ABSTRACT
Standards referenced reform, tied to reporting, engages directly with assessment issues related to accountability. Assessment is the key to good education and is inseparable from curriculum. In an accountability context, standards are used as a lever to improve the reliability and consistency of teacher judgement, and classroom evidence is used by education systems for reporting and tracking achievement over time. Assessment is thus a powerful driver for change and is at the heart of the teaching-learning dynamic. The relationship between the learner, learning and assessment needs to be kept central and the idea of teacher empowerment is fundamental. This chapter is a call to honor and sustain teacher professionalism through educative forms of school-based and teacher-led evaluation, assessment and communities of judgement practice. It supports the argument for a central place for classroom assessment in the role of assessment in educational accountability. Given the current international quest for countries to seek “national consistency
in education” through the use of standards referenced assessment systems, involving student assessment and reporting against national standards and benchmarks, it is important to make explicit the intended and unintended consequences of such strategies. At the outset it is beneficial to acknowledge the inexorable existence of the pressures to pervert. In a context that is standards-driven and that values standardization, there is a great danger that technical, rationalist approaches that generalize and encourage the development of superficial assessment tasks and practices, will emerge. Attaining coherence between classroom assessment and system level accountability that includes system interest in transparency of outcomes has been much debated (Frederiksen & White, 2004; Wilson, 2004). It is teachers’ judgements and interpretations of assessment data in the context of social moderation that is
key, for it is teachers who have direct access to the information needed for any accountability system. Yet it cannot be presumed that teacher assessment is unproblematic. It is internationally acknowledged that the development of teachers’ assessment capacity is not a strength of teacher education training. To help understand the tensions that are involved in this issue, a framework,
representing important dimensions, is introduced in the first section of this chapter. The next move is to define terms and concepts such as accountability and standards as they are used in this chapter. The chapter then outlines the different assessment regimes and associated practices for achieving accountability in the context of standards referenced reform and in so doing highlights their value and limitations. What is apparent in this analysis is the central role of teacher empowerment and professionalism in the case for intelligent accountability and more generative and educative forms of assessment, pedagogy and curriculum to enhance quality and improve equity of educational provision.
