The Future of Test-Based Educational Accountability PDF Download

Author: Katherine Ryan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135590885
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In recent decades testing has become a much more visible and high-stakes accountability mechanism that is now seen as a powerful tool that can be used to drive school improvement. The purpose of this book is to identify and analyze the key issues associated with test-based educational accountability and to chart the future of educational accountability research. Chapter contributions are intended to be forward looking rather than a compendium of what has happened in the past. The book provides an accessible discussion of issues such as validity, test equating, growth modeling, fairness for special populations, causal inferences, and misuses of accountability data.

Author: Laura S. Hamilton
Publisher: Rand Corporation
ISBN: 0833033980
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Test-based accountability systems that attach high stakes to standardized test results have raised a number of issues on educational assessment and accountability. Do these high-stakes tests measure student achievement accurately? How can policymakers and educators attach the right consequences to the results of these tests? And what kinds of tradeoffs do these testing policies introduce? This book responds to the growing emphasis on high-stakes testing and offers recommendations for more-effective test-based accountability systems.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book was written in response to school policymaking's growing emphasis on testing. During the 1990s, a number of states implemented educational accountability systems that assigned consequences for students, teachers, or schools on the basis of student test scores. The 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the "No Child Left Behind NCLB act of 2001") makes such test-based accountability a requirement for all 50 states. The goal of the law is ". . . to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments." The purpose of this book is to help educators and educational policymakers understand test-based accountability so they can use it effectively in the service of this goal. States have considerable flexibility in developing their accountability systems, so long as those systems have at their core an appropriate feedback mechanism. Data on student achievement are collected annually and compared with a specific target. Failure to attain the target leads to successively harsher sanctions for schools, including ultimately reconstitution; success leads to recognition and financial rewards. when combined with greater flexibility from federal regulations and parental options to obtain supplemental educational services or move students from less-successful schools, these test-based incentives are supposed to lead to improvement for all schools.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309128145
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
In recent years there have been increasing efforts to use accountability systems based on large-scale tests of students as a mechanism for improving student achievement. The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a prominent example of such an effort, but it is only the continuation of a steady trend toward greater test-based accountability in education that has been going on for decades. Over time, such accountability systems included ever-stronger incentives to motivate school administrators, teachers, and students to perform better. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education reviews and synthesizes relevant research from economics, psychology, education, and related fields about how incentives work in educational accountability systems. The book helps identify circumstances in which test-based incentives may have a positive or a negative impact on student learning and offers recommendations for how to improve current test-based accountability policies. The most important directions for further research are also highlighted. For the first time, research and theory on incentives from the fields of economics, psychology, and educational measurement have all been pulled together and synthesized. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education will inform people about the motivation of educators and students and inform policy discussions about NCLB and state accountability systems. Education researchers, K-12 school administrators and teachers, as well as graduate students studying education policy and educational measurement will use this book to learn more about the motivation of educators and students. Education policy makers at all levels of government will rely on this book to inform policy discussions about NCLB and state accountability systems.

Author: Jim Horn
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623963931
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
With new student assessments and teacher evaluation schemes in the planning or early implementation phases, this book takes a step back to examine the ideological and historical grounding, potential benefits, scholarly evidence, and ethical basis for the new generation of test based accountability measures. After providing the political and cultural contexts for the rise of the testing accountability movement in the 1960s that culminated almost forty years later in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, this book then moves on to provide a policy history and social policy analysis of value-added testing in Tennessee that is framed around questions of power relations, winners, and losers. In examining the issues and exercise of power that are sustained in the long-standing policy of standardized testing in schools, this work provides a big picture perspective on assessment practices over time in the U. S.; by examining the rise of value-added assessment in Tennessee, a fine-grained and contemporary case is provided within that larger context. The last half of the book provides a detailed survey of the research based critiques of value-added methodology, while detailing an aggressive marketing campaign to make value-added modeling (VAM) a central component of reform strategies following NCLB. The last chapter and epilogue place the continuation of test-based accountability practices within the context of an emerging pushback against privatization, high stakes testing, and other education reforms. This book will be useful to a wide audience, including teachers, parents, school leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students of educational history, policy, and politics.

