Helen Ladd writes in the Brookings blog about an alternative to school accountability – an inspection and review system for schools:
Inspection and review systems use professional inspectors to make periodic visits to schools – and ideally also to districts. The inspectors review school documents, talk to school leaders and teachers, and may also survey parents. They use a standard protocol to evaluate the quality of the policies and practices at each school, and to report on student outcomes. Their written reports are publicly available.
Such systems have been used extensively in other countries such as England, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. And similar systems, often referred to as school quality reviews, are currently in use in New York City and in Massachusetts for charter schools and low performing schools.
This approach has many potential benefits.
The individual school reports provide useful information to schools, policymakers, and also parents by highlighting both the strengths and the weaknesses of the school, with particular attention to how well the school is addressing the needs of the students it serves. In addition, the inspection office can use information from the individual reports to disseminate information on best practices.
Further, the inspections draw attention to school activities that have the potential to generate a broader range of educational outcomes than just performance on test scores. These include the skills needed for good citizenship, healthy interpersonal relationships, and personal fulfillment. The effectiveness of such systems is not easy to measure. Much of the research has been descriptive, and is based on survey responses about how the inspections affected school processes. The few studies that have focused on the single narrow measure of student test scores have found small positive effects.
This approach treats schools fairly by holding them accountable only for the practices under their control and by alerting higher level policy makers to the additional resources or capacity they may need to meet the needs of their students.
With the new ESSA, the time is ripe for change.
States now have more authority to try out new approaches. Importantly, any such system will require professionally trained inspectors—perhaps former superintendents, school principals or teachers—and also well-designed inspection rubrics. That will make an inspection system far more costly than the current test-based system. The costs, though, will depend on a number of design features over which states or districts would have control, such as the scale and frequency of the reviews. In addition, some of the costs would be offset by any educational benefits that accrue from the closer monitoring of school processes.
The potential benefits are great. The challenge is to convince policymakers that qualitative judgements, not just quantifiable outcomes such as test scores, have an important role to play in raising the quality of schools by assuring that they attend to the needs of all their students and foster a broad range of student outcomes.
For more, see: The Brookings Blog
