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Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2002 (2002) 324-333



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Comment by Theodore Hershberg

[Building a High-Quality Assessment and Accountability Program:
The Philadelphia Example]

Americans in recent years have asked their schools to do something entirely unprecedented: educate all of their students, not only their top fifth, and educate all of them to levels far higher than were required in the past. The pedagogical vehicle introduced to achieve these goals--standards-based school reform--requires major changes in classroom instruction, in how schools are organized to support these changes, and in levels of funding. Although forty-nine states have embraced the standards movement, only a few have recognized the need for systems of accountability to accompany these reforms. The evidence available from around the country makes generally clear that accountability works. States showing the most significant gains in the National Assessment of Educational Progress--Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas--are also the states that have increased school funding and implemented effective systems of accountability. The experience of those that have not, such as New Jersey, suggests the futility of standards reforms without accountability. More money alone wins the equity battle, but it loses the school reform war.

Andrew Porter and Mitchell Chester describe the accountability system used in Philadelphia as part of Children Achieving, the complex standards- driven reform agenda put in place by David Hornbeck, who came to Philadelphia in 1994 as superintendent of the public schools. The authors' account is a detailed and highly accurate portrayal of the system instituted by the school district. It is especially commendable for providing readers with a how-to primer as well as a rich description of the adjustments that were made in midstream as the system evolved in response to many specific challenges encountered along the way.

Daniel Koretz commented on the paper using a sophisticated psychometric lens, and while he found serious problems in the student test data, I remain convinced that real progress was made despite the shortcomings he identified. Ultimately persuasive are that student test scores continued to rise even though over time more students--particularly lower performing students--took the tests and that the scores improved on both the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) and the tests used by the school district (Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition, or Stanford 9). Despite the methodological concerns raised by Koretz, these factors suggest strongly that some good things were happening in Philadelphia. [End Page 324]

Given that psychometrics is not my field, my contribution is to establish the local and national contexts in which to understand the Philadelphia experience. Children Achieving included ten key elements--the tenth being an insistence that for the program to succeed all of the preceding nine had to be implemented. The record of standards-based school reform across school districts of all sizes and in all locations makes absolutely clear that success is difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances; that is, when adequate financial resources are available and all key stakeholders from the teachers unions and administrators to the school board and parents share the same goal. This was decidedly not the case in Philadelphia.

While separating out the individual contributions to student achievement from the overall reform effort provided by the accountability system is impossible, many factors external to the reform plan had an enormous impact on its outcomes. Given the opposition of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), the lack of adequate financial resources to support the reforms, the complicating role of race, and the resistance of those with vested interests in the noninstructional components of the status quo, what impresses most is that Children Achieving succeeded at all.

The Philadelphia Context

That Superintendent Hornbeck and the PFT got off to a bad start is undeniable. Why remains a matter of dispute. Union leaders insisted they were ignored from the outset--that the superintendent refused to open his plan to compromise. Hornbeck, a key architect of the standards-based reforms undertaken in Kentucky in the early 1990s and a nationally known educator, contended that he had a ten-point plan to reform the city's troubled schools...

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