Accountability for College and Career Readiness

Developing a New Paradigm

The recently released Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education report entitled Accountability for college and career readiness: Developing a new paradigm provides suggestions for enhancing students’ college and career readiness. The report focuses on areas of accountability for meaningful learning, accountability for adequate and intelligently used resources, and professional capacity. The need for higher-quality assessment systems that include authentic performance tasks such as classroom-based projects as well as an integrated approach to multifaceted collection of evidence for teacher evaluation and school review is suggested.
 

The report states: “As in jurisdictions like Australia, Finland, and Singapore, the standardized measures can be used to validate the local assessment results, while the performance assessments are used to inform instruction, provide feedback to students and teachers, and enable diagnostic decisions, as well as to provide evidence of student learning. Both should be part of a research and development process to validate the assessments and to provide evidence of their effects on instruction and learning.”