March 14, 2008

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UFT’s Accountability Framework: Fixing The Schools, Rather Than Fixing Blame

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 8:24 am

On Thursday morning, UFT President Randi Weingarten unveiled the UFT’s accountability framework in a speech before a meeting of the Association for a Better New York [ABNY].

The accountability framework is our contribution to the public debate over how schools and school districts should be held accountable for the achievement of their students. [It is the product of an effort mandated by a resolution of our November Delegate Assembly.] Our goal is to organize accountability in a way that provides a road map on what a school and a school district needs to do to improve the quality of the education their students. As Randi said in her ABNY speech, a system of accountability in New York City and in American education more generally should be focused on “capacity-building – not finger-pointing.”

To these ends, our system of accountability was guided by three principles. First, accountability has to be transparent, so that educators, parents and the public at large can readily understand how a school is being evaluated and what needs to be done to improve it; second, it must be fair, assessing all of the school’s work and viewing it in context; and third, it must be accurate, employing broad and comprehensive measures that examine all of the key indicators of a successful school.

In our view, there are four pillars of a successful school, and they are the four areas in which a specific school would be graded: [1] academic achievement, [2] a safe, orderly learning environment, [3] teamwork for student achievement, and [4] the responsibility of the school district to the school. To provide a picture of how the pillars of this framework would work in practice, we developed accountability reports for elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. Each report begins with a school portrait that provides essential information about the student population and school faculty, as well as an overview of the school’s resources. A breakout of the four pillars consume the remainder of the report.

In each pillar, the reports employ multiple measures in order to get the fullest and most finely granulated picture of a school’s work. Our measures are based on hard quantitative data, such as a school’s graduation rate and student attendance rate; qualitative data, obtained from the on-site interviews and observations of an independent quality review team; and survey data, obtained from a survey of staff, parents and high school students. Standardized test scores play a role as hard data, but they are put in proper perspective, as one source of information in a field of multiple measures.

One can see how these measures play out in the all important area of academic achievement. It is broken into three graded components, [1] academic performance — the school’s absolute standing on such measures as graduation, [2] academic progress or advancement — the school’s record of moving its students forward academically, no matter what their starting point, and [3] curriculum — the richness, the robustness and the rigor of the curriculum the school provides to its students. To obtain a fair and accurate picture of the academic achievement of a school, we look not simply at a single year’s data, which can be distorted by random variations in annual cohorts, but examine three year averages. Since schools operate with vast differences in student populations, we examine a school’s performance against that of similar schools, using a modified form of the state’s “similar schools” measure in which schools are divided into quartiles based on the proportion of Special Education students, English Language Learners and students living in poverty [Title One eligible]. To understand how well a school is serving its neediest and most challenging students, the data is disaggregated by these same student populations. Lastly, curriculum is evaluated by a combination of survey data and qualitative data.

Similarly, the pillar on a safe, orderly school environment employs hard quantitative date [crimes], survey data and qualitative data. It also looks at the guidance and intervention services, such as peer mediation and conflict resolution, provided by the school. Teamwork focused on student achievement is essential to a school’s success, and the same combination of data provides a picture of whether or not the school has a healthy cooperative culture focused on student achievement.

Schools thrive when all the stakeholders take responsibility for their performance and their improvement. Consequently, our framework has a 360 degree system of accountability, which flows from the top-down as well as from the bottom-up. In the fourth pillar, the Department of Education is evaluated in how well it performs its obligations to the school in three general areas, [1] provision of resources, [2] oversight, and [3] provision of curriculum.

It is our hope that the UFT’s proposed framework initiates a vigorous debate over both the ends of accountability and the best means to achieve these ends. We believe it vital that accountability not be reduced to producing high scores on two tests a year, but considers all of the indicators of a education that teaches the whole child; that accountability hold everyone — from the faculty of a school to the leaders of the school system — responsible for doing their share to improve the quality of education; and that accountability be directed to fixing schools, not fixing blame.

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