Accountability Through School System Performance Reports
One outcome of No Child Left Behind is the annual reporting of how well (or not) individual schools and entire school districts are doing with regard to basic academic progress vis-a-vis grade level goals and guidelines in targeted areas of learning. A cursory review of any particular state or county's report card can be both disheartening and horrifying to the casual observer. It is important to note that a nonperforming status or a poor grade does not necessarily indicate that a school should be shut down. In some cases, schools may have actually improved when compared to a previous year's report. While the downside is that so many schools appear to be missing preestablished benchmarks for simple adequate progress, the upside is that the general public has a chance to see which local schools are succeeding or failing. The consensus is that accountability can be an important step toward real and substantive change in public education, how we achieve and measure it continues to be an unresolved challenge. New methods of accountability measurement and reporting must be interpreted carefully to avoid unwarranted and hasty decisions pertaining to whether individual schools have the capacity to improve.
If one considers the implementation of NCLB as a work in progress, then there is hope because it has represented a workable starting point for policymakers and educators. Shifting the paradigm for how public education is delivered will not be an easy task, especially since there are so many competing interests and agendas involved. Establishing accountability as a hallmark of this federal legislation not only raises the bar for all school systems, it provides the basis by which all stakeholders can help to ensure that the components of the mandate make sense and are fair to those who are actually being evaluated -- schools, teachers, and students. The notion of grading local schools and school systems is probably the single most important incentive for raising the expectations and standards being applied in elementary and secondary schools. Although administrators and teachers have been overburdened and underfunded during these early years of NCLB, the continued nuancing and expected amendments to the original piece of legislation bode well for elevating academic expectations, standards, and accountability.
If one considers the implementation of NCLB as a work in progress, then there is hope because it has represented a workable starting point for policymakers and educators. Shifting the paradigm for how public education is delivered will not be an easy task, especially since there are so many competing interests and agendas involved. Establishing accountability as a hallmark of this federal legislation not only raises the bar for all school systems, it provides the basis by which all stakeholders can help to ensure that the components of the mandate make sense and are fair to those who are actually being evaluated -- schools, teachers, and students. The notion of grading local schools and school systems is probably the single most important incentive for raising the expectations and standards being applied in elementary and secondary schools. Although administrators and teachers have been overburdened and underfunded during these early years of NCLB, the continued nuancing and expected amendments to the original piece of legislation bode well for elevating academic expectations, standards, and accountability.
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