March/April 2002
By Douglas B. Reeves
"We have to think about accountability in a very different way," says Douglas B. Reeves, chairman and founder of the Center for Performance Assessment and the International Center for Educational Accountability. "We have done a splendid job of holding nine-year-olds accountable. Let me suggest as a moral principle that we dare not hold kids any more accountable than we expect to hold ourselves."
At a recent forum hosted by the Principal's Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Reeves outlined the principles of what he believes comprise effective school-based accountability systems. His remarks were edited for this issue
Principle #1: Congruence Objectives and strategies are sometimes developed in complete contravention to what the accountability system calls for. Accountability must be the unifying theme that draws strategy, rewards, recognition, and personnel evaluations together.
I once worked in a district that planned to focus its accountability system on the principle of prioritized standards--that is, focusing on the most important standards rather than trying to cover everything at once. That was the rhetoric. But the first line of the teacher evaluation form was, "Did the teacher cover the curriculum?"
In another district, accountability-minded educators said, "We look at the evidence. We know that if more children are involved in extracurricular activities, our attendance and student achievement will be better." Yet when you looked at the recognition and reward system in that district, the teachers they rewarded and recognized were the most exclusive, the ones who protected their classes and their extracurricular activities from any students other than the cream of the crop. In both of these cases, the accountability system was contradicted by the objectives and strategies.
Principle #2: Specificity If I go to one more conference where we hold hands and chant, "All children can learn," I'm not going to be able to take it anymore. I believe that all children can learn, but I have never achieved anything with a mantra. Accountability is not about chanting mantras; it's not about generalities.
We've got to know specifically what works. We've got to investigate which strategies in our own communities are specifically associated with improved student achievement. And let's focus on behaviors, not just test scores--in other words, measure what the grownups do. We need to set as many standards for the adults--the board members, the administrators, the teachers, perhaps someday even the parents--as we do for kids.
Principle #3: Relevance There ought to be a direct relationship between the strategies schools employ and improvements in student learning. Of course, relevance isn't always obvious. Some research indicates that, with the exception of attendance, the number-one factor associated with improved test scores and behaviors in the classroom happens to be more nonfiction writing.
It may be obvious that more nonfiction writing is related to better writing scores, and it may make sense that more nonfiction writing is highly related to better reading scores. Less obvious is the fact that even a little more nonfiction writing in a curriculum is also related to better math, science, and social studies scores. In these instances, we find specific relationships between our classroom strategies and our results.
Do these relationships prove causality? Not necessarily. But they do provide us with a way of testing the hypothesis that more nonfiction writing will improve test scores and student behavior. If I were to ask every teacher, "Why can't you do more nonfiction writing?" many would say, "I don't have the time." Time, time, time is the number-one issue. These teachers are articulating the hypothesis that if they spent more time on writing, they wouldn't be able to cover the curriculum, and that would make scores go down. I may not have been able to prove causality, but I have disproved that hypothesis.
Principle #4: Respect for Diversity "All children can learn" does not mean "all children are the same." Furthermore, diversity is not merely about external characteristics. If we're really going to take this seriously, that means we start looking at diversity on the inside as well as diversity on the outside. Making this principle both a moral and an intellectual part of the curriculum will require taking different approaches in different schools. That is, it will require a diversity of approaches, diversity of techniques, and diversity of teaching strategies.
When U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige was running Houston's schools, he did not say, "My way or the highway" to 200 schools. He said, "You want respect for diversity, including different styles, approaches, and strategies? You got it. But the price of freedom is transparency. The price of trying different things is being able to come to one another, and come to me, with transparent results. Tell me what worked, tell me what didn't work." That's what accountability requires. You can embrace different strategies provided that you report those strategies. Win or lose, succeed or fail, we report them.
It's important to remember that respecting diversity doesn't mean anarchy or that all views are equal. You can have respect for diversity without giving up foundational principles. We have the ability, maybe even the mandate, to say that some values are better. The values of freedom, truth, and justice are better than the values of oppression and totalitarianism. That's the kind of thing we ought to be able to say. Not every principle is up for grabs. Principle #5: Continuous Improvement Jeff Howard, president of the Efficacy Institute, uses an analogy that may resonate for people who have kids at home. He calls it the Nintendo Effect, which refers to the child who cannot focus or concentrate and is always moving about the classroom until you turn on the Nintendo machine, whereupon the child is transfixed, moving not a follicle of hair as he sits for hours in front of the machine.
The question Dr. Howard asks is, "How long would that child be staring at the screen if you mailed his Nintendo scores to him nine weeks hence?" Part of what keeps him engaged is not just what's happening on the screen. It is that he gets feedback that is timely, immediate, and relevant. If we're going to build a holistic accountability system, once-a-year feedback is not sufficient. We should be building a system that every month gives feedback to our children, our leaders, and our teachers so we can get busy building better instructional systems. Principle #6: Focus on Achievement, not Norms There is actually a state where the Board of Education voted that 80 percent of students must be above average. Now, I have taught statistics for a long time, and no amount of listening to Garrison Keillor will convince me that that is a possible distribution. But there's another issue here. When you hear these comparisons made to norms and you hear comparisons made to the average, normally the visceral reaction is that this is something that hurts poor kids. However true that might be, it also hurts advantaged kids.
The bell curve is insidious for all kids. It is an ineffective, inappropriate way to measure student achievement. You've got some "above average" kids who are inappropriately complacent and who are hurt by norms as surely as kids who are in the low end of the bell curve. Do you know the 55th-percentile kid who gets a 55th-percentile score in reading and cannot write an essay to save his soul? The 55th-percentile student in math who cannot apply the algorithm in different contexts? The only thing that really matters is whether students are meeting expectations that are clear, objective, and immutable--not who beat whom.
Douglas B. Reeves is chairman and founder of the Center for Performance Assessment and the International Center for Educational Accountability. For Further Information D.B. Reeves. Accountability In Action: A Blueprint for Learning Organizations. Denver: Advanced Learning Press, 2000.
D.B. Reeves. Making Standards Work: How to Implement Standards-Based Assessments in the Classroom, School, and District. Denver: Advanced Learning Press, 1997.
Center for Performance Assessment, 1660 South Albion St., Suite 1110, Denver, CO 80222; 800-844-6599; 303-504-9312 (local); fax: 303-504-9417; email: info@makingstandardswork.com.
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