Neverending Accountability

Forget standardized test scores. In Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Bob Lenz, chief education officer and founder of Envision Schools, calls for college diplomas as a better measure of school performance under NCLB. Lenz says:

Designing educational policy to leave no child behind is the equivalent of driving forward by looking in the rear view mirror. If our policymakers want to move America’s children along the road to success, they should make earning a college degree a defining goal and remake “No Child Left Behind” into “A College Diploma in Every Hand.”

How exactly would this work? Lenz provides no details. Would associate degrees count the same as bachelor’s degrees? Part-time attendance the same as full-time? With tuition going nowhere but up, would a public school be accountable for its students’ ability to save and pay for college? Would taking other post-high-school paths – oh, let’s just say military service to be especially contrary – mean students and their schools would be NCLB failures?

And when, exactly, would you take the measurement? If a class graduates from high school one spring and you count heads and degrees four years later, all you’ve done is assess a very specific slice of the college population. Not every eventual graduate is a traditional student.

Lenz is on firmer ground when he describes his idea of a revamped curriculum. Academic rigor and an emphasis on critical thinking skills are good not only for the college-bound.  

But Lenz’s proposal assumes that college-prep in school naturally leads to college attendance, which then, if public schools are doing their jobs, leads to college graduation. For many kids this is indeed a straight line.

For many other young people, the decision and the ability to attend and finish college require a convergence of factors that public schools have no control over.

Because at some point, we are talking about adults here, adults who make adult decisions based on complicated adult lives. Grading public K-12 schools on college diplomas means grappling with how to assess a student who attends college part-time for eight years while supporting a family as much as it means figuring out how to hold a school accountable when a college student sleeps through an 8 a.m. class.

Bachelor’s degree completion hasn’t changed that much since at least the 1980s, yet the world certainly has, and sure, college degrees are a good thing. And there’s no argument that kids should arrive at college prepared. But shifting accountability from preparation to degree completion — whew, that’s a leap. 

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