The Accountability Plateau, Double-Standards, and the Defense of Sloth
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 16, 2011 at 8:17 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Hey, it's a hectic Friday, so just three quick things that I want to touch upon today.
First, Fordham yesterday released Mark Schneider's new paper "The Accountability Plateau." Mark, former NCES Commissioner (and a visiting scholar at AEI), makes a compelling argument that the accountability efforts of the 1990s and early 2000s initially had a significant impact on student achievement but have now hit a wall. It's a good analysis that makes sense. And I think Mark's interpretation makes a lot of sense when we keep in mind that the K-12 response to accountability, along with more productive measures, has frequently entailed boosting attention to reading, shifting energy and resources from untested subjects to tested ones, and moves to ensure that effective teachers are teaching in the tested grades. Such maneuvering can obviously only be done once. But let's keep in mind that we don't usually think of accountability as merely punctuating an equilibrium. Rather, we expect that public and private organizations which take accountability seriously--whic
