Commentary
Accountability, or Mastery?
The assessment trade-off that could change the landscape of reform.
There is general agreement in American public education that the conventional high school is badly broken and in need of a complete overhaul. Some even argue that it is obsolete and should be replaced with new models of secondary education.
Overwhelming evidence of institutional failure has triggered this almost universal alarm, and educators and policymakers have tried to solve the problem in a number of ways: by breaking bigger schools into smaller “academies” or creating “schools within schools”; by instituting a senior-year or culminating project; by raising standards, increasing rigor, and adding Advanced Placement courses; and by adopting high-stakes tests that students must pass to graduate. Positive results have been negligible.
But now, two states—New Hampshire and Rhode Island— are pioneering a promising “new” approach to redesigning high schools by instituting performance-based or competency-based assessments that link content to skills and use multiple measures (not just a statewide standardized test) to evaluate students’ proficiency.
The dominant school improvement strategy of standards-based accountability stresses academic content and standardized tests. Performance assessment combines content with skills, and requires students to carry out tasks to demonstrate mastery of both. The tasks generally fall into three categories—performance, portfolios, and projects—and are designed to encourage students to think and to solve problems through hands-on activities. To demonstrate mastery, students may, for example, perform a musical recital, make a significant oral presentation, write a major essay, or submit a portfolio of cumulative work from different disciplines. The point is that students must produce evidence that shows they understand the content and can apply it in real-world situations.
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