Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right

by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, Tamara Wilder

Book Overview

Yes, we should hold public schools accountable for effectively spending the vast funds with which they have been entrusted. But accountability policies like No Child Left Behind, based exclusively on math and reading test scores, have narrowed the curriculum, misidentified both failing and successful schools, and established irresponsible expectations for what schools can accomplish.

Instead of just grading progress in one or two narrow...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807749397
• ISBN13: 9780807749395
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Teachers College Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Required Reading

This is on my short list of books about education that everyone should read. I presume that EPI has put it in the hands of everyone in Congress, but it might be worth, after reading it yourself, passing it on to a local school board member. Whereas a lot of criticism of NCLB amounts to little more than an unbalanced rant and I would say that most criticism is unconstructive, Grading Education offers a comprehensive, compelling, and constructive critique. It's comprehensive in that it places NCLB within a (very interesting) discussion of the history of evaluation of schools, and constructive, not in the sense that it suggests a way to fix NCLB (that, the authors say, is impossible) but rather by offering a sensible alternative framework for "getting accountability right". The authors believe (rightly) that accountability is important, and (again rightly) that the particular method of democratic accountability through locally elected school boards simply doesn't work. (They do not ask whether NCLB, with all its flaws, when superimposed on a system of local democratic control is superior to local democratic control on its own, which I suspect it might be, but their aim is to influence future policy). The book ought to have a lot of influence over the debates around the re-authorisation, revision, or tacit abandonment of NCLB which, presumably, we'll start to have at some point. I hesitate to say too much about it, for fear of releasing you from the obligation of reading it. But the basic argument is as follows. Whereas NCLB has focused very narrowly on reading and math test scores, not only have Americans historically cared about a much richer set of goals for education, but they (including parents, school board members, and politicians) still do. They offer 8 goals or aims of education: promoting basic academic schools, critical thinking skills, appreciation of arts and literature, social skills and work ethic, Citizenship and community responsibility, physical health, and emotional health, they and enlist various thinkers from Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, through Horace Mann to Eisenhower and Nelson Rockerfeller (and contemporary surveys) in support of this richer conception. (If I can be forgiven a bit of self-promotion, I'd welcome feedback on how these goals fit with the goals I set out and defend in On Education ). In contrast to this rich view of the aims of education, we have developed measurement tools that are very crude. As one well known defender of progressive educational causes from the seventies (Richard M Nixon) put it: "To achieve this fundamental reform it will be necessary to develop broader and more sensitive instruments of learning than we now have. The National Institute for Education would take the lead in developing these new measurements of educational output. In doing so it should pay as much heed to what are called "immeasurables" of schooling (largely because no one has yet learned to measure them) such as r