Today’s National Review Online has an interesting article by Max Eden and Lindsey Burke. The DC schools have been used as an example of how a data-driven accountability system can lead to rapid improvements. Some schools in DC have shown astonishing improvements in attendance, graduation rates and other metrics beloved of the experts. Eden and Burke point out that exposés by the Washington Post and NPR show that most of this “improvement” is attributable to fraud.
As they put it:
Syllogisms have gone out of style in education, but the conclusion to this one ought to keep parents across the country up at night: (1) Washington, D.C.’s “expert driven” education reforms were hailed as a national model and emulated in districts nationwide; and (2) Most of the alleged progress in D.C. public schools turns out to have been fraudulent.
Naturally, the revelations about the rampant fraud school administrators engaged in while trying to meet the standards imposed on them has not caused a lot of soul searching among the experts who advocated for accountability.
For people who talk ceaselessly about “accountability,” experts have been curiously silent in the face of these revelations. Worse yet, the top-down mandates they implemented in D.C., intended to hold principals and teachers “accountable” for improving “outcomes,” have long since caught on across the country.
It’s bad enough that the “top-down mandates” approach has been imposed on K-12 public schools, but it’s even worse that it is now being applied to higher education. Learning Outcomes Assessment surely falls in this category as do the performance-based funding formulas that more and more states are adopting.
As public universities jockey for resources in states with performance-based funding, we should expect to see more fraud.
Eden and Burke conclude that what is needed in public schools is school choice. Allowing parents can move their children to schools that they consider to be effective is the ultimate form of bottom-up accountability. One might be able to make case for accountability in a system where students have no real choices about where they go to school, but where choice is available it’s hard to imagine a more direct form accountability than letting parents choose the schools they think are doing the best job of educating students.
There is a lesson here for higher education. If students had no choice about where they went to school, you might be able to make a case for the need to impose an accountability regime. But that’s not the case. Students seeking higher educations have abundant choices: they can go to four-year schools, two-year schools, private schools, public schools, for-profit schools, not-for-profit schools, brick-and-mortar schools, online schools, fun schools, serious schools, schools with water features, schools with Division I sports, schools with Division III sports, schools with lazy rivers, schools without lazy rivers … and the list could go on. One might (and I stress the might) be able to make the case that market forces don’t apply to public K-12 education and that thus some form accountability regime is needed, but it’s virtually impossible to make that case for higher ed. “School choice” has always been the norm in higher ed, and it might explain why American higher education is widely considered the best in the world, while our K-12 system is a global laggard.
If you are curious about how much market demand there is for learning outcomes assessment, I direct you to a recent report from NILOA (the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment).
In that report you will find this tidbit:
The larger the size and greater the selectivity of the institution, the less likely it is to employ a variety of assessment activities. For almost every category of assessment activity, the larger and more selective the institution, the less likely to employ various assessment approaches or use the results.
(There is something missing in the last sentence of that quotation, but is that’s how it reads in the report.)
More selective schools — the schools people most want to attend and that charge the most– do less assessment than less selective schools. This sounds like exactly the sort of market-based accountability that schools ought to pay attention to. If you waste resources on what one assessment critic has called “feel-good, fakey” assessment, then student will choose to attend a different school. That maybe overstating the extent to which students are even aware of assessment, but its clear that they are not giving weight to a school’s assessment program when they decide where to spend their money or accrue their debt. I don’t think this is an example of market failure. Rather, it’s a loud and clear assessment of the value of assessment.
Jerry Muller’s book The Tyranny of Metrics is looking more and more timely everyday.