Letter to the Editor

Keeping Assessment Out of Program Accountability

The search for alternative methods for measuring the progress of adult learners started with dissatisfaction with standardized tests in measuring the many different and important ways in which adults learn. The alternative approaches to measuring student progress that have been explored in Adventures in Assessment may soon be recognized as acceptable alternatives to standardized tests, and this offers the hope that assessment will become a more valuable experience for learners and teachers. U nfortunately, these new tools may become part of the program accountability systems used by funding agencies to judge whether or not their money is being well spent.

Last year Sondra Stein and I published an article in Adult Learning ("How a College and University Model Could Be Used to Judge Program Effectiveness, .Sept. 1991, Vol. 3, No.1) that suggested an accreditation approach to measuring program effectiveness for accountability purposes. Our intent was less to promote the accreditation model than to argue for dropping student assessment from the program accountability process. Using student progress as a measure of program effectiveness can cause programs to seek out those students who can do well on a curriculum that teaches to a standardized test or to formulate curriculum to prepare students to pass the test.

An accountability system must compare a program against a standard measure of impact in order to assess whether it is doing well or poorly. If alternative assessment approaches are integrated into an accountability system, these tools will eventually be required to perform like standardized tests and provide measures that can judge a program against some standard. Only standardized, comparable measures can serve as a measure of program effectiveness.

A program should be concerned with improving its standard of service rather than recruiting students who will be successful or training students to be successful on a standardized test. Student assessment should take place, but it should be designed to produce measures of progress that serve the needs of students and teachers, not the needs of a program to secure funding. Using student assessment as the measure of effectiveness for program accountability, no matter how good the assessment tool, will always make the test result the focus of programs rather than the needs of the student.

Funding agencies do have a legitimate right to measure the effectiveness of the programs they fund. But, looking at student progress does not necessarily provide a way to judge whether or not money is being well spent. Some of the existing standardized assessment tools are good measures of student progress in acquisition of skills or competencies, but the impact on a student's life could be in areas not measured by the assessment tool. Though progress as measured by tests might come slowly for some students, positive changes in their lives could be occurring.

Judging a program against standards of practice and service can give an indication of how well money is being spent. If a program has all of the elements of good practice and service, then students who enter and remain in the program should be doing about as well as they can. Just as higher education programs are judged on the quality of their teachers, curriculum, materials, administration, and equipment- adult basic education should be measured by the elements of its programs. The accreditation model used by colleges and universities does not rely on student assessment. Why should ABE programs be judged by student performance?

Assessment of student progress is now serving as a "red herring," drawing attention away from the need for staff development and program development. Time and money is being put into the development and implementation of models for measuring student progress, many of them useful and effective, while little attention is paid to evaluating and improving the quality of service. Assessments of student progress are essential to managing learning, but they should not drive the system. Rather, they should be an integral part of a good system. The need for ABE services will be with us for decades, and we need a model for measuring accountability that focuses attention on building effective institutions.

ABE practitioners who are interested in promoting alternative assessment must pay attention to the context in which assessment takes place. If the context is part of the funding process, then standardized measures will be needed. A better option would be to change and improve the system of measuring program effectiveness so that measures of student progress were not part of the funding process. The assessment tools, then, could serve the needs of students and teachers, and the program accountability system could focus on improving servtce.

John P. Comings, Vice President
World Education, Inc.
210 Lincoln Street
Boston, MA

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 3 (April 1992),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.