For the past few months, Marc Tucker, of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has written a series of blog posts in which he lays out his plans for comprehensive reforms to bring more accountability to American education.
Tucker began back in February with a post entitled, “NCLB, California and Accountability in all its Guises” in which he argued that there is no evidence that test-based accountability helps students, teachers, or schools improve student achievement.
Tucker went on to elaborate on this theme in “The Failure of Test-Based Accountability”. Here, Tucker argues that testing has not only been unhelpful but downright harmful to the profession of teaching.
In his next post, “Accountability and Motivation”, Tucker evaluates various options for bringing greater accountability to American education.
Then, drawing on a career theme for his work, Tucker focuses, in “Accountability: What the Top Performers Do”, on how the top performing school districts around the world set up their successful accountability systems. Essentially, tests are used only to hold students, rather than teachers and schools as in the United States, accountable. This takes place as students know exactly which courses and tests they must take in order to move on to the career or university they have chosen and as their diplomas display exactly which courses they took and how they did on those courses.
Next, in “Accountability and the Modern Teachers’ Union”, Tucker explains how he feels the defensive and political position of modern American teachers’ unions has not aided the profession. Rather, he argues the teaching profession should do what other professions have done in the United States and what teachers have already done in countries with more successful education systems: boost the profession by making it harder to become a teacher. Once this takes place, there will be a stock of better teachers leading to better student results leading to higher respect for the profession leading to higher pay for teachers. Everyone is happy.
Following up, Tuckers writes three successive posts, here and here and here, about his vision for an overall improvement of the American educational accountability system. Tucker also sums up his plans in this post, in which he lays out a plan for four comprehensive tests given to students through their public school career. These tests would be expensive, but the fact that there would only be four would make up for this, and the benefits of good testing aligned to academic and professional goals would be well worth it. Moreover, the system would give more time for teachers to be accountable to each other.
Tucker concludes the series with “The Federal Role in State Education Accountability Systems”, which discusses the means by which the federal government can play a helpful role in facilitating this plan without intruding on state and local rights.
For those especially interested in macro-education reform, these posts are very much worth your time and effort. Tucker is an education veteran who has explored many education models and seeks to synthesize them to help American education.
For more information, please visit: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/
