Accountability: How and Why a Boring Report Made Me Weep
Posted on 06/02/2011 @ 11:54 AM
James Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, writes about his reaction to a recent report by the National Research Council on "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education." What Gee finds most disturbing about the report is that it contains nothing we did not already know.
In the article, Gee notes, "Good parents, good teachers, and the good nuns that taught me decades ago could have told us such an incentive structure would not work. They could have thought of better ones, and do every day. Why do we, in education, at a policy level, so often do what even commonsense tells us is wrong?"
Read the full article, and tell us what you think the answer is to the last question Gee poses: What are we really interested in?
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