Upper Elementary Grades Bear the Brunt of Accountability

This from the Phi Delta Kappan:

Educators claim that accountability forces them to narrow the curriculum. But a comparison of teachers' schedules before and after NCLB shows that little has changed.

Upper elementary teachers won't be surprised to learn that in every state, students enrolled in grades 3 through 8 bear the brunt of educational accountability.

All states test all students at these grade levels in English/language arts and mathematics (Toye et al. 2006). Furthermore, an increasing number of states are testing students at selected elementary and middle school grade levels in science and, to a lesser extent, in social studies.

Although all states test high school students, testing is done less uniformly; states vary on the grades and subjects tested. Finally, only six states test students at grade levels lower than grade 3 (California, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi) (Toye et al. 2006). Although the burden of educational accountability in the United States rests with children ages 8 through 12, not much research has evaluated the impact of educational accountability on schools, teachers, and students.

Teachers provide the bulk of the evidence of the impact of accountability on teaching. Not surprisingly, teachers report that accountability has adversely affected how they teach, impacting curriculum, quality of instruction, and instructional time...

Teachers report that the major effect of educational accountability on the curriculum has been "narrowing" the curriculum. Hutton, Curtis, and Burstein, for example, conclude that the emphasis on high-stakes testing "is impacting how the core subjects are being taught, with the social studies curriculum being relegated to the background and only taught when there is time" (2006, p. 18). Similarly, M. Gail Jones and her colleagues (1999) state that, as a result of the ABC program in North Carolina, the teachers they interviewed spent most of the school day preparing students in the basics, that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

It's true that different subjects in the elementary school receive different emphasis in terms of allocated time. But it's not true that educational accountability legislation has caused this...