Accountability Doesn't Suck...

...Neither Does Belonging and Meaning

Ross Wiener published an insightful and rousing op-ed at the New York Times on Monday citing troubling data on the state of American children and youth and arguing convincingly for the need to foster a spirit of belonging and purpose in our nation’s schools.

Unfortunately, that op-ed was embedded in a larger piece in which Wiener argued, unconvincingly to say the least, that the current failure of our education system to deliver these things is the fault of accountability policies in general and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 in particular.

One need always be humble in arguing cause and effect in social policy. Outside of controlled scientific studies, theories of causation will always be only that, theories. Making a credible argument about the current state of American students does at least require close examination of data as Tim Daly did two weeks ago (and as did Chris Stewart in a friendly critique of Daly’s arguments). In addition to data, claims of causation also require logic. But Wiener, astonishingly, offers neither.

There are many holes in Wiener’s thesis. Here are a few:

Failure to Explain Achievement Declines. As Chad Aldeman points out, the foundation of Wiener’s op-ed is that student achievement has declined over the past 10-12 years, a finding highlighted most recently in the Harvard-Stanford Education Scorecard. But Wiener doesn’t really offer an explanation as to why.

Chad asks wryly “Did anything happen in 2015 that could have led to such large achievement declines?” And one would have to have been hiding under a rock to miss credible theories offerd for the decline, the 3 main ones being: a nationwide retreat from accountability; the proliferation of screens and social media; and, of course, COVID. All of these were recently covered in the very same newspaper that published Wiener’s op-ed. Wiener doesn’t really dig into any of them.

False Choice Between Achievement and Other Outcomes. In critiquing Wiener’s op-ed, Mike Petrilli asks “[Wiener] wants schools to help students find purpose, develop strong character, and build real skills. Do we really believe it’s impossible to do that in schools that are also trying to help students make year-to-year progress in reading, writing, and math?...Is that also the case in high-performing charter schools?”

The answer to these questions is “of course not.” In 2023 and 2024, Rianna Saslow and I conducted a series of case studies in four states of high-poverty schools with high proficiency rates and/or high academic growth. Through surveys and interviews with school leaders, we found that those schools used data not just to assess and drive changes in student learning but also in many other areas as well, including chronic absenteeism, belongingness, social-emotional development, and family engagement. In these high-achieving schools, it isn’t either-or, it is both-and.

Kevin Huffman makes some good arguments here as well: “I don’t think the NCLB test-based accountability squeezed out creative and dynamic lessons and learning. I didn’t see a radical difference in lesson quality, creativity, or engagement in non-tested subjects - or in the teaching that happened the last month of school after tests were over. Also, if that were the case, our post-accountability universe (i.e. the past decade) would have ushered in a different era. We, too often, lack creative and engaging lessons, in my view, for other reasons (poor ed school instruction, weak administrator support, failure to reward excellence in teaching).”

Mischaracterizing the Aims of Motives of Advocates. The cringiest part of Wiener’s op-ed was where he described what he sees as the theory of action of accountability proponents: “The strategies that produced the early gains of the No Child Left Behind era depended on a social contract: comply with adult-designed systems, defer questions of meaning and purpose, and the payoff will come.” That sounds downright dystopian. And it belies the real history of accountability reform.

I was the lead negotiator for House Democrats on NCLB. My boss, Congressman George Miller, was arguably the strongest driving force, alongside President George W. Bush, behind its provisions to disaggregate data and to identify and narrow opportunity and achievement gaps. We thought this package dovetailed strong accountability, which at the time was a domain predominated by Republicans, with principles of equity that are held most strongly on the left.

We were disappointed at the time that we didn’t get strong support from legacy civil rights groups. But that support did come later, organically, because legacy civil rights organizations, along with groups representing students with disabilities, saw the positive impact NCLB was having in schools and for students which, before NCLB, nobody was paying much attention to at all.

When Democrats proposed “suspending” NCLB in 2008 because, they argued, everyone hated it, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella organization that includes every major civil rights group in the country, issued a strong statement declaring “LCCR believes that NCLB is a civil rights law, and that some of the requirements of NCLB constitute, in essence, the rights of children to obtain a quality education.” Those same groups were responsible for making sure that the Every Student Succeeds Act had at least a modicum of accountability and those groups continue to be strong assessment and accountability advocates to this day.

You wouldn’t know any of that reading Wiener’s op-ed.

Wiener is correct in asserting that public education does indeed serve a civic and developmental mission. But that mission depends on ensuring that all students, regardless of background, acquire the foundational skills that open doors to further learning, economic mobility, and informed citizenship. Reading and math are not the whole of education, but they are the gateway to nearly everything else.

Accountability, done well, is not about reducing schools to test scores. It is about making sure we do not look away when students are not learning. And no one should have a problem with that.