Don’t Throw It Out—Fix It

Missouri currently has a very weak system of accountability for public school districts. Every spring, students take assessments under the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), and these test results feed into an accountability system known as the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP). And by “feed into” I mean that test scores are less than half of what districts are held accountable for. Based on MSIP results, districts are designated as fully accredited, partially accredited, or not accredited. It’s not actually much of a system, though, since all but six of our 520 districts are fully accredited.

The Missouri Senate debated this week whether we should just throw out the MSIP part. Students would still take the MAP tests, but only to meet federal requirements and get federal dollars. Supporters claim that outcomes will dramatically improve because every teacher, freed from the pressure of MAP scores, will thrive and innovate. Of course, that’s not true across the board. We have quite a few districts that need more oversight, not less.

Rather than take an accountability system with almost no teeth and toss it aside, we should be working on building a better one. It is still true that you can’t fix what you don’t measure. We need test scores to tell us if students can read and do math. We need to know how well schools are serving their students. Publicly funded systems should be held accountable to taxpayers.

We are on version six of MSIP. The state board of education recently determined that the results of MSIP 6 are not reliable enough to use without a rolling three-year average. If it is a broken accountability system—which it seems to be—let’s fix it.