“Few leaders are punished because of poor
school performance.”
— Susan Furhman, President
Columbia University
Teachers College
The symposium began with the address by Susan Furhman, president of Columbia University Teachers College
in New York, titled Ten Assumptions About
Accountability.
Often cited as an expert on the need for accountability
in school districts, Furhman chastised both federal
and state governments for failing children in public education.
Furhman
urged the participants to consider education “in the context of the last 20
years, including the No Child Left Behind Act.”
“The focus is on whether students have profited from the
tests,” she said. “Are the tests correct in measuring achievement?” Her
assessment was that if such tests are accurate, they show “a little, but only
some, improvement.”
Next, she asked, “Are the tests adequate?” To that
question, she responded that a universal lack of accountability has called
their usefulness into question.
“Individual schools are not improving consistently,” she
said. “Accountability gives an incentive to improve.”
Findings across the country are not consistent that such
improvements are taking place, she said.
She stressed that long-held concerns about student
achievement are in line with the need to insure the interaction between
students and teachers.
“That capacity is limited, especially among less affluent
students,” she pointed out.
Fuhrman also brought up the problem of educating children
without English language skills.
Teachers have to act in concert to achieve the goal of
teaching these disadvantaged youngsters, she said.
“In many schools, this doesn’t happen,” she said. She
urged teachers in schools with these students to act together.
“Accountability systems will provide interpretation of
future success,” she said. “Very few systems supplement scores with other
information — qualitative reviews, surveys.
“We need to provide evidence that the process is working.
But we don’t do that. If we’re failing, the burden is on districts and states
to remedy the failure.”
In the United States, the lack of unified curricula,
testing and evaluation is an approach that as a nation fits our decentralized
education system, she said.
But decentralization, according to Furhman,
“prevents state control over proficiency levels.”
The present system doesn’t take advantage of state
variations, and it prevents accountability, collaboration, assessment and
teacher development,” she said.
She said there is relatively little uniformity in
governing schools.
“There is no punishment of elected officials:
accountability is not required of leaders or policy makers,” she said.
“Supposedly, elective and employment leaders are to consider school
performance.”
To meet the challenge, Furhman
suggested, state flexibility is the remedy, adding we need experimentation to
find ways to improve. “Accountability is part of the solution,” she said.
Furhman
stressed the need for more funding to provide what she sees as five major
changes necessary for student improvements:
• standard
assessments and consequences;
• specific
curricula, possibly created on a national level or by some kind of educational
consortium;
• better
assessments;
• investment
in capacity;
• combining “bigger and
better” programs with raised standards and accountability.
She predicted that with a new administration in
Washington, “we will see more effort with the states in improving schools and
accountability.
“I hope we’re moving to a point where we’re thinking
about investment,” she told the audience before they split into groups to take
part in panel discussions.
Concurrent with the UCSB forum, but not as part of it,
the Sacramento State Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy
announced it will release a report showing California lags in higher education.
“There are national standardized tests,” said institute
spokesman Blake Ulveling. “California has its own set
of tests, and students have been doing increasingly better on them. But they’ve
been doing quite poorly on the national.”
Test results are often cited in funding requests by
school districts, Ulveling pointed out.
“I believe high stakes testing doesn’t necessarily lead
to better aptitude,” he said.
Reach Margo Kline at mkline@syvjournal.com.