    
Issue Brief #3: Standards and Accountability 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.
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. Setting Smart Standards What does a good set of academic standards look like?4 While state standards vary in form and content, some common criteria that researchers use to evaluate them include: Clarity. Are the standards clear, definite, and do they spell out specific skills to be mastered or knowledge to be acquired? Otherwise, teachers and students have little guidance as to what is being asked of them. Comprehensiveness. Do the standards cover all, most, or few of the important skills at each grade level? The greater the coverage, the more assurance the public has that meeting the standards means that students truly have mastered the important skills. Rigor. Do the standards ask students to perform at the appropriate level, or is the state asking too little (or too much) of its students?5 Good standards are not necessarily verbose, though the best state standards (such as those in Indiana, Massachusetts, and California) tend to be long on detail. They should be accessible to parents and community members through state education websites and disseminated widely to teachers. Most importantly, they should be aligned to state assessments, so that students are tested on what the state has determined they should be taught at each grade level. Making Accountability Count Of course, good standards themselves are not a cure-all for poor student achievement. Standards are a roadmap: They tell you where to go and how to get there, but students and teachers still have to make the journey. That’s why the best standards are also driven by accountability systems that hold schools and districts responsible for results. The No Child Left Behind Act requires states that choose to receive federal education funding to test students annually in grades three through eight and once in high school; it also provides new funding for programs that help struggling students and requires states to set yearly performance goals broken out by different “sub-groups” of students, such as racial and ethnic groups, low-income students, and special education students.6 This breaking-out of achievement data, called “disaggregation,” is crucial to closing to the achievement gap, since the persistent poor performance of particular groups such as African Americans, Hispanics and low-income students can often be masked by the higher performance of other students unless subgroup data is analyzed separately.7 No Child Left Behind establishes a baseline for what should be included in a state’s accountability system. But the best state accountability systems go beyond the federal requirements. States can establish their own corrective actions that initiate prior to NCLB’s trigger-points for federally mandated interventions (such as student transfers to high-performing schools). Likewise, states can go beyond the basic reporting requirements on state assessments by creating easy-to-use school report cards so that parents know exactly where their child’s school stands in relation to other schools and the state standards. They can enact stronger graduation requirements and comprehensive summer school programs to bring students back up to speed. Finally, states can work to build more provisions into their accountability systems to reward success and invest in the best practices pioneered by successful teachers, schools and districts. As anyone in the workforce knows, the best employers not only set high standards and hold employees accountable for reaching these goals, but also create a work environment that attracts top talent and gives employees the tools they need to succeed. The same is true in the world of education. The most effective accountability systems not only hold schools leaders to a higher standard of performance but also provide them with greater freedom to pursue a vision of excellence and to bring together a team of teachers and staff committed to making it a success. Do Connecticut’s Standards Make the Grade? Independent reviewers from across the spectrum have been remarkably consistent in ranking the Constitution State’s standards near the middle of the pack. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education policy think tank in Washington, D.C., has evaluated standards in English, math, science, social studies/history, and geography several times over the past decade. Each time, Connecticut has scored “C’s” in most subjects, most recently in 2005, when the state’s standards in English and science received that grade.8 The American Federation of Teachers has reached similar results in its ongoing evaluation of state standards. The AFT rates standards for elementary, middle, and high school students for content and form. Connecticut receives strong ratings for math, above average rankings for science, and slightly below-average ratings for English and history.9 The major critique of Connecticut’s state standards—called “The Connecticut Framework”10—is that they simply are not detailed enough. For example, in his evaluation of Connecticut’s history standards for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, historian Sheldon Stern noted that despite asking students to “demonstrate an in-depth understanding of major events and trends in United States history,” the Framework “does not mention key historical figures and does not even attempt to establish grade-specific objectives in American history.”11 Similarly, the American Federation of Teachers noted that spelling mechanics are almost completely ignored in the state’s English standards.12 Is Connecticut’s Accountability System Working? Connecticut’s accountability system contains a strong system of assessments linked to relatively weak accountability provisions. The assessment system is grounded in two statewide tests: the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), given to elementary and middle school students, and the Connecticut Academic Performance Tests (CAPT), given to students in high school.13 Introduced in 1985, the CMT measures how well students are achieving in the areas of mathematics, reading and writing compared to the expectations for their grade level. The CMT involves approximately seven hours of testing over a 1–4 week period. In 2006, the number of grades tested was expanded from fourth, sixth and eighth grade to cover all grades 3–8 to comply with the requirements of No Child Left Behind. In 2007, science will be added to the subjects tested. The CAPT, which was introduced in 1994, measures how well students are achieving in the areas of mathematics, reading, writing and science compared to the expectations for students in the spring of their sophomore year. High school students are required to take the CAPT over approximately eight hours during a 1–3 week testing period in the spring of tenth grade. There are no plans to expand the number of grades covered. While there is no “passing” grade on the CMT or the CAPT, the Connecticut State Department of Education does set “state goals” for each subject area in each grade tested. The department defines these state goals as the knowledge, skills and critical thinking abilities that are “reasonable to expect of students” within their grade level.14 The results are sent in a report to parents explaining student scores and comparing their child’s results to others in the school and district along with a detailed student skills checklist showing the student’s performance on individual skills.15 Students who failed to make the state goal in any subject on the CAPT are given the opportunity to retake the test in the eleventh and twelfth grades. But unlike 23 other states, Connecticut does not require students to pass a statewide assessment to graduate from high school.16 In fact, districts are explicitly prohibited from using goal-level performance on CAPT as a prerequisite for getting a high school diploma.17 Thus, it is possible for Connecticut students to graduate high school without mastering the skills and knowledge the state has deemed reasonable to expect of sophomores. According to a 2003 study by the Manhattan Institute only 31 percent of students—and just 20 percent of African Americans and 11 percent of Hispanics— graduate from Connecticut high schools with at least the “bare minimum qualifications” necessary for entrance to a four-year college.18 At the same time, Connecticut, unlike states such as Florida or New York, has no public plan in place to assess school leaders’ progress in raising student achievement and closing the racial, ethnic and socio-economic gaps in our schools. Indeed, while students are compared against the performance of their peers, Connecticut’s reporting system explicitly avoids providing parents and community members with assessments of how well their schools are performing compared to other schools in the district or state. The Bottom Line Connecticut has done a solid job of articulating academic expectations for its students and testing them to see if those expectations have been met. But much more work remains if this system is to become an engine for closing the state’s achievement gap. While the state standards and assessments have proven relatively effective at identifying areas where students are falling behind, additional work is needed to ensure that school leaders are both held accountable for reaching this higher standard of performance and given the requisite tools to achieve success.
1. A Nation at Risk, U.S. Department of Education, April 1983, available here.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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