Beyond Test Scores

By Jack Schneider (2017). Beyond Test Scores reframes current debates over school quality by offering new approaches to educational data that can push us past our unproductive fixation on test scores. Using the highly diverse urban school district of Somerville, Massachusetts, as a case study, Schneider and his research team developed a new framework to more fairly and comprehensively assess educational effectiveness. And by adopting a wide range of measures aligned with that framework, they were able to more accurately capture a broader array of school strengths and weaknesses. Their new data not only provided parents, educators, and administrators with a clearer picture of school performance, but also challenged misconceptions about what makes a good school.

School Integration in Massachusetts: Racial Diversity and State Accountability

By Jack Schneider, Ashley J. Carey, Peter Piazza, and Rachel S. White (2020). This report is designed for both policy leaders and the interested public. We use publicly available data to track demographic trends across the past decade. In doing so, we examine not only the state of school diversity in Massachusetts, but also the role played by existing accountability structures in exacerbating segregation.

Educational Accountability 3.0

Several of the most problematic elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) were repealed when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was reauthorized in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Nevertheless, the nation’s most important education legislation remains deeply committed to test-focused approaches to accountability. In both incarnations—as NCLB and ESSA—this key federal law has been framed as an effort to strengthen schools and close opportunity gaps, yet it has constrained state and local officials, produced a host of unintended consequences, and largely failed to realize its aims. This report seeks to outline what a more effective and equitable approach to assessment of student learning and accountability for schools and districts might look like. Drawing together roughly two dozen leading scholars, it sets forth a policy agenda for the next reauthorization of ESEA. At the same time—in light of the lengthy delay in reauthorization that is likely to occur—it considers how local and state leaders might leverage some of the underutilized flexibility available under ESSA.

Developing a Learning System for Continuous Quality Improvement: A Research-Practice Partnership Between Lowell Public Schools and University of Massachusetts Lowell

By Elizabeth Zumpe, Derek Dzormeku, Abeer Hakouz, Peter Piazza, and Jack Schneider (2023). This report details the launch of a Research Practice Partnership between the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Lowell Public Schools. It describes the challenges and opportunities inherent to such work, offering an overview of first-year accomplishments.

Alternative Educational Accountability Right Now: Examples from the Field

By Ashley Carey & Jack Schneider (2022). In cities and states across the country, there is a burgeoning movement to expand how we measure student learning and school quality. Coalitions of researchers, practitioners, and activists have begun to develop more holistic and democratic alternatives. Drawing on interviews with the leadership of these efforts, this report offers a general overview of each, including background information about their structures, successes, and challenges. This report also looks across these efforts to identify responses that might collectively address shortcomings of existing measurement and accountability systems in the U.S.

Measuring School Quality Beyond Test Scores: A Toolkit

By Jack Schneider, James Noonan, Ashley Carey, Kara Hersey, Jane Marshall, Karalyn McGovern, and Melanie Pavao (2021). Our toolkit offers guidance on building a school quality framework, including primers on using alternative assessments like surveys, administrative data, and school walkthroughs. This guide also includes sample focus group protocols and an inventory of open-source perception surveys.

The (Mis)measure of Schools: How Data Affect Stakeholder Knowledge and Perceptions of Quality

By Jack Schneider, Rebecca Jacobsen, Rachel S. White, and Hunter Gelbach (2018) Teachers College Record.

Under the reauthorized Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states and districts retain greater discretion over the measures included in school quality report cards. Moreover, ESSA now requires states to expand their measurement efforts to address factors like school climate. This shift toward more comprehensive measures of school quality provides an opportunity for states and districts to think intentionally about a basic question: What specific information should schools collect and report to their communities?

Putting the Public Back Into Public Accountability

By Derek Gottlieb and Jack Schneider (2018) Phi Delta Kappan.

Educational accountability has been relentlessly criticized for its imperfections over the past 15 years. These criticisms generally take aim at the narrowness of measurement systems, which rely chiefly on standardized test scores, as well as at
the punitive sanctions associated with underperformance. Without a doubt, these are serious matters. But relatively little concern has been directed at a related problem: the failure of accountability systems to meaningfully engage the public.

Holistic School Quality Measurement and the Future of Accountability: Pilot-Test Results

By Douglas J. Gagnon and Jack Schneider (2017) Educational Policy.

