COMMENTARY

Standards-Based Accountability's High Stakes

By Ronald A. Wolk, Ed Week

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the mantra of the school reform movement was “all children can learn.” This sentiment was in perfect harmony with our nation’s long-standing commitment to universal education—the promise that every child would have the opportunity to be educated to the level of his or her ability.

By any measure, our education system has failed to keep that promise. Although the evidence is abundant and well known, and so need not be detailed here, consider three indisputable facts that capture the essence of the system’s failure.

First: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, has reported for decades that an average of three out of 10 seniors score “proficient” or above in reading, writing, math, and science, and their scores generally decline as they move from the 4th grade to the 12th grade.

Second: Of every 100 students who start the 9th grade, about 30 drop out, and, according to recent studies, another 35 or so graduate without being adequately prepared either for college or the modern workplace. That means that about 65 percent of the nation’s young people are not being adequately educated.

Third: The brunt of the failure falls on poor and minority children, who are on the wrong side of an unyielding achievement gap. It is no coincidence that the gap is between white and most minority students. More than half of all African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students reach the 9th grade without being able to score proficient on reading and math tests. These students are more likely to fail the high-stakes tests and to drop out. They are least likely to attend college, and, if they do, they are most likely to leave without a degree.

To assume that these students fail because of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” as President George W. Bush suggested in making the case for the No Child Left Behind Act, is preposterous. Their failure is due to the hard bigotry that generations of these kids have suffered. And high common standards won’t rectify that. Indeed, they divert attention away from the real problem by creating the illusion that things will improve if students and teachers are held to even higher standards.

If that were even close to being true, how do we explain that nearly 30 years of unprecedented effort and enormous expenditures has not improved student performance, reduced the dropout rate, or closed the achievement gap?

I am convinced we have made little or no progress in improving education because we misdiagnosed the problem at the outset and, consequently, our efforts to improve student performance have been seriously off course.

That misdiagnosis arrived in April 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, the report of a federal commission that stunned the nation. Its major assumption was that ...

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