Shanker Blog » Rethinking The Use Of Simple Achievement Gap Measures In School Accountability Systems - 0 views
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Jeff Bernstein on 17 Nov 14"Achievement gaps have also, however, taken on a very different role over the past 10 or so years. The sizes of gaps, and extent of "gap closing," are routinely used by reporters and advocates to judge the performance of schools, school districts, and states. In addition, gaps and gap trends are employed directly in formal accountability systems (e.g., states' school grading systems), in which they are conceptualized as performance measures. Although simple measures of the magnitude of or changes in achievement gaps are potentially very useful in several different contexts, they are poor gauges of school performance, and shouldn't be the basis for high-stakes rewards and punishments in any accountability system. Let's take a quick look at four problems with using gaps in the latter context."