Links
Accountability Issue Paper
(PDF)
Statement to Education Secretary Spellings
___________
news
Contact
US
|
 |
Educational Accountability
CAPE believes that all educational institutions have a responsibility
to provide their students with the knowledge, skills, values, ethics,
and social commitment they will need to succeed, to be good citizens,
and to be positive forces in a dynamically changing society and global
environment.
Ultimately, each private school is most immediately accountable to its
students’ families, and to its graduates—one by one. Private
education is based on choice. Families choose private schools for their
children, and parents will always be judges of whether a school meets
the needs of their children. All private schools are also to some degree
dependent on generous, voluntary support from graduates, families, and
others who are pleased with these schools.
Other forces also shape a private school’s destiny. The performance
of private schools is continually assessed by their governors and sponsors.
These overseers have an ongoing duty to evaluate outcomes and make their
decisions based in large part on each school’s performance.
Many private schools voluntarily participate in an accrediting process
as a way of accounting to the school’s own public as well as the
larger community. Accrediting bodies conduct extensive site-based reviews
of every aspect of a private school’s operations and program, measuring
and certifying that it meets prescribed standards.
Some states, in varying degrees, are also involved in some forms of accountability.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (268 U.S.
510 [1925]) limited the state’s authority to “standardize
its children” by forcing them to submit to only one kind of instruction,
because “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”
While guarding the liberty of parents to “direct the education and
upbringing of children,” the state has a legitimate responsibility
to ensure that students are educated in safe environments that promote
democratic values. Private schools comply with applicable statutes and
regulations. But in carrying out its regulatory role, government must
not impose on private schools rules “so pervasive and all-encompassing”
that compliance would “effectively eradicate the distinction”
between public and private schools and thereby deny parents their capacity
to guide their children’s education (Ohio v. Whisner, 351
N.E.2d 750, 768 [1976]).
At a time when test scores are seen by some as the ultimate measure of
attainment, the accountability of private schools for student achievement,
teacher quality, and school success cannot be addressed by standardized
testing alone or any single scale of measurement. While students in private
schools routinely take standardized tests as one tool for assessing achievement,
and while other forms of periodic assessment also have their place as
well, CAPE believes that test scores should never be allowed to become
a sole or dominant indicator of achievement or failure. Educational accountability
requires a much broader, long-term assessment of outcomes. These must
include the family’s educational goals for its children, how students
do at the next level(s) of schooling, accomplishment in life, and evidence
of productive good citizenship.
An accumulation of accountability mechanisms—not any single one—combines
to assure the public that private schools will provide the resources and
vision needed to help every enrolled student succeed. Within such an environment
of accountability, private schools pursue their mission, and survive or
fail on the merit of their performance. CAPE supports policies and initiatives
that will preserve and enhance this environment of accountability—so
that private schools remain good for students, good for families and good
for America.
Approved by CAPE’s Board of Directors: March 2004
(Modified from a statement approved March 1, 2003, by
the
National Association of Independent Schools.)
Related Links
Click here to download CAPE's accountability
issue paper as a PDF document.
Top of Page
Remarks on Accountability by NAIS President Patrick
F. Bassett at CAPE's Meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings - 3/14/05
Thank you, Secretary Spellings, for meeting with the private schools
community, which represents 11% of the nation's k-12 students. I'd like
to take a few moments to speak about private school accountability. We
demonstrate how educational excellence serves students well, whether at
large, inner-city parochial schools or rural non-sectarian independent
schools. Our accountability includes but goes beyond assessment, as we
are truly accountable on a daily basis to our parents, our graduates,
and our communities.
If there are places in America where truly "no child is left behind,"
it is in the private school sector. The government's own studies of private
school students regularly demonstrate how they outperform their peers
in public schools; indeed, NCES's National Educational Longitudinal Study
confirms that private school students, in dramatically significant proportions,
are much more likely to persist to graduate from a four-year college and
are much more likely to contribute to the community via public service
and civic participation.
Private schools prosper in part because they are not
burdened with onerous regulations and government testing and so have the
freedom to teach what and how their mission dictates they should. This
is not to say that private schools eschew the accountability of testing.
Private schools test all the time and in fact have "national tests":
They are called SATs, ACTs, CTPs, ERBs, and the AP or IB exams. The real
accountability measures, however, are how our graduates succeed at the
next level of schooling and in the workplace (for which there are already
mountains of evidence, much of it from the government's own studies, but
also from research provided by universities, such as the Annual College
Freshman Survey by the Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA).
There are multiple means by which private schools are routinely assessed:
by their boards of trustees; by their membership associations; by their
state or regional accrediting bodies. We all subscribe to meeting basic
health and safety regulations as dictated by the state. But in carrying
out its regulatory role, government must not impose on private schools
rules "so pervasive and all-encompassing" that compliance would
"effectively eradicate the distinction" between public and private
schools (Ohio v. Whisner, 351 N.E.2d 750, 768 [1976]).
Since the first schools in America were, in fact, private schools, there
has always been a "public purpose of private education," mainly
to provide the highest quality education to those who could access it,
through their own means or from the beneficence of patrons or other agencies
providing direct support to enable more families to have a real choice
in schools.
Finally, private schools are like businesses in that they are held to
a daily accountability by their families: If private schools don't serve
their clients well, they fail. That is accountability in its truest sense--immediate,
decisive, and real. Since the government has effectively agreed, in encouraging
the creation of charter schools that are freed from many regulations in
exchange for better student performance, we hope that the government will
continue to recognize the benefits that our private school freedoms bring
to our students, to our schools themselves, and to our schools in their
public purpose. Not only are private schools "good for kids, and
good for families" but also they are "good for America."
Top of Page |
|
