HIGHER EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT

Higher Education Development

Higher Education Development

Introduction

Many efforts to hold schools accountable can be understood as an enactment of democratic symbolism. Accountability efforts are institutional features intended to legitimate public school systems in the eyes of the public (Mintrop, 2007).

Local school systems face a legion of ways to account to parents, students, employers, and taxpayers. Across the various U.S. individual states and a number of Westernized countries, accountability policy requirements differ according to local expectations for educational purposes and missions and identify no fewer than six kinds of accountability strategies in education: bureaucratic, legal, professional, political, moral, and market (Henig, Rich, 2005).

Discussion

A variety of platforms structure educational accountability movements. School enrollments can provide pressures on the spending side. Economic inflation can raise tax revenues, spending demands, or both. Declining enrollments can increase per pupil costs, while at the opposite extreme, enrollment growth can lead to increases in aggregate spending (Friedman, 2006). Any enrollment fluctuation can trigger taxpayer criticism.

Traditionally, accountability policies required school officials to get voter approval for budget increases or capital expenditures. These were intended as a check on local school boards and the local school bureaucracy. However, when these electoral channels at the local level proved ineffective in controlling costs, critics mobilized at the state level to control state taxes and spending (Cuban, 2007). In the 1970s, a taxpayer revolt in California led to the tax limitation known as Proposition 13 and began a wave of similar efforts across the country.

Sustainability Problems in a Politically Controlled Policy Environment

Given their roots in the will of the polity, accountability requirements constantly shift, making it difficult to assess the long-term impact of these accountability policies. Kentucky is one of the few states with a reform program that has survived over a decade, and even in that state, the student assessment program was changed drastically in 1998, making it difficult to trace systemic effects since the inception of the Kentucky Education Reform Act in 1991 (Cibulka, Lindle, 2008). The political reality is that many accountability reforms have proven controversial, causing opponents to mobilize to change or dismantle them. Also, as new state superintendents or commissioners, mayors, and governors assume power, they seek to put their own stamps on school reform (Mintrop, 2007).

The Potential of Educational Measurement and its Limits

The policy environment from the 1990s and continuing today has focused on the need to improve student outcomes. Assessment is viewed by advocates as a tool with the potential to raise educational outcomes for all students and to help close the achievement gap between the economically poor and students of color, on the one hand, and other more advantaged groups, on the other (Henig, Rich, 2005).

While the standards and assessment movement has arguably improved student achievement levels on standardized tests, there are important qualifications. First, United States students remain among the lowest-performing students in industrialized nations on international comparisons. Second, while achievement levels have risen in all groups, the so-called achievement gap persists and has even widened after narrowing for a period of ...