The Education Policy Center| Article 3

Strengthening Accountability in Michigan Public Schools

The Education Policy Center at MSU has already begun to play an active role in public policy. Earlier this year, David Plank, the center’s director, and Barbara Markle, director of the College of Education’s Office of k–12 Outreach, presented fellow members of the Michigan Education Alliance’s Task Force on Accountability a framework for action toward an improved accountability system in Michigan. The task force was established to address the question of how to bolster the state’s accountability system. Task force members included representatives from the state Board of Education, the Michigan Department of Education, and leaders of all the key constituencies in the public school system. Plank and Markle solicited and incorporate the thinking of Michigan’s education leaders who sit on the task force, and drafted a plan that reflected agreement among all of the participants. The policy center, in conjunction with the task force, will work in the coming months to complete the tasks described in the framework’s action plan. The following article written by Plank, and which is one of the first in the center’s Policy Reports series, analyzes educational accountability, some of the persistent issues in Michigan, and the efforts of the task force.The article is reprinted as an example of the type of information the center is providing lawmakers and educational leaders. If you would like information about the policy center’s research and publications, go to its Web site at www.epc.msu.edu.

Traditional Accountability No Longer Sufficient

In Michigan, public schools have traditionally been, and still are, held accountable in three major ways. Schools are democratically accountable to local voters. If the residents of a school district are dissatisfied with the performance of their local schools, they can replace the members of the elected school board. Public schools are also legally accountable for compliance with state and federal laws ranging from state statutes governing the management of public funds to federal mandates including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. And, educators who work in public schools are professionally accountable to their peers, and to the norms and standards of their profession.

Under Michigan’s traditional accountability mechanisms, performance expectations for public schools were decided at the local level. Some school boards set high standards for local schools and students, but others did not. The state did not intervene in these decisions. Instead, the state held schools and school districts accountable for compliance with a body of laws and regulations that aimed to ensure minimum conditions for learning for all students (e.g., districts are required to provide at least 180 days of instruction each year, and schools are required to employ licensed teachers).

Now, however, as Michigan moves from an economy based on farming and manufacturing to one increasingly based on information, success depends on the knowledge and skills of the state’s workers. Public expectations about what students should know and be able to do are rising. We now expect our public school system to ensure that all students have the high-level reading, math, and critical thinking skills they will need to perform effectively in the new economy. As expectations for public schools have increased, key stakeholders including employers have argued that traditional accountability mechanisms (democratic, legal, professional) do not hold Michigan’s public schools to a sufficiently high standard of performance.

The Emergence of “New Accountability”

New accountability began to emerge over the course of the last decade. The approval of Public Act 25 in 1990 marked the first key step toward a comprehensive framework for standards based accountability in Michigan’s public schools. And, the establishment of charter schools along with the expansion of school choice policies by the Michigan Legislature introduced a new kind of market accountability into the public school system. Choice policies make schools more directly accountable to the consumers of education, the parents and students. Rather than waiting for the next school board election to express their dissatisfaction, families in Michigan can now move from one public school to another, taking their state funds with them. Schools that do not meet the expectations of parents lose students and revenues.

The Evolution of Public Act 25

Key elements of the original Public Act 25 framework included:

• School Improvement. Schools are required to develop school improvement plans, create school improvement teams including parents and teachers to implement their plans, and to measure progress toward achievement of plan objectives.

• Core Curriculum. The state established a model core curriculum, and proposed learning outcomes for all students. Local school districts are encouraged to align their curricula with the state’s core curriculum, and to notify district residents if the curriculum is not aligned.

• Accreditation. Schools are regularly evaluated on the basis of their curricula, staffing, and facilities, and on their compliance with the requirements of the school improvement process.

• Annual Education Report. All schools are required to publish an annual report providing information to parents and community members on student achievement, parent participation, accreditation status, and other factors related to the implementation of the school improvement plan. They are also required to hold a public meeting to review the report.

With its emphasis on school improvement and parent participation, pa 25 marked a decisive move beyond simple compliance with minimum standards of time, staffing, and facilities as a basis for holding public schools accountable. pa 25 held schools accountable for developing and participating in a continuous process of school improvement that included opportunities for parent and community involvement.

