IB_Connecticut_Standards_Accountability.pdf

Standards and accountability have been at the center of education reform efforts in the United States for twenty years. States have taken responsibility for articulating what they expect students will know; for testing students to ensure that those expectations are met; and for holding schools and districts accountable for results. Yet, in Connecticut and elsewhere, progress has been slow. Much work remains to ensure that areas of low-performance are not just identified, but eliminated by correcting failures, rewarding achievement and giving school leaders the freedom they need to pursue a vision of success.

The standards and accountability movement was kicked off by the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. This report from the U.S. Department of Education surveyed the declining academic achievement of American students, especially as compared to foreign students, and concluded that “[t]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”1 Six years later, at a national meeting, governors committed their states to setting high academic standards for students at all grade levels, to monitoring progress towards meeting the standards through regular testing, and to developing accountability measures to spur results.2

More than twenty years after A Nation at Risk, standards and accountability remain the cornerstones of the national strategy to raise student achievement. Between 1996 and 2002 the number of states with written academic standards prescribing what students should know and be able to do at certain grade levels climbed from 14 to 49 (Iowa being the last hold out).3 Most states have some sort of system that makes schools and districts accountable for meeting those goals, though they vary widely. And the federal No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, has spurred many states to strengthen their testing and accountability systems. This legislation requires states that choose to accept federal education funding to assess their students in each year from grades three through eight, and at least once in high school, and to develop a system of consequences for schools and districts with continued poor performance.

As the bipartisan authors of the No Child Left Behind Act recognized in 2001, standards without consequences are merely aspirations that schools and districts are free to ignore—which is precisely what happened in the early years of the standards movement.

The combination of strong standards, accurate assessments and effective accountability provisions hold the promise of increasing transparency—since they give stakeholders, such as parents and community members, a way of tracking the performance of their public schools. But the results from state assessments must be presented to parents and community leaders in ways that facilitate informed judgments about school performance. And they must be connected to accountability measures that reward success and promote interventions that can correct failures. Hence, standards, accountability and assessments are like the three legs of a stool: all of them must be strong to ensure an effective platform for change.