Rachel White 
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Abstract:

Standardized test-based accountability systems have spread across education systems worldwide, from state A–F school grades in the United States to Italy’s National Evaluation System (SNV). These systems promise data-driven improvement, but that promise rests on one precondition: that the measures are stable and valid from one year to the next.

This seminar draws on a study of Texas, the second-largest U.S. state, where the education commissioner has repeatedly revised the rules of the school accountability system over the past decade. Using ten years of district-level data, Rachel White documents how often the rules changed, shows that only about a third of districts kept the same rating across a rule-change year compared with two-thirds in stable years, and finds that changes in student test performance explain less than a third of accountability rating volatility. Counterfactual rescoring reveals that most districts would have received different grades had prior rules applied to the same student results.

The seminar considers what these findings mean for research that treats accountability ratings as outcomes, for the democratic accountability of the officials who control the metric, and for the design of more stable evaluation systems elsewhere.

Rachel White is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at the University of Texas at Austin and the founder and director of The Superintendent Lab. Her research centers on power and voice in education policy spaces. Much of her current work focused on inequities in superintendent labor markets and how superintendents navigate politically contentious environments, including state accountability systems that have fueled state takeovers of school districts and the privatization of publicly funded education programs. In both her teaching and research, Rachel White draws on her experience as a former school board member and vice president, high school cross country and track coach, and policy analyst with the Michigan Association of School Administrators.