On his Education Week blog, Marc Tucker discusses the National Center for Education and the Economy’s latest report, which calls for replacing the current system of test-based accountability with a system much more likely to result in improvements in student performance.
Following is an excerpt describing the plan outlined in the new report:
Fixing Our National Accountability System says the alternative to the kind of punitive accountability measures now dominating American policy is not just a different accountability system but a different kind of education system. The report’s proposal does not focus on getting rid of our worst teachers, but on producing a surplus of very good teachers and making sure those teachers are equitably distributed among our students, so that students who are harder to educate get more of them than those who are easier to educate. The countries that outperform the United States in comparative studies of student performance are recruiting their teachers from the upper ranges of their high school graduates, greatly raising the standards for getting into schools of education, making sure that prospective teachers have a very strong education in the subjects they will teach and making sure they learn their craft with early and comprehensive experiences in real school settings overseen by experienced mentor teachers. They are attracting first class candidates into the teaching profession by offering them starting salaries comparable to those of high status professionals, using career ladders to create real careers in teaching, and recruiting and training school leaders who are very good at making schools the kind of places that true professionals want to work in.
This blog also covered Tucker’s recent series on school accountability. Please follow this link for more details: https://www.coreeducationllc.com/blog2/marc-tucker-designing-a-better-accountability-system/
Read the full blog here: http://bit.ly/1kXVgbV
Access Fixing our National Accountability System here: http://www.ncee.org/accountability/
