History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Accountability: How and why a boring report made me weep
- 06-02-2011
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Blog by James Gee/Huffington Post
The National Research Council, a part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, has just put out its report on "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education". It is hard to believe that such a boring sounding report could be of the "read it and weep" sort. But for anyone who cares about children, teachers, schools, and our country, it is an emotional read. We all know that the federal government and the states have, for years now, used large-scale tests to hold teachers, principals, and schools accountable for how much students learn. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and high school exit exams are two examples with which the report deals. The National Research Council established a Committee on Incentives and Test-based Accountability "to review and synthesize research about how incentives affect behavior and to consider the implications of that research for educational accountability systems that attach incentives to test results" (Summary, p. S1). The report makes many disturbing points; here is but one of them from a summary of the report that anyone can downloaded free: (more...)
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