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Comment
- Brookings Papers on Education Policy
- Brookings Institution Press
- 2002
- pp. 104-110
- 10.1353/pep.2002.0022
- Article
- Additional Information
Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2002 (2002) 104-110
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Comment by Alan Wurtzel
[Reform, Resistance, . . . Retreat?
The Predictable Politics of Accountability in Virginia]
Frederick M. Hess presents an excellent analysis of the politics of high-stakes accountability. I think standards, assessments, and consequences are useful, necessary ingredients to improving public education.
The issue is not whether, but how, to achieve high-stakes accountability in a manner that is fair and effective and that achieves both public and political support. I agree with the fundamental premise of Hess's paper that high-stakes accountability is popular in the abstract, but that losers, as well as winners, inevitably emerge during implementation. The losers are likely to be more effective politically in watering down the stakes than the advocates of accountability are in persuading politicians to stay the course. So how an accountability system is set up and whether it gives the potential losers a greater opportunity to influence politicians to water down the high stakes are important considerations in the design. Hess has done a persuasive job in showing how the system is working in Virginia.
While Virginia has not given up the basic thrust of accountability, the school board, under pressure from the legislature, has delayed or watered down the process of implementation, carved out exceptions for students with learning disabilities and for whom English is a second language, and reduced the graduation requirements. And it is likely to move to make something else, in addition to high-stakes testing, a factor in the criteria for graduation. This is to meet the criticism of people who maintain, with some justification, that [End Page 104] a child's future should not rest on a single high-stakes test. The struggle is to find something else that is useful and relevant to add.
While Hess points out that the failure of earlier efforts of standards-based reform in Virginia was significant--the Literacy Passport Test, for example--he does not discuss the historical context in which the current Standards of Learning (SOLs) efforts were and are being played out. History may be relevant to an understanding of how the whole design makes the standards more or less politically immune to attack.
The modern effort at standards, or SOL reform, began in 1989 under Democratic governor L. Douglas Wilder and his superintendent of public instruction, Joseph Spagnola. When I joined the Virginia Board of Education in 1991, which was halfway through Governor Wilder's term, an effort was well under way to create a new and challenging standard under the rubric of outcome-based education (OBE). OBE was attacked by, for example, Peg Lusick, an outspoken critic of outcomes-based education, the American Eagle Forum, and other right-wing groups.
The members of the board, most of whom were Democrats, and all of whom had been appointed by either Wilder or his Democratic predecessor, came to agree that the methodology that Spagnola and his advisers were following was too politically correct (PC). Not that it was wrong in theory, or basically flawed, but that the tone of it was too PC and was, therefore, subject too easily to political attack. Under political pressure Governor Wilder pulled the plug before the board could act to correct and depoliticize the standards. It is not unlike what happened with the national history standards, which some board members thought were fundamentally good, although the exemplars were too PC.
Republican George F. Allen, elected governor in 1993 over weak Democratic opposition, declared OBE "dead and buried." But once in office, he began the process of creating education standards that were different in tone, but I would argue not fundamentally different in substance. They were grade by grade. They were concrete, specific, and measurable. They were focused on the fundamental core subjects, and they were premised on high standards.
He appointed Bill Bosher as superintendent of public instruction. Bosher, who led the standards process, was far more politically savvy than his predecessor. He had, for the first two years, to juggle a tough-talking Republican governor who, in large part, owed his election to the religious right...