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Academic Auditors A very good case can be made that the last thing public schools need is another layer of well-credentialed men and women poking around in them. But in proposing the creation of a brand new profession -- that of academic auditor -- that is exactly what I aim to recommend for elementary and secondary schools, though with two exculpatory twists. First, practitioners of this new line of work would be private-sector, not government, employees. And second, they would not have access to a single printout on a single child without the specific blessing of local citizens. But before talking about what academic auditors might actually do -- for the time being, think of their role as roughly analogous to that of financial auditors -- let me suggest why their creation would be a good idea. Implicit in any number of current education controversies is a tension between two worthy goals: Celebrating "local control" on the one hand, and assuring "accountability" on the other. Accountability in education can take many shapes. For example, it's one of the main virtues of school choice, as parents who are unhappy with the education their children are receiving can enroll them someplace else, easy enough. But for our purposes, think of accountability in narrower terms, as in testing boys and girls on a regular basis in order to assure that they're really learning to read, write, compute, etc. If, for instance, kids in a school test "well" (always controlling for the socioeconomic background of students and their families), that would at least suggest that their teachers and administrators are performin The aforementioned tension can be summarized like this: It's nearly impossible to mesh (1) the multiplicity of curricular and pedagogical practices that thousands of communities doubtless would pursue if they were, in fact, free to do so with (2) interest parents might have in knowing how their kids and their local schools are doing, with precision, in comparison to other children and other schools. For doesn't there need to be a fair amount of sameness in what children are taught for test scores in one place to be compared meaningfully to scores in other places? The answer, needless to say, is yes. How to reconcile, therefore, accountability's demands for homogeneity with the distinctly American devotion to decentralization in public education? I am indebted to colleagues on an American Experiment task force I recently chaired who proposed what they called academic auditors. They urged that educators and consumers (with emphasis on the latter) contribute to developing principles and measures of evaluation that are "grounded in the kind of uniformity and credibility that are necessary to engender widespread confidence." Examples might include:
The list can go on, but you get the idea. While data like these might not lend themselves, say, to comparing with exactitude what ninth-grade algebra students in Minneapolis know compared to ninth-grade algebra students in St. Paul, much less to students in St. Louis, such information would be helpful in determining the kind of academic progress ninth graders in Minneapolis were, indeed, making. It needs to be stressed once more that academic auditors would have more in common with financial auditors employed by Arthur Andersen than with any government number crunchers. This, for no other reason, than auditors at Arthur Andersen generally show up only when and where they're invited. Similarly, one would presume that academic auditors would come to develop a battery of universally accepted criteria in much the same way that financial auditors, over many years, have done so in their field, making it possible, most pertinently, for investors to cogently compare the performance and prospects of one business with those of another. Let me close with one more reason why academic auditors are a good idea. The drive over the last two decades for more testing, more explicit "standards," and greater attention to "outcomes" has been propelled more by educational elites (especially conservative ones, frankly) than by rank-and-file moms and dads. This has been true because parents, more often than not, have been quicker to see how professional educators and governmental officials have repeatedly bastardized fundamentally sound notions, including academic rigor itself, into anti-intellectual, Rube Goldberg contraptions like the Profile of Learning, the centerpiece of Minnesota's "graduation rule." Simply put, every school in this state should be granted the right to opt out of the Profile, which has more to do with making the lives of teachers administratively miserable than with actually assuring that kids know their stuff. In its stead, I would urge that Minnesotans of all sorts start constructing the new profession we've been talking about here; one with many potential attributes, but none more attractive than the fact that members wouldn't have much chance to speak unless first spoken to. -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. |