Accountability Gap Persists

The main problem with the accountability framework originally defined by pa 25 was the absence of any mechanism for assessing whether the school improvement process defined by the law was effective. Did schools that participated in mandated school improvement activities improve, or not? Answering this question required a mechanism for assessing the performance of students, schools, and school districts.

The Legislature attempted to address the assessment gap when it amended the law in 1995 to require that accreditation standards for schools include pupil performance on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (meap) tests. For purposes of accreditation, the meap tests are intended to measure the extent to which students have mastered state-defined standards of knowledge and skill. Aggregated results of the tests also provide a measure of schools’ and school districts’ success in delivering the core curriculum and raising student performance to state-defined standards. The meap lies at the heart of standards-based accountability in Michigan today.

Unfortunately, there are three persistent issues in an accountability system that relies as heavily as Michigan’s on a single test as a measure of student, school, and district performance:

• The first is the close association between meap scores and student background. Put simply, students who are economically well off do well on the meap; economically disadvantaged students do less well. This relationship is not fixed. Some students who live in poverty perform well on the meap, and some wealthy students do badly. The strength of the relationship nevertheless poses a dilemma for policy-makers, who are caught between the goal of ensuring high achievement for all students and the likelihood that high standards will condemn many poor students and the schools that serve them to “failure.”

• The second issue is that a single test, however well designed, can only measure a limited set of student accomplishments. The meap, for example, measures the extent to which students at a given grade level have mastered state-defined standards of knowledge and skill in five key areas of the model core curriculum. It does not measure the progress that students make over the course of an academic year, and it does not measure the “skill infrastructure” that students bring to the test. Measuring these other results requires an accountability system that incorporates multiple indicators, perhaps including other kinds of testing as well as school and classroom evaluations of student performance.

• The third issue is the inevitable tension between standards-based accountability and market accountability. Attaching increasingly high stakes to the curriculum standards reflected in the meap tests may limit the flexibility and adaptability of schools as they seek to respond to parental expectations. On the other hand, some schools that are successful in winning and maintaining the support of parents may do poorly when it comes to meeting the state’s accountability standards. As above, a partial solution to this problem is available in the development of an accountability system that incorporates multiple indicators of student and school performance.

Strengthening the New Accountability

In May 2000 the Michigan Association of School Boards convened a Task Force on Accountability. The members of the Task Force included representatives from the State Board of Education, the Michigan Department of Education, and leaders of all of the key constituencies in the public school system. This is the first time that organizations representing all parts of the public school system have formally come together to adopt a common approach to the improvement of Michigan’s education system.

The Task Force addressed the question of how to build a stronger, more effective accountability system for Michigan’s public school by addressing the question: “Who is responsible for what, and to whom?” An effective accountability system requires that all actors in the state’s education system accept responsibility for the accomplishment of specific results. No single group can improve the performance of schools and students by themselves, without the support of others, but the system will only work when each group steps up and commits itself to be held accountable for the accomplishment of measurable goals.

The Task Force report, drafted by MSU’s Education Policy Center, reflects agreement among Task Force members on the general principles that should guide the development of an accountability system. The report, which was made public in early September 2000, establishes a framework that will guide the activities of Task Force members during the coming year, as they work with their organizations to identify specific results for which each group is prepared to be held accountable, and to define indicators that can be used to measure those results.

By June 2001 the Task Force will produce a follow up report, based on the work of the organizations, that links the key actors with the objectives for which they are responsible, identifies objectives for which responsibility is shared among two or more actors, and identifies critical objectives for which accountability is not clearly assigned. The report will define measurable indicators for each of the identified objectives.

In addition, the report will include an analysis of alignment within Michigan’s accountability system. This analysis will focus on the alignment of key aspects of the education system, including for example curriculum and assessment. It will also assess the degree of alignment between the accountability framework developed by the Task Force and other accountability mechanisms already in place in Michigan, including the assessment system being developed by Standard and Poors and the school accreditation process mandated by the Legislature.

The Task Force seeks to influence the policies set by the State Board of Education and assist the work of the Michigan Department of Education in strengthening the Michigan Accreditation System. This ambitious endeavor will require a great deal of time and effort on the part of all of the organizations represented on the Task Force. It will result in a much-needed examination of each organization’s role in improving our educational system, and contribute to the development of a state accreditation program that truly supports continuous improvement in Michigan schools.

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