Will Contemporary Reform Strategies Provide the International Economic Progress and Educational Equity Gains They Promise?

• In Event: Beyond the Rhetoric: Examining the Economic Rationales and the Evidence-Based Support for Current Reform Strategies

Abstract

1. Purpose – Since the 1983 Nation at Risk report, the most prominent educational reform strategy has been top-down, test-based, accountability accompanied by punitive consequences and frequently including various forms of privatization. The primary rationale for this approach, according to President Obama, is to make the nation economically competitive in a twenty-first century world. A second claimed benefit is the achievement of educational equity. By separating test scores by wealth and racial groups, a light will be cast on the nation’s educational disparities which will, in turn, have the salutary effect of forcing remediation of the inequities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether these education reform strategies produce or hold promise of producing these economic and social benefits.

2. Perspectives / Theoretical Framework – The primary determinants of national economic growth are first established through the economics literature. Then, these elements are compared to the focus of various education reform strategies. In terms of social equity, the primary approach is to explore whether the achievement gap has closed, stayed the same, or widened during the time frame of the reforms.

3. Modes of Inquiry – The methods are correlational and descriptive. The work of various labor economists is examined with a particular emphasis on current and projected job requirements in terms of types, levels and skills. The effects of education standards (and their relative difficulty) are reviewed in both a national and international context. Funding equity and adequacy are examined as relates to the identified break-out groups of interest with a focus on whether achievement gaps are opening, closing or staying about the same.

4. Data sources – World Economic Forum international economic criteria, international rankings of this data, National Assessment scores across groups and over time, National Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, identified skills for the twenty—first century, the Common Core State Standards content, and national testing consortia test specifications (to the degree they are available) are the primary data sources employed.

5. Results - Preliminary evidence indicates that contemporary reforms have led to a narrowed essentialist curriculum, a relative neglect of the broader purposes of education, the relative omission of soft skills, a failure to close the achievement gap, negligible gains from privatization efforts, a lack of relationship between achievement and difficulty of standards, and only a weak relationship between test scores and international economic competitiveness.

5. Significance of the Study – If the contemporary test-based accountability reform strategies advance national workforce and economic needs while also advancing democratic and equity goals, then we can conclude that this reform strategy is sound. If the indicators do not align or have not moved in the desired direction, then scholars, practitioners and policy-makers must more closely examine the efficacy of these reforms and whether they should be continued.

Author

• William J. Mathis, University of Colorado - Boulder