Can We Measure What Matters Most?

Why Educational Accountability Metrics Lower Student Learning and Demoralize Teachers

J. M. Beach

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781475862294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

This book examines the idea of educational accountability, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make schools better? Do business management theories and practices make organizations more effective? What if the most widely used management theories and assessment tools don't work? What if educational accountability tools don't actually measure what they're supposed to? What if accountability data isn't valid, or worse, what if it's meaningless? What if administrators don't know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can't measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. How is a business-model of economic efficiency supposed to increase the competing, and perhaps mutually exclusive, ends of schooling, such as human development, student learning, personal satisfaction, social mobility, and economic growth? What if students don't learn much in schools? What if schools were never designed to produce student learning? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• 1. A Different Kind of Reform The Neoliberal Gospel of Education
• 2. Getting Our Money’s Worth A Short History of the Accountability Movement in the U.S.
• 3. What Do Grades Measure? Investigating Grades as an Accountability Metric
• 4. Education as a Social Practice The Foundations of Teaching and Learning
• 5. Nurture and Nature The Ecology of Student Learning (On What Teachers Can and Cannot Do . . . )
• 6. A Managerial Coup d’État
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• References
• Preview of This Book’s Companion Volume
• About the Author