Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.

The Economic Policy Institute is an American non-profit organisation that was founded in 1986 to widen the debate about policies to achieve healthy economic growth, prosperity, and opportunity.  It is a nonpartisan think-tank that seeks to broaden the public debate about strategies to achieve a prosperous and fair economy (www.epi.org). At the time of publication in 2008, Richard Rothestein is a research associate of the institute, and at the time of conducting the research for the book, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder were graduate students.  Rebecca Jacobsen has since moved to be an assistant professor of teacher education and education policy at Michigan State University and Tamara Wilder is a postdoctoral fellow at the Ford School of Public Policy also at Michigan State University.

Grading Education includes historical analysis of education within the United States over the last 250 years.  The focus is on Primary and Secondary Education.  It is interesting to read about the original broad goals that society had for education and to see how these goals have developed over time, and how the goals relate to education policy.  Different goals seem to have taken on different levels of importance at different times.  The eight broad goals that are described as being relevant currently include; basic academic skills, critical thinking, the arts and literature, preparation for skilled work, social skills and work ethic, citizenship, physical health, emotional health.  The context is very American, and it prompts this Australian reader to consider what a similar Australian timeline might look like, no doubt with the Hobart, Adelaide and now Melbourne Declarations featuring over the last 20 years and the aims of the Australian Curriculum also now a part of the unfolding story.

After laying out the historical generation of goals, Grading Education goes on to describe the impact of the accountability measures that are being used currently "Federal and state accountability systems have proposed to judge schools solely by their accomplishments in the first two goal areas (basic skills and critical thinking).  In practice, because basic skills are easier and less expensive to test, accountability has relied mainly on this goal, with the unintended consequence that less time and energy is spent on the other goals."

Concepts such as "bubble children" are introduced.  These are the students who are just below the level that is deemed satisfactory and proficient and so significant energy is applied to helping these children to meet the standards so that progress is noted in the accountability measures.  This attention can sometimes mean other students who are already above the standard, or well below it receive less attention.

Having noted potential impacts of the accountability measures and their reporting on the actions of teachers (described as Campbell's law), the authors also explore this phenomenon in other professions including medicine, police, war, and job seeking.  At this point a range of alternative accountability measuring and reporting strategies are proposed.

The book includes an extensive bibliography and some compelling transcripts from classroom teacher interviews.  I suspect that an international reader would be placed in a better position to interpret the information included in the teacher interviews if a timetable showing the amount of time allocated to each subject within the timetabled day and also the way time is used before and after class had been included, so that we could interpret the stories of reduced time, in comparison to our current time allocations.

The book was easy to read, relatively short chapters give that sense of achievement as you move through the text, and the prose is constructed in a readable format.  It would probably be of interest to people who are wondering about the broader goals of education, those who have an interest in the historical development of how policy unfolds.  If you are pondering different staff and school appraisal models, you might find some of the different sorts of measures and sources of information proposed in the alternative model to be of interest.

There is an underlying sentiment that the costs associated with accountability measures sometime determine what is used, and these may or may not be the best choices for accountability and careful checking of the achievement of school or broader educational goals.  The book is centred in the American context, with some international examples including Ofsted from the United Kingdom but it might inspire questions for the Australian context like, how do we make best use of the data generated by NAPLAN to support student learning?  How do we ensure that NAPLAN enhances what we do across the board, without impacting negatively on disciplines like Science, Social Science, The Arts, and Health and Physical Education through an over zealous focus on numeracy and literacy for the purpose of schools looking good in the reported data?  How do we keep our eye on the ball of all of the goals of education and not just those that can be measured most easily?

Any text that deals with current accountability measures, like no child left behind, can date quickly as policies change and strategies are altered.  But there can be wisdom found in knowing where we have come from, and what might be the unintended consequences of the strategies that we use to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of our progress towards agreed goals.  With some further exploration into the logistical background behind some of the conclusions, this book as the potential to support Australian educators in devising some questions in their own context about how we take best advantage of the materials available to us to support the learning of each individual student within our classrooms and lecture