BOULDER, CO (October 25, 2015) – Yesterday, the Obama Administration acknowledged its own role in escalating the nation’s over-reliance on high-stakes, test-based accountability policies. It issued a Testing Action Plan for states, including a section on “reducing the reliance on student test scores through our rules and executive actions,” backing away somewhat from the Administration’s past policies that strongly promoted reliance on test scores in educator evaluation systems and in the evaluation of teacher preparation programs.
This shift in policy follows a nationwide disillusionment with test-based accountability policies, as illustrated by the opt-out movement; it also follows a growing consensus among researchers that test-based policies have been unsuccessful in driving greater learning. The question now becomes: where to from here?