I spent the morning doing a "radio tour" of talk shows around the country, explaining our new Accountability Illusion report. A common question is why it matters that states are implementing NCLB so differently. After all, states had very different accountability systems before NCLB. That's true, but we think it's a problem, for three reasons.
First, it surely demoralizes educators to know that their very own schools, deemed "in need of improvement" under NCLB, would be considered acceptable, even praiseworthy, if located elsewhere. (Play our "Fix that Failing School" video game to get a sense of just how capricious the system can be.)
Second, what drives the state-to-state variation in Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) results isn't a principled difference about what it means to be a good school. Rather, we witness state education departments going through subtle machinations to create outcomes that they judge sensible, or at least politically saleable.
Third, variable and discrepant school ratings were one thing when states set the penalties (if any) for schools that didn't make the grade as defined by the states. But NCLB created the trappings of a national accountability system. Now every state operates under a federal mandate to offer "public school choice" and "supplemental services" (tutoring) to children stuck in "failing schools," and further mandates to overhaul change-resistant schools. All those sanctions and interventions, uniform as they are, are triggered by AYP systems that couldn't be more different. At best, this is a disconnect. At worst, it's chaos.
It's true that the only way to ensure the exact same ratings of the exact same schools, from state to state, would be to adopt a national accountability system, complete with a national definition of AYP. Nobody, including us, wants that. What is feasible is decoupling the transparency that was supposed to flow from NCLB (and could actually come from a rigorous set of national standards and tests) from state decisions around school "success" or "failure" and the appropriate interventions that follow. In other words, let's do "transparency" at the national level and leave "accountability" to the states.
