The Age of Achievement and Effort

The Age of Achievement and Effort

Since the early 1990s, increasing student achievement, especially for subgroups perceived to be underperforming, was among the most prominent policy priorities for educators around the world. This was an Age of Achievement and Effort. In this age, cyclical reviews of performance data drove teachers to engage in intensive interactions focused on short-term problem solving. These interactions led, in turn, to rapid interventions to improve performance and close achievement gaps. Teachers and leaders worked hard to measure and accelerate the progress of every student, in every class, and in every school. The Age of Achievement and Effort was a golden age for testing, data teams, and teaching to prespecified standards.

For those who felt that previous reforms had been too wishy-washy, and too subject to the whims of individual teachers, principals, or system leaders, the Age of Achievement and Effort had its merits.

Educational reform in this period was driven by four questions. 1. How are we doing? 2. How do we know?

3. How can we improve? 4. How can this benefit everyone?

In the best-case scenarios, these questions led teachers and leaders to pay attention to performance, measurement, improvement, and equity. They made educators focus on helping all students, especially those who struggled the most, rather than on raising the overall or average levels of attainment.

The assumptions and motivations behind the Age of Achievement and Effort were sometimes far from virtuous, though. The age first emerged in the English-speaking world in the United Kingdom in the 1980s when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher believed that the path to economic prosperity was to open up markets, roll back the state, pare back government support for the vulnerable, and replace manufacturing with finance and services. Her government fomented mass

distrust of public institutions, especially public education, for being ineffective, obstructive, and unwieldy. By the early 1990s, the United Kingdom had created a highly prescriptive national curriculum that was accompanied by standardized testing and a toughened-up school inspection system.22

Meanwhile, in the United States, President Ronald Reagan, who was also inspired by free-market ideology, commissioned an elite task force that wrote a report on A Nation at Risk.23 This report likened alleged declines in educational standards and results to an insidious war being waged against the United States as a nation, in which the teaching profession itself was a big part of the problem. By the late 1990s, a growing drive to develop state standards had led to more testing and standardization as the response. In upstate New York, for example, Andy’s research on secondary schools’ experiences of educational change found:

Increased examination credit requirements led to losses of curriculum choice, standardization of content, and diminished capability among teachers to respond to student diversity.24 Students became more test conscious and teachers found it harder to connect with students’ interests and lives. Teachers felt that students with special needs and language learning difficulties were especially disadvantaged when they were required to take the tests. The resulting effect on teachers was widespread demoralization and burnout.25

The legislation of President George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act took the standards movement that had begun in states like New York to a national level.26 NCLB began as a bipartisan initiative led by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to combine heightened attention to equity with top-down accountability as measured by standardized tests. But as the implementation of NCLB progressed, schools eventually had to meet ultimately unattainable targets for adequate yearly progress, where 100 percent of schools were expected to be proficient or better with 100 percent of their students. When schools struggled, they were closed down. There were also epidemics of systemwide cheating.

Promising efforts to promote engaging educational innovations were sidelined as educators placed exclusive emphasis on driving up achievement results. Dennis encountered this in the early 2000s, when he led the federally funded Massachusetts Coalition for Teacher Quality and Student Achievement to improve student learning by developing teachers’ professional skills.27 Teachers complained bitterly when curriculum innovations they had taken years to develop—on art history, music appreciation, or the history of the Civil Rights Movement, for example—were undermined by the state’s and the nation’s relentless obsession with testing. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top strategy offered no easing up on NCLB’s approach.28 It granted funding only if states used the federal government’s own test-based growth measures in their accountability strategies.

Meanwhile, the U.K. government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, set out a similar agenda of national large-scale reform strategies by instituting a National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy from 1997 for literacy and 1998 for numeracy.29 The strategy provided prescribed and paced instructional materials, exercised relentless surveillance over implementation through the use of coaching and other strategies, retained the tough and even punitive approach of the existing inspection service, and imposed high-stakes consequences for schools that failed to improve on “key stage” achievement tests.30

Despite the government’s claims of success based on its own data that showed increasing proficiency rates between 1995 and 2000, a report by the independent Statistics Commission contradicted these claims.31 It concluded that the almost identical year-by-year growth rates in two different subjects were statistically highly improbable. Other large-scale research found that the government’s claims about improved reading scores were “illusory” and “exaggerated,” and represented very small effect sizes that “could easily result from test practice.”32

This and other independent evidence demonstrated that the standardized achievement tests had inflicted huge collateral damage: a narrowed curriculum, loss of classroom creativity, teaching to the

test, and diminished opportunities for what is now known as deep learning. “Whole class teaching . . . was a traditional teacher-directed style,” researchers found.33 “Teachers asked closed questions, pupils supplied brief answers which were not probed further, generalized praise rather than specific feedback was given, and there was an emphasis on factual recall.”34

The Age of Achievement and Effort became a global phenomenon, promoted by transnational organizations like the World Bank, the OECD, and the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in the United States. For instance, when the OECD published its national rankings on its first international PISA test in 2000, governments like those in the economic powerhouse of Germany were shocked to discover that they were mediocre in the league tables, rather than strong performers.35 In the United States, as each cycle of PISA results was released, the NCEE and the media wrung their hands in despair over the merely middling performance of a country struggling to maintain its reputation as the world’s only super-power.36 This was despite the fact that some states, such as Massachusetts, performed as well as the highest-ranked countries, and that the whole country had an average score similar to that of the European Union.37

Instead of developing visions for their educational systems related to what they wanted their students and societies to be like, country after country started setting goals in terms of the international rankings for PISA. Australia’s government proclaimed its intention to rank in the top five by 2025.38 Meanwhile, when Andy went to Wales in 2013 with an OECD policy review team (independent from the branch that administers the PISA assessments), the Welsh Department for Education and Skills stated that it wanted to be in the top twenty by 2015 (which would have placed it higher than England).39

More and more educational policies boiled down to how far the countries in question could ascend up the PISA rankings. But PISA metrics and the inferences made from them were flawed. For one thing, when each new cycle of results was published, the OECD added in new systems that ranked near the top, such as Shanghai