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Making magic: linking assessment and accountability: we must be able to articulate our assumptions about assessment and accountability and be able to test the value of those assumptions.

Article Excerpt
It's broken. The link between assessment and accountability is broken. In theory, if assessment and accountability are linked together, student achievement will rise. That has been the working theory of educational policymakers at the state and federal levels in recent years. Require annual assessments of student achievement and hold schools and districts accountable for demonstrating gains.

The theory worked for a while. Many--if not most--schools achieved annual increases in student achievement scores. California's Academic Performance Index, which measures gains in student achievement across the whole range of student performance levels, rose steadily. Some schools even saw gains in meeting No Child Left Behind's Annual Yearly Progress, although that only measures gains at the "proficient" level.

It seemed that the theory linking assessment and accountability was working, but the 2004 test results raise doubts about the theory. Newspapers reported the test results with headlines such as, "District fails exit exam," or "Test results flat." What happened? Assessment and accountability were linked, but achievement did not continue to rise. Is the theory wrong?

At the very least, the theory linking assessment and accountability is too simplistic, since it does not describe why or how the theory should work. In essence, it is a magician's black hat theory. Add assessments and accountability into a hat, pass the magician's wand over the hat three times, and out comes a rabbit--oops, I mean, achievement. The theory assumes that what happens in the hat is sufficient to produce achievement. But what was supposed to happen in the hat?

Awareness of the system

As educational leaders, we have operated on our beliefs about the contents of the magician's hat. The first item in the black hat was awareness of the assessment and accountability system. We began with awareness of the new statewide assessment tool, the SAT-9. We scrambled to find out what the test covered and to find tools that would raise awareness of the assessment for teachers and students. Some districts spent incredible sums on test prep companies that teach us how to teach our students to weed out incorrect answers and guess smartly. Was the magic in learning how to estimate knowledge?

Alignment to standards...

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