Author: George W. Elford
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810843851
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
This text addresses the problem of the overuse of standardized testing. It argues that so-called test-based reform has given rise to the "cram curriculum" and turned schools into test-prep centres. Overlooked are teachers, who observe students, and are the primary source of information on learning.

Author: Dorothea Anagnostopoulos
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
ISBN: 1612505333
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The Infrastructure of Accountability brings together leading and emerging scholars who set forth an ambitious conceptual framework for understanding the full impact of large-scale, performance-based accountability systems on education. Over the past 20 years, schools and school systems have been utterly reshaped by the demands of test-based accountability. Interest in large-scale performance data has reached an unprecedented high point. Yet most education researchers focus primarily on questions of data quality and the effectiveness of data use. In this bold and thought-provoking volume, the contributors look beneath the surface of all this activity to uncover the hidden infrastructure that supports the production, flow, and use of data in education, and explore the impact of these large-scale information systems on American schooling. These systems, the editors note, “sit at the juncture of technical networks, work practices, knowledge production, and moral order.

Author: John L. Rury
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 197883229X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
An Age of Accountability highlights the role of test-based accountability as a policy framework in American education from 1970 to 2020. For more than half a century, the quest to hold schools and educators accountable for academic achievement has relied almost exclusively on standardized assessment. The theory of change embedded in almost all test-based accountability programs held that assessment with stipulated consequences could lead to major improvements in schools. This was accomplished politically by proclaiming lofty goals of attaining universal proficiency and closing achievement gaps, which repeatedly failed to materialize. But even after very clear disappointments, no other policy framework has emerged to challenge its hegemony. The American public today has little confidence in institutions to improve the quality of goods and services they provide, especially in the public sector. As a consequence, many Americans continue to believe that accountability remains a vital necessity, even if educators and policy scholars disagree.

Author: Robert L. Linn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
The ever-increasing reliance on student performance on tests as a way of holding schools and educators accountable is discussed. Comparisons are made between state accountability requirements and the accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. The resulting mixed messages being given by the two systems are discussed. Features of NCLB accountability and state accountability systems that contribute to the identification of a school as meeting goals according to NCLB but failing to do so according to the state accountability system, or vise versa, are discussed. These include the multiple hurdles of NCLB, the comparison of performance against a fixed target rather than changes in achievement, and the definition of performance goals. Some suggestions are provided for improving the NCLB accountability system.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9087909020
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
In an age when responses to accountability regimes in education range from hysteria to cynicism, this volume reframes accountability in narratives of collective, participatory responsibility that leave one feeling inspired and ready to act. The authors, all scholar-practitioners speaking from contexts spanning leadership, policy, literacy, indigenous education, and diversity, explore ways to navigate accountability discourses with wisdom, courage and hope.—Tara Fenwick, PhD, Head, Dept. of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia. In this collection, the preoccupation of educational institutions with accountability is critically examined by writers who work in the field. They consider the impact of accountability regimes on professional practice and the learning agenda, challenge current policies and call for a rethinking of accountability. The skills and knowledge associated with this work is what we should hold schools accountable to. It is, as you see from reading these contributions, time for change.—Stephen Murgatroyd, PhD, Chief Scout, The Innovation Expedition Inc. About the Book From their diverse perspectives, nine educational practitioners discuss current educational accountability policies and how these affect students, educators, learning and teaching in a variety of settings, from K-12 schools to post-secondary institutions and government agencies. The authors combine theory, research and their day-to-day experiences to reflect on the challenges posed by realities such as outcomes-based curricula, high-stakes testing, standardized reporting and management by objectives. By examining current accountability initiatives and their effects in relation to core values of public education such as equity, diversity, democracy and opportunity, this book offers educators a range of insights for thinking about and doing education differently.