Georgia Supt. John Barge’s decision to abandon PARCC’s Common Core-aligned tests damage the concept of transparency-as-accountability. (Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)
It was no surprise that Georgia announced this week that it is ditching Common Core-aligned reading and math tests developed by Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Career consortia of states for its own battery of exams. After all, the state’s chief schools officer, John Barge, had hinted at such a move over the past couple of months, especially after opponents of the standards began pushing back against efforts by the superintendent and Gov. Nathan Deal to continue implementation. By deciding not to ditch the tests for cost reasons (a red herring given how much the Peach State and its peers spend on wasteful programs and practices such as special education ghettos), Barge and Deal thought they could satisfy Common Core foes while still continuing implementation. But considering how badly movement conservatives and others opposed to the standards want a clear victory — and not just a moratoriums on implementing standards as has happened in Indiana and Michigan — they will not let Barge or Deal off the hook until they announce that the state will abandon the standards altogether.
Common Core supporters want to downplay the Peach State’s decision, and the move made earlier this year by Alabama to use a Common Core-aligned exam developed by testing giant ACT instead of that from PARCC and Smarter Balanced, the other coalition of states developing Common Core-aligned tests. They definitely want to ignore the noise coming out of Florida, as the state’s top two legislators, at the behest of movement conservatives in the Republican Party opposed to the standards (and threatening to wreak havoc on their future election prospects), are pushing Gov. Rick Scott and Education Commissioner Tony Bennett to abandon the tests as well. Typical is Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s blog President Checker Finn, who declares on the think tank’s blog that it didn’t matter that other states may ditch PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests. He argues that while ditching the tests will “forfeit one of the benefits of commonality”, it doesn’t mean that those states will abandon the standards altogether. Supposed Chicken Littles such as former Fordham staffer Andy Smarick are, in Finn’s view, worried about nothing. Argues Finn: “Better for states to drop out than to fake it.”
Sure, Checker. What Finn fails to acknowledge is that Georgia’s decision and that of other states to ditch the PARCC and Smarter Balanced has numerous consequences — and not just for Common Core implementation. For conservative reformers dismayed with the No Child Left Behind Act (as well as for centrist Democrat reformers still supporting President Barack Obama’s effort to eviscerate the law), Georgia’s move also makes it harder for them to advance their dearly-held idea of common curricula standards without common accountability.
As Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle explained last week, an underlying idea behind PARCC and Smarter Balanced is that multi-state testing regimes could advance transparency and accountability by effectively wrestling the setting of test proficiency targets (or cut scores) out of the purview of state boards of education, which often set the goals so low that they make a mockery of the curricula standards aligned to them, weakened the potential of the standards in providing comprehensive college-preparatory curricula to all children, and promote the illusion that . With high-quality data in hand, reformers and policymakers could shine light on which states were setting demanding proficiency targets, and ultimately, show the progress of districts and the adults who worked with them in improving student achievement. They could then use the data to hold districts and the adults within them accountable in their own ways, including through sanctions and rewards states develop on their own.
Essentially, the idea is that the transparency coming out of Common Core test data could be a new approach to accountability. This is the theory at the heart of the “reform realism” touted by Fordham and other conservative reformers, and it is also at the heart of the Obama Administration’s No Child waiver gambit, which has allowed 37 states and the District of Columbia to ditch the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions for their own array of accountability systems. It does make some sense. After all, No Child has proven that transparency can work so long as accountability measures are also in place. The law’s Adequate Yearly Progress measures exposed the low quality of education across the nation’s public schools, especially in suburban districts that have long-touted themselves as being superior to their urban counterparts. And as the American Enterprise Institute admitted in a report it released last May (whose data its education policy guru, Rick Hess, proceeded to ignore), No Child’s accountability provisions forced districts to focus on improving student achievement, especially for poor and minority children who have been subjected to educational malpractice.
But transparency-as-accountability in the form of Common Core tests has only a chance of working only if all the states implementing Common Core use the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests. Considering that Georgia and Alabama have already ditched the tests — and that more may do so within the next two years — this isn’t going to happen. Because these states either developing their own tests or using those from ACT, they are also likely to continue setting low proficiency cut score targets, especially since state education officials are always under more pressure from traditionalists to define proficiency down than from reformers to do the converse. This will lead to inaccurate data on district and school performance that will be useless in any accountability regime.
Even if all states implementing Common Core used the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, transparency-as-accountability would still likely fail. Why? Because transparency is only as useful as the carrots and sticks that accompany it. The natural sanction that comes with transparency — embarrassment of being exposed as either being mediocre or failing — doesn’t always spur states and districts to take action on their own. Otherwise Detroit Public Schools, the district that most exemplifies the nation’s super-clusters of failure would have long ago turned around its performance. Under the scenario of all states using the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, you can still expect some states continuing their abysmal proficiency cut score-setting practices regardless of the proverbial harsh spotlight. Especially if the new tests turn out to be no better than the existing array of exams currently in place.
This isn’t to say that transparency cannot help advance accountability. No Child have proved that transparency is critical to advancing accountability. It’s that transparency is rather meaningless unless all states have strong common accountability systems aligned to curricula standards that uses that transparency (and, more importantly, the high-quality data promoting it) to subject districts and states to harsh consequences as well as meaningful rewards. No Child’s AYP provisions could have served as the model upon which such a system could have been developed; in fact, the Obama Administration could have even issued waivers that would have allowed AYP to be revamped to align with Common Core, which in turn, would have made it less likely that Georgia and Alabama would have dropped the PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests.
But thanks to the Obama Administration’s No Child waiver gambit, we now have 39 different accountability systems, many of which limit the effectiveness of data from Common Core-aligned tests in providing transparency or triggering consequences. From super-subgroup subterfuges that obscure data on how schools are improving the achievement of poor and minority kids, to Plessy v. Ferguson-like performance targets that perpetuate the soft bigotry of low expectations, the entire waiver gambit actually weaken both transparency and accountability all at once. Same is true for measures such as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s Student Success Act and one-time reformer Lamar Alexander’s plan for reauthorizing No Child if either end up becoming law. By supporting these efforts, Centrist Democrats and conservative reformers supporting Common Core have engaged in logical incoherent thinking and policymaking. And Georgia’s decision to ditch the PARCC tests shows the consequences of their faulty thinking.
It is time for Finn and others to repeat these words: Common tests are worth nothing without common accountability. This may also prove true for common standards too.