Smart Ideas on Early Elementary Accountability From UFT

Last week United Federation of Teachers (New York City’’s teachers union) President Randi Weingarten gave a major speech proposing a new accountability framework to replace the controversial school report cards that NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein instituted last November.

In contrast to Klein’’s report cards, which assigned schools a single letter grade based primarily on student test scores, UFT’’s proposed alternative would offer parents and the public a matrix of indicators concentrated in three areas: academic achievement; safety, order and discipline; and teamwork for student achievement. Each school’s report would also rate the NYC Department of Education on the quality of support it provides the school.

What we like about Weingarten’’s proposal is the effort it makes to include indicators that reflect how well schools are educating students in grades K-2. Too often, school report cards and accountability systems totally ignore the early grades, because those systems are based on test scores and K-2 students don’t typically participate in state assessments. The result is an information black hole for parents and policymakers at the time when schools should be putting in place the fundamental groundwork to support children’s later learning. It also makes it harder to recognize or reward highly effective K-2 teachers. But the solution isn’’t to extend testing down to younger students–because the kind of standardized assessments we use under NCLB aren’t appropriate or necessarily reliable for younger children.

The UFT plan takes some sensible steps to include K-2 students in accountability reports:

• First, it used third grade test scores to evaluate K-2 academic performance. We’’ve previously argued that all elements of the PK-3 continuum need to be judged based on their contribution to the ultimate goal of proficiency by third grade, so we can really get behind this idea.
• Second, UFT’’s plan would use independent on-site observations and surveys to evaluate the quality of K-2 learning environments, including the extent to which they provide a rich, age-appropriate curriculum for K-2 students. Because there is a strong research base about what works in early education, what young children need to know, and the kind of teacher interactions that contribute to student learning, on-site observations make a lot of sense as a quality measure in the early elementary years.
• Third, UFT ‘s plan would evaluate elementary schools on the extent to which K-2 students “display “school readiness skills, such as effort, cooperation, responsibility and respect.”” We think this proposal is on the right track, because fostering the kinds of social and emotional development skills that it mentions should be a critical goal of PK-3 instruction. But we fear the language UFT chose to use here may confuse parents and the public. The phrase “school readiness” here suggests the UFT plan would rate schools based on characteristics children bring to school with them, not the contribution schools make to students’ acquisition of these skills. It also implies that the early grades aren’’t themselves school–a position we’’re pretty sure UFT doesn’’t hold. We’’d be a lot happier with this part of the proposal if UFT called it “”K-2 social and emotional development”” rather than “”K-2 school readiness.”” We’’d also like to know more about the kind of indicators and assessments that would go into this measure, because evaluating social and emotional development in the early years, while critical, can be tricky.

We also like the UFT proposal’s’ emphasis on teamwork among educators and effective school leadership as a part of a school’’s evaluation. In order to offer an aligned PK-3 education experience to students, schools must have strong leadership and collaborative relationships between teachers both within and across grade levels and subject areas. Creating incentives to build such collaborative relationships is smart.

Eduwonk and Leo Casey offer further analysis of the overall plan on their blogs. In general we agree with Eduwonk’’s comment that, while accountability consequences should be based on a relatively few, narrow and clear-cut indicators, parents, educators and the general public all benefit from systems that provide information about a variety of school performance indicators. Leo says UFT hopes the “”proposed framework initiatives a vigorous debate over both the ends of accountability and the best means to achieve those ends.”” We’re pretty sure they’d also like to see some concrete changes to make the NYC report card system look more like this proposal. As that debate unfolds, we hope it includes serious discussion of how NYC, and other school systems, can do a better of providing parents and the public with information about how schools are educating students in the early elementary school and pre-k years.