High-Stakes Hustle: Public Schools and the New Billion Dollar Accountability

Educational Forum, The, Fall 2004 by Baines, Lawrence A, Stanley, Gregory Kent

Abstract

High-stakes testing costs up to $50 billion per annum, has no impact on student achievement, and has changed the focus of American public schools. This article analyzes the benefits and costs of the accountability movement, as well as discusses its roots in the eugenics movements of the early 20th century.

Once upon a time, the dirty little secret of standardized testing was that the tests might be culturally biased. These days, the biggest drawback may be the exorbitant costs to develop, maintain, administer, prepare, and publish them.

The rise of expansive bureaucracies within state governments whose sole purpose is to keep up with student testing has forever altered the budgets of public schools. In 1967, 80 percent of a school's budget was devoted to regular instruction. By the late 1990s, the percentage of funds devoted to regular instruction had dwindled to about 50 percent (Rothstein and Miles 1996). To meet the prohibitive costs of testing, cash-strapped schools, particularly those in urban and rural areas, have paid for testing from funds originally designated for hiring teachers, fixing leaking roofs, and buying new books.

One unanticipated problem with high-stakes testing is that administrative costs have been not one-time debits, but continuous expenses. To keep up with the paperwork, state governments have created bureaucracies within bureaucracies-Offices of Educational Accountability, Offices of Test Administration and Reporting, Offices of Standards and Measurement-while simultaneously reducing other staff, including teachers, to stay within budget.

The annual cost of high-stakes testing rivals the gross national products of some small countries, somewhere between $20 and $50 billion, or 5.5-14 percent of every dollar spent for public schools (Center for Education Policy 2003). So what has the annual expenditure of $20-50 billion bought for America's children? From all available evidence, these billions of dollars have improved almost nothing.

Ostensibly, one reason for crafting expensive testing systems was to assure that public schools adhered to high standards. Yet, the "subjects tested" and the difficulty of exams vary by state. Furthermore, the aforementioned $20-50 billion does not take into account the costs of remediation for children who fail to make the grade. For example, if only 5 percent of New York City's children fail the state exam-an impossibly optimistic number-holding these students back a year would cost an additional half-billion dollars (Education Priorities Panel 1999). Raising the bottom 50 percent of low-performing districts to the average level of performance would cost an additional $25 billion-just in New York City. For the past few years, many urban districts (Los Angeles most notoriously) have attempted to implement a "no social promotion" policy only to discover that they lacked the funds and the physical space to retain failing students.

Mathis (2003) estimated that the new accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind would force state governments to increase their expenditures on education by 30 percent. In responding to NCLB, some wealthy schools have created new positions-deans of finance or assistant principals of accountability-whose full-time job is to keep the school in compliance with the numerous tenets of the law. These administrators, though necessary, were hired at a cost equal to the salaries of three to four new teachers per year (Robelen 2003).

The Benefits of High-Stakes Accountability

Because test performance has become the sole criterion for success, other measures such as student motivation, teacher satisfaction, and preparation for college are rarely mentioned in discussions of high-stakes accountability. Data indicated that student motivation is low and getting worse (National Center for Education Statistics 2003), teacher attrition is high and getting higher (Rose and Gallup 2003), and more than half of today's high school graduates will not be ready for college-level math or science (Giegerich 2003; Greene and Winters 2002; National Center for Education Statistics 1996).

The California Department of Education (2003) issued a news release on August 15, 2003, detailing the improvements in student performance in all subjects and at all grade levels for five consecutive years on STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting), its state exam. California also administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, a nationally normed achievement exam given since 1969. The performance of California students on the NAEP over the same time period, however, tells a very different story. According to the national test, student achievement in California was mixed during the past five years-scores were up in mathematics at grade 4, down at grade 8; up in reading at grade 4, down at grade 8; and down in science in all grades, but slightly up in writing. While STAR showed consistent gains in achievement, the NAEP tests showed no significant change in achievement among California students for a decade (NAEP 2003). California is not alone in hyping selective test results as indicators of enhanced achievement. Florida Governor Jeb Bush touted students' accomplishments in a May 15, 2003, news release (Governor's Office 2003):