School accountability systems in the United States have been criticized on a number of fronts, mainly on grounds of completeness and fairness. This study examines an alternative school quality framework—one that seemingly responds to several core critiques of present accountability systems. Examining results from a pilot study in a diverse urban district, we find that this alternative system captures domains of school quality that are not reflected in the current state system, specifically those measuring opportunity to learn and socioemotional factors. Furthermore, we find a less deterministic relationship between school quality and poverty under the alternative system. We explore the policy implications of these findings vis-à-vis the future of accountability.

A Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Educational Assessment in the United States

By Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider (2017). In Alarcón & Lawn (eds.) Assessment Cultures. Educational assessment in the United States is characterized by a number of seeming contradictions. It is viewed as a valid measure of learning, but often seen as an inaccurate gauge of student ability. It is regularly the key variable in high-stakes decisions, but is widely considered to be unfair. It is used to motivate students, teachers, and schools, yet is thought to distort the learning process. Assessment, in short, is deeply accepted and widely reviled. How did this come to pass? Why is it that Americans are drawn to educational assessment just as strongly as they are repelled by it? What accounts for this love/hate relationship?

Building a Better Measure of School Quality

By Jack Schneider, Rebecca Jacobsen, Rachel White, and Hunter Gehlbach (2017) Phi Delta Kappan.

What if we could measure school quality more fairly and comprehensively? What if we could assemble a picture that more accurately matched the reality perceived by those who truly know a school?

In spring 2014, our team began work in a small, urban school district in Massachusetts to build a new framework for measuring school quality (Schneider, 2017). Rather than beginning with the data available and then seeking to align them with relevant values and goals, we did the opposite. We began with a simple question: What do stakeholders — educators, parents, and the public — care about?

Student Experience Outcomes in Racially Integrated Schools: Looking Beyond Test Scores in Six Districts

By Jack Schneider, Peter Piazza, Rachel S. White, and Ashley Carey (2021) Education and Urban Society.

In this study, we examine eight social and emotional outcomes (e.g., student engagement, sense of belonging) analyzing differences for students who attend racially diverse schools. Drawing on survey responses from roughly 26,000 students, we find that racially diverse schools are associated with more positive social and emotional outcomes for all students. Strikingly, we find that these outcomes are most uniformly positive among white students, whose families have long represented the strongest opposition to systematic racial desegregation. In light of these results, this study has implications for educators, advocates, researchers, and policy makers during a time of renewed attention to school integration.

Making the Grade: A History of the A-F Marking Scheme

By Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt (2013) Journal of Curriculum Studies.

This article provides a historical interpretation of one of the defining features of modern schooling: grades. As a central element of schools, grades—their origins, uses and evolution––provide a window into the tensions at the heart of building a national public school system in the United States. We argue that grades began as an intimate communication tool among teachers, parents, and students used largely to inform and instruct. But as reformers worked to develop a national school system in the late nineteenth century, they saw grades as useful tools in an organizational rather than pedagogical enterprise––tools that would facilitate movement, communication and coordination. Reformers placed a premium on readily interpretable and necessarily abstract grading systems. This shift in the importance of grades as an external rather than internal communication device required a concurrent shift in the meaning of grades––the meaning and nuance of the local context was traded for the uniformity and fungibility of more portable forms.

Adding “Student Voice” to the Mix: Perception Surveys and State Accountability Systems

By Jack Schneider, James Noonan, Rachel S. White, Douglas Gagnon, and Ashley J. Carey (2021) AERA Open

For the past two decades, student perception surveys have become standard tools in data collection efforts. At the state level, however, “student voice” is still used sparingly. In this study, we examine the ways in which including student survey results might alter state accountability determinations.

The Best of Both Worlds: Replacing Machine-Scored Standardized Tests with Teacher-Rated Classroom Assignments and Accurate Grading May Represent Our Best Hope For Promoting Both Accountability and Instruction

By Jack Schneider, Joe Feldman, and Dan French (2016) Phi Delta Kappan.

A History of Achievement Testing in the United States or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy

By Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider (2018) Teachers College Record.

This essay offers a historical analysis of the structural and cultural aspects of American education that help explain the durability of standardized testing in the face of more than a century of persistent criticism.

Why ESSA Has Been A Reform Without Repair

By Andrew Saultz, Jack Schneider, and Karalyn McGovern

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was designed to remedy the wrongs of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). After more than a decade in effect, NCLB’s many shortcomings made the law untenable and a target of criticism for both the political left and right. ESSA was supposed to shift policy in substantive and substantial ways from NCLB. So far, however, it has not.