The recent release of North Carolina’s ABCs testing data is already generating ripples of criticism and controversy. Hailed as one of the first comprehensive accountability programs in the nation, the ABCs system has measured student proficiency and school growth since 1996-97.
Unfortunately, ABCs results for 2004-05 show only 69 percent of state schools meeting expected or high growth, a drop of 6 percentage points from the year before. While state bureaucrats admit student performance is faltering, they ignore the program’s obvious design flaws and the fact that its reward system is fundamentally misguided. What’s the problem? For starters, current policies hamstring teachers, preventing them from tailoring methods to the actual students in their classroom.
Each year, teachers are expected to teach this year’s students based on last year’s data. Teachers are given post-test results from the previous year as a baseline for students, ostensibly to provide information about the skills and proficiency of their incoming class. One obvious problem with this method, however, is that classroom demographics can change considerably from year to year — incoming students maydiffer substantially in skills and aptitude from the group that sat for last year’s test. Teachers not only begin the year with insufficient information, they are also judged unfairly. Financial bonuses are meted out based on a school’s (not an individual teacher’s) performance. This works fine for a good teacher in a strong school (making expected or high growth), but what about the standout teacher toiling in a school full of disadvantaged students? Under the ABCs system, that teacher receives nothing — clearly a disincentive for quality teachers to stay in the schools that need them most. Smart teachers, knowing they cannot possiblyaffect all students in a struggling school, flock to schools where well-educated, affluent parents will compensate for poor teaching. At-risk kids are left stranded in failing schools.
The result is a system roiling with internal politics. Large sums of bonus money (an estimated $94 million last year) are tagged to school performance, so the heat is on to find a way to make schools look good. State bureaucrats are caving under the pressure. This year, when sixth-grade reading scores came in alarmingly low (for the second year in a row), the State Board of Education made the decision to remove them altogether from growth formula calculations. Including the scores would have resulted in only 22 percent of middle schools making expected or strong gains, compared to the 47 percent who earned this designation when the scores were dropped (still nothing to gloat about). While the scoring formula may be problematic, as state bureaucrats claimed, it is also highly likely that middle-school students are reading poorly. But in this case, politics won out. As Henry Adams wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, “practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”
So, what’s the remedy? First, teachers need better baseline information about incoming students, so they can tailor teaching methods to actual student proficiency. Teachers must then be held accountable for individual students’ academic growth under their teaching, not for averages of groups. Rewarding teachers with merit pay would encourage quality teachers to stay the course and work hard, whether they are laboring in affluent schools or inner-city schools. Merit pay would also short-circuit much of the politicking surrounding school “growth” designations, as bonuses would be determined individually rather than collectively. Good schools would continue to stand out, and disadvantaged schools would have the requisite financial leverage to attract and retain quality teachers.
In the final analysis, attaining high student achievement and authentic accountability will require more than altering “growth formulas”or whitewashing troubling results. Such changes may make bureaucrats feel better, but they won’t help students read or write. Ignoring the facts might work in the world of politics, but it will earn you a failing grade in any classroom.
Lindalyn Kakadelis is director of the North Carolina Education Alliance.