Can Federal School Accountability Policy Meet the Moment?

TLDR: Recent evidence suggests the need for a continued federal role in school accountability policy, but policymakers must grapple with the changing educational landscape and its implications for student assessment.

The federal role in school accountability expanded into new territory in 2001 with passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, in large part by requiring states to administer standardized reading and math assessments annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once during the high school years. To say that NCLB has had its critics is an understatement. Still, recent research indicates that the past two decades of K-12 assessment and accountability policy led to steady increases in student achievement, especially in math and for student groups that our education system had not been serving well. This finding is consistent with NCLB’s focus on student subgroups, including students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and poor and non-white students. A major component of the law was ensuring that students and families long under-served by the education system could not be ignored.

The need for a continued federal role in school accountability policy

These gains suggest there is a continued role for the federal government in pushing states and districts to collect and report information that helps families and policymakers identify whether schools are helping all students learn. Yet the potentially tectonic shifts that artificial intelligence (AI) will bring to education raise questions about what future federal assessment and accountability policy could or should look like.

Policy must evolve to match the changing role of technology in education

For instance, a growing number of organizations are asserting the need for a new generation of assessments to match the changes that AI is already delivering to classrooms. Such assessments would capture rich portraits of verbal reasoning, real-time performance, and project-based evidence of mastery, with AI helping to interpret that evidence rapidly along with personalized feedback for students and teachers at scale.

Federal assessment and accountability policy has played a particularly important role in drawing attention and resources to the needs and academic progress of historically underserved students. But policy tends to move slowly, while technological changes in schools (as elsewhere) are moving at a pace seldom before witnessed. Maintaining a focus on equity when it comes to assessment-related accountability will require policy makers to grapple much more quickly with a changing educational landscape.