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TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SCHOOL
ACCOUNTABILITY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 14th, 2008
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Jim Windham, Chairman, Texas Institute for Education Reform
Texas has been a national leader in public school standards and accountability-based reform for
over 20 years, and our system has been properly credited for significantly improving student
performance and closing the achievement gap between student groups.
This system has served us well, but it is now time to step back, take a long look at our needs for
the new century, and create the next generation of accountability for Texas that will keep it in the
forefront of student achievement growth.
We should use this opportunity to strengthen and streamline standards for student learning,
student assessments, data systems, school and district ratings, and the rewards, sanctions, and
interventions for student, school, and district performance.
TIER believes that the benefits of a good public school accountability system break down into
three essential components:
- Transparency – for parents and communities to know in simplest terms how their schools
are serving their children so that they can make the right choices for their benefit.
- Diagnostics and tools – for educators so that they can make the necessary adjustments to
correct underachievement in student outcomes.
- Consequences – for students in terms of promotion and graduation; for educators in terms
of compensation and employment; for schools and districts in terms of accreditation.
Various groups and advocates would weight these factors differently. For TIER, it seems that
they should have approximately equal weight. Some believe that the current system is much too
punitive and that high stakes consequences should play a much smaller role. But we believe that
this is a high stakes world, and that without real consequences there is no accountability.
TIER has recently completed a comprehensive paper outlining our views on the next generation
of accountability for Texas. We have brought copies with us today for members of the
Committee, and it is available on our web site.
Our vision for the next generation of accountability is built upon ten principles outlined in an
executive summary of our paper, which is in your binders. I won’t cover them all, but will
briefly touch on the more important ones.
- 1. Most important and possibly most revolutionary – Make postsecondary readiness for all
students the goal of accountability. Let me make this clear: postsecondary success for all,
defined as the range of academic, workforce, and social proficiency that high school
students should acquire to successfully transition to skilled employment, advanced
military training, an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, or technical certification. Multiple pathways, one standard, equal rigor. It follows that schools and districts should be rated and accredited annually on the basis of increasing the percentage of students
progressing toward and reaching this postsecondary readiness standard.
- 2. We must have sound statistical design of our assessments, which means that they must
measure the full range of student performance, the value-added to each student’s
achievement during the year, and each student’s progress, or growth toward the exit
standard of postsecondary success.
- 3. The accountability system must be based on sufficient capacity and resources to enable
schools to succeed. This encompasses, for example, the data system enhancements
contemplated by HB 2238 from the 80th legislative session, but also entails more
investment at the district level. And in case you think I am completely out of character, I
don’t have in mind across the board formula increases, but rather targeted programmatic
funding that is designed to meet the technological and human resource needs of districts
as well as enable innovation so that they can meet much higher standards of performance.
- 4. I have already touched on consequences, which are an absolutely essential principle, so I
won’t belabor the point.
- 5. Accountability must be a state/local partnership. We must have the involvement of all
stakeholders because the final implementation will be executed only by the professionals
in our school buildings.
Finally, although not directly a component of your work, I want to comment on curriculum
standards, the enhancement of which is an absolute prerequisite for its success. Everything we
are doing here in enhancing accountability systems will be useless if we do not get our TEKS
standards right. We all know that they are not nearly rigorous enough, not objective enough, not
measurable, and not well aligned from grade to grade. And they are the platform for the entire
edifice—the curriculum, the assessments, the accountability. So I would simply urge this body
to send a message to the current TEKS revision deliberations underway at the SBOE to get it
right, and very soon; otherwise, very little else matters.
We at TIER look forward to working with the Select Committee on your deliberations and I hope
you will call on us if it appears we can be helpful as a resource in any way. Thank you.
For more information contact Jim Windham or visit the TIER web site at www.texaseducationreform.org.
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