Finding the right balance is crucial to the
future of school accountability systems, the purpose of which is to create clear expectations for schools and districts to assess whether they are meeting them.
States can use a hyperlink to another part of their state website to provide parents and other users with a full
description of their school accountability system on district and school report cards, enabling states to reduce the length of their report cards and preventing duplicative information.
It does, however, provide some preliminary evidence that the form of reference bias that would be most problematic in the
context of a school accountability system may not be an important phenomenon in the CORE districts as a whole.
Promoters of school accountability systems based on rigorous testing often point to the high achievement of secondary - school students in those European and East Asian countries that use curriculum - based exit exams such as France's Baccalaureate and England's GCSE and A-level exams.
Using multiple sources of data, we present evidence that score manipulation is driven by local teachers» desire to help their students avoid sanctions associated with failure to meet exam standards, not the recent
creation of school accountability systems.
His work has influenced how we think about a range of education policies: test score volatility and the
design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race - conscious college admissions and the economic payoff of a community college education.
However, since the article was published, it has been pointed out (rightly) by Morgan Polikoff of USC that the U.S. Department of Education's (USDOE) waiver guidelines do not allow for a fully - controlled proportional model to be used by state education agencies as
part of their school accountability systems.
Yet a few school systems are moving forward with using student self - reports to systematically track the development of non-cognitive skills and even with including them as a
component of school accountability systems; others may well follow.
It hands significant authority back to the states on all the issues that matter: the content of academic standards and related assessments, the design
of school accountability systems, and interventions in low - performing schools.
Kane directed the Measures of Effective Teaching project for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which studied issues facing K - 12 and higher education, such as the design
of school accountability systems, and teacher recruitment and retention.
His work has spanned both K — 12 and higher education, covering topics such as the design
of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race - conscious college admissions and the earnings impacts of community colleges.
Coverage of the recent enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a major rewrite of the much - maligned No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), has rightly focused on Congress's decision to give states greater control over key issues such as the design
of school accountability systems and the certification and evaluation of teachers.
One reason researchers don't have much to say about these questions currently is that the No Child Left Behind Act effectively required all fifty states to adopt a common approach to the design
of school accountability systems.
Wisconsin just released new report cards as part
of a school accountability system to replace the No Child Left Behind law.
ESSA replaces many provisions contained in the previous reauthorization — the No Child Left Behind Act — to give states more authority in the design
of their school accountability systems and to encourage them to use measures beyond test scores to measure school performance.