Fixing schools' broken accountability system

This from JCTA President Brent McKim - refreshingly, sounding more like a professional teacher than a union thug - in the Courier-Journal:

Kentucky's education accountability system is broken and must be fixed. When the Kentucky Education Reform Act created our ground-breaking accountability system, the concept was simple: Identify clearly what schools are to teach and hold them accountable for doing so through a high-stakes statewide assessment.

Although many of the highest performing countries in the world, such as Finland and Singapore, do not use accountability as the basis for school improvement, the KERA model is certainly a workable one. However, there are some critical assumptions that must be met if the system is to promote good teaching and learning, which should be the ultimate goal:

The expectations for what is to be learned each year must be clearly identified for educators, students and parents.

The amount to be learned in a given year must be reasonable and teachable...

...Unfortunately... [t]he process for defining what we want students to know and be able to do was essentially to bring in groups of teachers, provide them technical assistance, and ask them, "What should we teach in your grade level or course?" Put a dozen teachers in a room, each with their own favorite topics, and the answer comes back "Everything!" every time. No one began by listing all the topics and asking the teachers, "How long would it take to teach each topic to a typical class of learners?" No one then said, "OK, now we are going to determine our content standards, but the rule is, we can't pick more standards than there is time to teach them." ...

... [L]ittle or no thought was given to whether there was enough time in a school year to teach all the standards... Because educators are expected to teach a "mile-wide" set of standards, we find ourselves jettisoning our best teaching methods in an attempt to blaze through all the content for the given year in hopes that enough will "stick" to allow our students to do well on the state assessment. It's all about covering topics, not about teaching to mastery for all students. We simply don't have time for that...

...As we move into the 21st Century, where an overwhelming amount of information (and misinformation) is just a "Google" away, we need a system that focuses less on what facts students know and more on what ability they have to acquire and make judgments about information. This focus on student capacities should guide us as we redesign our school improvement system...