On Wednesday, Senator Harkin released his bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I haven’t read the bill yet, but I have read that Senator Harkin is proposing to drop the current Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement and instead evaluate schools based on “continuous improvement.” This would mean that all students are no longer expected to be proficient by 2014; instead, they are expected to make a certain amount of academic gains from year to year.

Sounds simple enough. Critics and proponents of NCLB alike have been pushing for the inclusion of a measurement of student growth since NCLB was enacted nearly a decade ago. However, back in 2002 less than a handful of states had the assessments and the data systems in place to measure how much academic gains individual student made from year to year. Now, thanks to NCLB, all states have the capacity to make such calculations. Almost all would agree that including such measures would greatly improve the fairness of any accountability system.  

Yet, incorporating student growth into a federal accountability system is not as straightforward as it seems. First of all, as my report Measuring Student Growth illustrates, there is no single method to measuring student growth. Choosing which method is best depends on the data available and how the data is going to be used. For example, a growth model, which identifies students who are not gaining as much as similar students, will look a lot different than a model that is used to identify students who gained enough in the past year to be on track to reach a certain benchmark such as being college and career ready when they graduate high school.

So before a growth model is used for accountability, policymakers need to state a clear purpose for what the growth data is to evaluate. For example, is the purpose to ensure schools are closing achievement gaps? Is the purpose to ensure all students are college or career ready by the end of high school? Or is it to identify schools where students are making fewer gains than students in schools with similar student populations?  For each of these questions, an adequate answer would require a different growth model.

Second of all, simply moving from a proficiency-based accountability system such as NCLB to a continuous improvement based system as proposed by Senator Harkin overlooks the fact that most state assessments are not designed to effectively measure student growth from grade to grade. Most states have developed their assessments to evaluate if a student is proficient or not proficient each year. As such, many state assessments are unable to reliably determine how much a student has learned from year to year, especially a student who scored at the very high or very low end of the test’s achievement scale. Yes, states can calculate a growth measure using the assessments they now have in place, but in many cases the result will not be as accurate as if the assessments were designed specifically to measure student growth.

These are just two major issues when it comes to including a growth measure for federal accountability. Yes, evaluating schools based on student growth is much fairer than how schools are currently evaluated under NCLB. But just simply including a growth measure does not automatically make it a better accountability system. Policymakers need to set a clear purpose for accountability systems and then incorporate a growth model that would best evaluates whether schools are meeting their goals. From what I know now about the Harkin bill, it is not clear whether the purpose is to ensure all students are college or career ready or if all students are making a year’s worth of gains. Without having a clear purpose for what to hold schools accountable for, adding a growth model will not be any fairer than NCLB. – Jim Hull