A comparative and international history of school accountability can explore the relationships among individual national
histories of accountability policy and discourse and broader questions of international trends and patterns.
This paper examines the
effect of accountability policy on school practices and student outcomes with remarkably comprehensive and detailed data that include a multi-wave five - year survey of the census of public schools in Florida and administrative data on individual student performance over time.
There's also a growing consensus that in the next
generation of accountability policies, we must broaden the criteria beyond test scores, and the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), encourages this kind of creative rethinking.
For this reason, different exams often lead to different inferences about student mastery, regardless of whether any
type of accountability policy is in place.
«Experts will debate the
merits of accountability policies for years to come,» said Huffington Post authors Joshua Bleiberg, center coordinator for the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings and Darrell West, vice president of Governance Studies and the founding director for the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings.
Together, these two changes — measuring performance levels using a performance index with as many categories as possible and weighting growth more heavily than status — will go a considerable way toward improving the
design of accountability policy and reducing unintended consequences.
But several studies do show longer - term
effects of accountability policies; we have strong evidence from Raj Chetty and colleagues that impacts on test scores do predict impacts on other important life outcomes; and, again, many states appear poised to broaden accountability measures beyond just test scores.
While special education placement rates appeared to increase following the introduction
of the accountability policy in Chicago, this alone can explain only a small fraction of the observed achievement gains.
But a new regulation from the Department of Education allowing performance indexes go a long way toward improving the design
of accountability policy and reducing unintended consequences, says Morgan Polikoff.