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

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

Some state governments offer superintendents monetary incentives worth more than a beginning teacher's salary for better scores. Paradoxically, administrators may be able to pocket these inducements at the same time that their schools go without essential supplies, teachers get laid off, and class sizes double.

To achieve AYP, some schools already have resorted to number fudging-funneling borderline students into GED programs, steering non-achievers into special education IEP diploma tracks, selectively admitting students to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and planning special field trips for low-achieving students so that they will be out of town on test days. Recently, the Department of Education in Massachusetts (Haney, Madaus, and Wheelock 2003, 4) claimed that 90 percent of students passed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) by not counting 17,000 students who would have significantly reduced the overall pass rate to around 70 percent. The reported passing rate for specific ethnic groups was even more distorted. For example, the passing rate for Latinos was reported at 70 percent, while in actuality it was 45 percent (Haney, Madaus, and Wheelock 2003, 4).

Such "data massaging" is not done to better serve the unique learning needs of students, but to make the numbers look better. In the new, billion-dollar accountability system, the voice of teachers-the only people who have daily contact with students-have little say. The system is designed to hold teachers accountable, yet teachers have no vote in determining the composition of classes, the curriculum, or the assessment.

Foster (2003, 174) tracked the development of standardized exams to the "factory model" of education where "students were products and teaching was the machinery to make the products." Popham (2003, 50) asserted that standardized tests "constitute a serious violation of any sort of truth-in-advertising precept. Standards-based tests don't measure what they pretend to measure. . . . In no case do these tests provide data that teachers can easily use to appraise their own instructional effectiveness."

Indeed, no professionals are held accountable in the same simplistic manner as teachers. Lawyers are not held accountable when their clients are sent to prison. Doctors say with resigned regularity that the operation was a success but the patient died anyway. If a patient smoked three packs of cigarettes per day and worked in an asbestos-filled environment, no one would blame the doctor if he couldn't miraculously cure a case of lung cancer. Yet, such bogus accountability is imposed on teachers with regularity. If an emotionally disturbed, learning disabled child lives with a homeless crack addict and ends up missing 40 percent of the school year, the teacher still is culpable for that student's performance on the standardized exam. With the new accountability system, having mainstreamed, learning-disabled, and emotionally disturbed students in a classroom can be detrimental for teachers who must post impressive gains in achievement.