91涩漫

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 91涩漫 Newsletter

As John Adams observed, 鈥渇acts are stubborn things.鈥� The facts, as education policy writer Chad Aldeman recently , are that No Child Left Behind coincided with some of the fastest achievement gains on record for Black, Hispanic and low-income students, and when that accountability framework loosened after 2015, scores fell 鈥� fastest for the students at the lower end of the achievement continuum.

To be sure, the (pre-COVID) decline that set in during the mid-2010s had many causes, including smartphones, the aftermath of the 2008 recession and a steep drop in time spent reading long-form writing. But few serious scholars treat the link between rigorous accountability and student progress as a coincidence. Most see its rise and fall as a major driver of both the era of steady improvement and its disheartening retreat.

As a former superintendent of Newark’s public schools, deputy chancellor in New York City and New Jersey’s commissioner of education (and, as importantly, as an AP U.S. History Teacher for four years), I have seen firsthand that the value of meaningful accountability is profound. Is there any other domain in American life that doesn鈥檛 operate on the principle that 鈥渨hat gets measured gets done鈥� or that sets high-performance standards but then eschews objectively measuring whether they are met?

Anyone who says you can have high standards for students and then never measure whether they have been achieved has never spent a minute in a classroom. Isn鈥檛 there also a message in the fact that the handful of states, notably Mississippi and Louisiana, that have bucked the current education recession have dug in on accountability (improving upon the NCLB playbook)? 

I have seen accountability鈥檚 profound benefits but am well aware of its flaws: narrowing curriculum at the expense of untested subjects like art, emphasizing the anti-educational practice of teaching test-taking skills, over-indexing the relevance of test performance to the exclusion of other indicators of learning and more. I have also seen how powerful political forces work relentlessly to undermine state- or federally imposed accountability measures: diluting standards, eliminating high school exit exams, scamming parents by reducing passing scores to artificially boost proficiency rates and substituting a laughably inflated grading system for objective evidence of learning.   

Only rarely do opponents challenge accountability鈥檚 core purposes of shedding light on and advancing learning in schools, districts or populations that are underperforming. Accountability came under pressure less on the merits than because it drew resistance 鈥� from teachers unions wary of being judged by student results, from a generalized hostility to any that compromises local authority, from that recoiled at testing as a matter of personal philosophy or due to NCLB鈥檚 emphasis on proficiency (whether a student cleared a fixed bar) over growth (the rate of progress toward that bar).

As Aldeman persuasively argues, the answer is not to abandon accountability but to support its evolution in a manner that preserves its strengths and mitigates its flaws. Assessments will never be perfect, but they can be and are being improved. Louisiana鈥檚 work in partnership with Johns Hopkins is a prime example. Other states and districts should follow the lead of the many schools that have proven that art and non-tested activities actually improve performance in reading and math 鈥� or that teaching the skills and knowledge embodied in high standards rather than test-taking skills is not teaching to the test but the very essence of sound educational practice.

None of these salutary practices, however, addresses the core problem inherent in the vagaries of politics 鈥� the recurring pattern of yielding to political pressures to weaken accountability. I have lived this in both New York and New Jersey: a tough, accountability-centered body of reforms yields broad achievement gains, which then retreat when a subsequent administration abandons them in response to political opposition. Energized by the understandable, if often injurious, human tendency to replace hard expectations with more comfortable ones, opposition to serious educational accountability has proven an enduring feature of the policy landscape.    

The replacement of NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 reflected precisely this phenomenon at the federal level. The hard truth is that gains driven by accountability are especially fragile 鈥� vulnerable to reversal every time political winds shift or a new administration takes office.

A promising path to resisting this regressive tendency is to embed accountability in a place far less vulnerable to political revision and changing administrations. Working alongside local, federal-compliant performance standards, accountability should be situated in the purchasing decisions states and districts make every year. 

Outcomes-based contracting, like state or federal accountability mandates, measures results and attaches real consequences 鈥� aligning the district’s and the provider鈥檚 interests squarely with explicit learning objectives from the outset. Providers are compensated based on whether students demonstrate measurable learning gains, not on what materials they deliver. For children from under-resourced communities, a contract that ends when materials ship is not a neutral arrangement 鈥� it is a guarantee that no one answers when the work fails.

A provider with a genuine stake in the outcome builds responsive interventions 鈥� adjusting, coaching, reteaching 鈥� until gains are achieved. That is a fundamentally different accountability relationship than education has ever demanded of its vendors. 

The infrastructure to change this is beginning to take shape. The Center for Outcomes-Based Contracting, working with more than 70 districts as well as leading providers, is building shared standards and cross-district learning that enable both sides to enter these agreements with confidence.

Harvard鈥檚 Center for Education Policy Research is the impact of outcomes-based contracting on Indiana’s literacy strategy for grades 6 to 8. The state is also among several that are restructuring how they contract for literacy outcomes, focusing on middle grades where targeted, high-impact supports can make a meaningful difference. Nationwide, intervention for students above third grade has historically lagged.

 The lesson of the last quarter-century of school reform is not that accountability was misguided. But it can and should be reinforced by aligning vendor incentives with explicit student learning goals 鈥� putting accountability close enough to the classroom that there is no waiver to request, no reauthorization to wait for, no administration change to hide behind. 

Accountability at the contract level ultimately says to every provider what historic performance expectations have been saying to every district and school for decades: You will be judged by how much children are learning 鈥� and accept the consequences when they are not.

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 91涩漫鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.