the passage of No Child Left Behind, many Americans are legitimately worried about the survival of the republic. I’m not blaming standardized testing for the mess we’re in right now. But maybe we would’ve been better off emphasizing history and the arts. 

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ASU Professor Quino E. Martinez. 1959. His Spanish 101 course was the first TV show produced at the Arizona PBS station. 

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The issue of standardized testing is coming into greater focus here in Arizona due to the passage of universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka ESAs, colloquially known as school vouchers. Armed with an ESA, any student will be allowed to attend a private school on the taxpayer dime. Or at least $7,000 worth, if the law survives a referendum effort. 

A source of controversy with ESA expansion is that private schools receiving public dollars will not be required to administer state tests. Nor will private schools accepting ESAs be required to administer the civics test required by law for graduation from a public high school in Arizona.

School reformers now argue that “accountability” is purely a matter of parental choice. No standardized testing needed, because if parents don’t like the quality of education provided, they can enroll their kid in a different school.

As a public school teacher who despises the burdens of state testing, I welcome the new parental choice philosophy to accountability. We already had a robust school choice environment in Arizona. But I get the feeling this new definition of accountability will stop at the now murky border between private and public schools. 

Of course, many private schools still give tests, some of them standardized. Good teachers in any school use both informal and structured methods to gauge how students are progressing in their learning. Having a structured plan for student outcomes is standard operating procedure in schools.

There are examples of pre-packaged testing structures, like Cambridge Curriculum and Advanced Placement exams, that are used in both private and public schools as a way to guide and measure student learning. While there are pros and cons to any test, these content area tests can be helpful tools to promote consistency of instruction.

It’s telling, though, that private schools want nothing to do with state tests. 

Would any private school in Arizona voluntarily administer the state’s civics test (which is literally a copy of the US citizenship naturalization test) to gauge how well their students are learning civics? 

Of course not. 

Does any private school want to administer the AASA or the ACT every year to self-evaluate the quality of instruction at their school?

No. 

Private school administrators do indeed seek to evaluate instructional quality, but the state testing scheme takes way too much time without providing the best measure of what’s happening in classrooms.

Yet this is what is required of public schools in Arizona. Test scores matter, not only due to federal law (and the money attached to compliance) but because the state has designed policies around the A-F school grading system.

Low scores on state tests are cited as evidence for how public schools are failing. Meanwhile the proposed solution, private schools, won’t be measured on the same scale.

Private schools receiving public dollars won’t be assigned a letter grade. According to voucher advocates, the letter grade is not important for helping parents decide whether to enroll their kids in a private school. School quality is something ascertained by other means. 

Maybe the student is happy there. Maybe students feel safe there. Maybe the teachers are friendly and hardworking. Maybe the school specializes in a preferred content area. Maybe the school has a competitive sports program. Maybe the values of a school align with the family.

Nobody would bother any family to ask for proof for why they think a private school is effective. It’s their choice.

But now, with the potential melding of public and private education, we should take a step back and look at the whole scene with fresh eyes. 

These testing demands we’ve placed on public schools … this evidence we’ve been extracting from public school students year after year … does it even matter?

If we decide to throw the old accountability philosophy into the wastebasket, I hope we at least take time to apologize to all the students who were forced to sit in front of computer screens taking mind-numbing tests.

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