The Sine Qua Non of Education: Rubrics and Their Relationship to Standards and Accountability?

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-9 - A Rubric Nation: Critical Inquiries Into the Impact of Rubrics on Education

Abstract

Currently, rubrics for assessment purposes exist at all levels of education, including teacher education. In today’s education milieu, greatly shaped by the Standards Based Reform Movement (SBRM), one would be hard pressed to engage in the process of evaluation without first considering developing a rubric. Education’s preoccupation with rubrics has become a driving force behind much of what is considered evaluation and assessment of work product as well as student/teacher behavior. It has become a ubiquitous apparatus to standardize the work being evaluated and inform producers of a work product of how “well” they have accomplished the predetermined goal outcomes. Proponents of rubrics claim that this tool offers a transparent and objective approach to assessment and evaluation – (Stevens & Levi, 2013; Spandel, 2006). Nevertheless, the use of rubrics presents challenging questions regarding the nature of teaching and learning and the assessment and evaluation of those involved in education. For instance, what are the unintended consequences of rubrics? How do rubrics support a corporate agenda determined to reshape education and to control (teacher) knowledge and practice? Do rubrics limit teachers’ capacity to make important decisions about their students’ learning, and if so to what extent?

In this presentation, we argue that to facilitate education reformers’ agenda of privatization, an instrument, in this case a rubric, must be in place that efficiently measures the amount a teacher or student conforms to the standards represented through the rubric. From this perspective, the rubric serves as the sine qua non to the reformers’ agenda because it is the essential tool required to quantitatively reinforce the argument that US schools are failing and to justify neo-liberal and conservative reform initiatives like charter schools, standardized testing, and elimination of teacher tenure. Each aspect mentioned, not only marginalizes naysayers (i.e., progressivists, social reformers, etc.) from the discourse of public education reform, but also ensures that those who remain in the system comply with it (Giroux, 2012; Spring, 2013). This is not merely a theoretical argument. Lack of curriculum control and high-stakes testing regimes, all of which generate billions of dollars for the testing industry (Taubman, 2009), severely impact overall teacher satisfaction (Franklin & Snow-Gerono, 2007). By situating rubrics as a sine qua non for education reformers’ agenda, the scholarly significance of this presentation is that it presents a critical dialogue about an often taken-for-granted idea—that rubrics are harmless tools.

Authors

• Michelle Tenam-Zemach, Nova Southeastern University

• Joseph E. Flynn, Northern Illinois University

• Leslie D. Burns, University of Kentucky