Figuring it out together: Making assessment and accountability systems more actionable

In uncertain times, dialogue is everything

When the school year began last fall with the pandemic in full swing, everyone in the education policy and advocacy space seemed to be grappling with similar questions: How should we be handling assessment and accountability when our physical classrooms are empty and many students are missing from even our virtual ones? What benchmarks should we be looking at to make sure our kids are getting the instruction and support they need? And perhaps most important, how do we not lose sight of real equity concerns in this unprecedented moment? 

As the school year got underway, it became apparent that although many educators and policy makers had similar concerns and opinions on the key issues most important to them, as a field, we weren’t necessarily engaged in productive conversations with each other.

When the pandemic subsides and things return to a semblance of normal, the students who’ve been missing from our classrooms will return. We need to ask ourselves: How will we know we’re ready for them?

My colleagues and I realized that even with all the demands of an unpredictable year, we needed to take the time to foster a dialogue so that we could elucidate our differences and areas of common ground, and find ways we could work together effectively.

Convening for a common cause

After we’d identified the need for a dialogue, we engaged a diverse group representing a range of experience and sensibilities, including district and state leaders, parents, policy advocates, teacher union representatives, and others. Once these stakeholders were seated at the (virtual) table, we conducted a series of three convenings that included whole-group discussion as well as numerous breakout sessions.

I’m pleased to report that these conversations were rich, thought-provoking, and full of great ideas—and I’m even more pleased that we can now share a summary of them with you in a paper released today, “Convening for a common cause: Reimagining assessment and accountability to improve student learning.”

The past year has exposed some sobering realities in education. We see that many of our practices in recent years haven’t served our students as equitably as they should. This is a hard truth to confront, because we have all been working hard—many of us dedicating our lives to help students—under trying circumstances. Nevertheless, it’s important to be clear-eyed about the ways in which we need to improve. This paper is an important step in that direction.

Challenges and recommendations

As the paper shows, there are a lot of strong feelings about specific policy areas. Our meetings revealed areas of disagreement as well as strong alignment on the need to address assessment and accountability in our schools. Given the current environment, participants were wary of generalizations around whether or not to test, or how exactly schools and educators should be held accountable. But they did align around the need to examine assessment data in an appropriate and non-punitive context, to use that data to drive meaningful change, and to embrace innovation.

Our paper synthesizes the qualitative data that surfaced in the discussions, lays out the main challenges we face, and offers policy recommendations at both the federal and state level. We wanted our findings to be relevant and actionable for the broadest swath of readers possible. The paper examines four challenges and potential paths forward in the current environment:

• States and districts have a great need to understand how students, educators, and schools are doing—and how they can most equitably apply interventions and distribute resources.
• Despite the flexibility given to states under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), we still see persistent inequities and achievement gaps, as well as accountability systems that are seen as unsupportive and associated with punitive consequences.
• ESSA places much of the onus for change at the individual school level, when it may be that systemic policies at the district and state levels are most in need of change.
• Many states still struggle to close gaps, suggesting that assessments may lack cultural relevance and context, and the data they generate may not be actionable enough to effectively drive systems change.

We hope our paper helps federal and state stakeholders address the near-term implications of COVID-19, while informing impactful changes over the long term. When the pandemic subsides and things return to a semblance of normal, the students who’ve been missing from our classrooms will return. We need to ask ourselves: How will we know we’re ready for them? And how can we be sure we’re ready in a way that gives our students of color, low-income students, and English learners the same opportunities to thrive?

When the questions are this critical, we know the conversation has only just begun. At a time when kids need all the support they can get, an open and ongoing dialogue intentionally focused on meaningful change is more important than ever.