Opinion Essay 2: Alternative Measures of School Quality

• In Event: The Future of Measurement and Accountability: A Research-Driven Vision

Abstract

This essay argues that school quality measurements should focus on informing people through monitoring and evaluating student learning, rather than on providing inputs for market-style competitions. If informing people is the aim, then it is important to rethink a number of our present approaches. Notably, we must start with the information needs of stakeholders when creating school quality indicators and not with the information needs of our current accountability system (Rothstein, et al., 2008; Gagnon & Schneider, 2019). New approaches to measuring school quality should not simply include new indicators; they should aim to transform the status quo. The path of least resistance would be to keep what presently exists and merely add a handful of new indicators that are easy to gather, ignoring alternatives like school inspectorates (Hofer, et al., 2020). But such an approach will fail to address the many flaws in present systems, including compliance-based accountability (Elmore, 2005; Marion, Vander Els, & Leather, 2017), a system that relies largely on standardized testing as a measure of school quality (Schneider, 2017; Koretz, 2017), and measures that are highly correlated with student demographics (Hegedus, 2018; Davis-Keane, 2005). The essay therefore proposes the following recommendations to begin the process of reimagining how we measure school quality:
Policy Recommendation 1: School quality measurement should be shaped by the concept of reciprocal accountability.
Policy Recommendation 2: School quality indicators should reflect the full range of what schools do and what Americans value.
Policy Recommendation 3. School quality measurement should not conflate measures of schools with measures of broader societal inequality.
Policy Recommendation 4. School quality measurement should use multiple indicators and varied instruments.
Policy Recommendation 5. School quality measurement should balance the desire for simplicity with an orientation toward preserving information that could be lost through aggregation.

Authors

• Ethan L. Hutt, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author

• Jack Schneider, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Presenting Author

• Ashley J. Carey, Sacred Heart University
  Presenting Author