[MUSIC] Welcome back. Today, we're moving into the third unit of the course that's focused on student accountability. Today, I'm going to be providing an overview and a summary of what we'll be talking about relative to this unit. So to start, again, I'm sharing two different quotes focused on accountability and accountability practices. And I think in some respects like the other quotes that we've used for different units and different segments of the course, it summarizes some of the key controversial issues around the concept of accountability. On the one hand, those who are opponents to the concept of accountability or think that we don't have the aspects of accountability quite right, this focus on the reliance upon or focus on standardized testing as the kind of focal point of accountability in schooling. And on the flip side, a set of beliefs that, to professionalize teaching, to improve schools and to have a sort of accountability to the use of public money that we need to have some sense how schools are doing and how teachers are doing and kind of rigorous and active ways to measure that. So, accountability really is exactly this. It's a set of practices or strategies to gather information and data that informs the public about how schools, teachers, districts and states are doing relative to public schooling. There are many different ways to think about school accountability and a lot of different topics that could have been chosen to discuss this. And so what I've done is just to choose a couple of different lenses and focal points that I think will give you a flavor of the major issues around school accountability and district accountability, but in no way is this exhaustive in terms of the full body of understanding how school accountability practices happen. So to start, in some ways the notion of school accountability emerged on the scene in school reform or in the school reform landscape in around the mid 1990s. It's important to note and some of our experts who are a part of the voices of the field aspect of this course have told us the school accountability or the idea of actually measuring school quality predates the 1990s by quite a long ways. In some ways, if we think back to ESEA and the passing of that piece of legislation in the 1960s, already we see evidence of the push for particular schools to make public certain aspects of their performance, but this kind of renewed focus on school accountability in the 1990s was marked with a focus on schools across the board. Having more transparency and having a set of indicators to really differentiate between schools and so the 1990s is kind of the modern school reform era approach to school accountability. It's important to understand that accountability takes a lot of different forms. And over the course of the history of school reform, we've seen both the focus on outputs and inputs. Outputs meaning, understanding the performance of students, how students are doing. Inputs meaning, trying to control the quality of things like teacher credentialing or the number of students that a student has to take to graduate from high school or whether or not the courses students are taking are of a certain college readiness standard, etc. So school accountability really takes into account both inputs and outputs, but what we've seen is a shift towards measuring the outputs side from the earlier school accountability systems that focused more on inputs. An important note in this is the intersection with the conversations we've had in the course with the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top. There are many people who mark the beginning of the school accountability era to these pieces of federal intervention in schools, but it is the case that we see that school accountability, the kind of pressure towards school accountability existed before the No Child Left Behind Act and before Race to the Top. But certainly, both of those federal initiatives have shaped and defined school accountability in the kind of modern school reform era. We're going to see many types of indicators that are brought to bear to measure school and district quality and we're going to be highlighting many of those. So once we move beyond the kind of summary of accountability issues, which will be the focus of the first part of the school accountability unit, we're going to take a deep dive into teacher evaluation and effectiveness. Again, in the late 1990s is when we began to see in the field an emergence of focus on the importance of measuring teacher quality to improve schools. Part of this is motivated by a set of literature and research that marks teacher quality or teacher effectiveness is a very important aspect of student outcomes and another piece of this I believe is motivated by or shaped by an increase in the number of indicators or statistical methods to capture teacher quality. And so this combination of the deepening concern about or focus on teacher effectiveness coupled with the emergence of different and more rigorous ways to measure that, I think are part of the motivation behind the renewed focus on teacher evaluation and teacher effectiveness. Again, it's important to know that the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top have certainly contributed to and shaped teacher evaluation efforts has have the emergence on the scene of value added or student growth approaches to measuring teacher quality. So this idea of taking all of the test scores in a particular classroom for a teacher and doing statistical calculation to understand how much student growth an individual teacher is getting, which is both new to the field and also somewhat controversial. So that will close out the overview portion and next, we will move into the set of segments that focus on summary of the school accountability issues starting with the historical lens. [MUSIC]
