Case Assignment
The field of education undergoes considerable changes all the time. First, much attention was paid to the social and cultural aspects of a certain community. Then, it was necessary to consider the perspectives of technological progress and the role of a human in it. Now, many educational organizations focus on the development of high-quality services and the improvement of students’ skills, attitudes, and abilities. Student assessment and institutional accountability are the two important parts of a learning landscape that also includes the technological deployment, the physical architecture, student-teacher relationships, and other teaching and learning processes (Bell, Neary, & Stevenson, 2009). However, despite a number of common goals and academic standards being established in the US system of education, there are still some misunderstandings over the explanation of the relationship between student assessment, institutional accountability, and student achievement. The aim of this work is to improve an understanding of the assessment-accountability relationship and discuss the issues and challenges educational leaders may face in evaluating student achievement and institutional performance.
College Educational Leaders, Assessment, and Accountability
One of the main threats to American education is that the population truly believes that the chosen system is one of the best and the most effective in the world. Educational leaders are proud of the opportunities they offer to students, and students, in turn, believe that they meet all expectations established by society when they successfully graduate colleges and universities. Chambliss and Takacs (2014) pose the question about the goals of a learning process in colleges and explain that colleges usually work to provide a “thick environment of constant feedback, driven by the establishment and maintenance of social relationships” (p. 132). In other words, college leaders have to develop and promote various assessment tools to make sure they achieve good results in institutional accountability and student achievements.
However, the main task is to clarify if assessments are developed to achieve learning success or to check if the achieved learning success is enough for a facility. It is wrong to neglect the fact that learning assessment is a central point in student experience (Hernandez, 2012). The primary issue of educational leadership in assessment and accountability is to understand what kind of work has to be done to improve student learning, how to prepare teachers for developing effective assessment, and how to make all these assessments useful for students, teachers, and leaders.
Challenges in the Work of Educational Leaders
The main challenge that college educational leaders can face in student assessment and institutional accountability is the necessity to deal with a number of tasks at once. To assess students’ means to grade and report student achievements and define if these achievements fulfill the expectations of a college (Hernandez, 2012). However, during the last several years, performance-based accountability requirements have become prevalent over other academic goals (Rabovsky, 2012). Educational leaders face a considerable dilemma if academic freedoms can promote social justice, public good, and academic responsibility or academic freedoms can help to discover knowledge that may foster social justice (Metz, 2010). In fact, it seems that leaders just try to create as many questions and concerns about academic freedoms, accountability, and assessment as possible in order not to come to one conclusion and recognize one simple step to high student achievements. What they try to do is to develop new debates and contradictions about the worth of a learning process.
Leaders are challenged by the obligation to meet a number of goals and please several groups of people. On the one hand, certain governmental standards have to be considered and respected in order not to lose funding and use available resources. On the other hand, teachers and their needs should be underlined because if leaders neglect the needs of teachers, the problem of academic shortage and turnover can be raised. Finally, educational leaders have to demonstrate their interests in promoting students’ skills and knowledge. Students should not be afraid of assessments and achieve good results to prove high institutional accountability and worthwhile future prospects. They have to accept it as a chance to evaluate their work and enjoy the results.
Student Achievement and Institutional Performance Factors
Assessment may also be defined as the main factor that can contribute to low student achievement and low institutional performance. Instead of focusing on students’ writing, reading, critical thinking, and technological skills separately, assessments are created to check all these abilities simultaneously. Many students are confused by the necessity to demonstrate their knowledge in different fields and make mistakes that are not inherent to them. Still, teachers’ concerns should also be recognized because these people develop assessments, introduce them, explain their urgency, and then report the results to their leaders. To prove the contributive nature of assessments, Hernandez (2012) discusses two characteristics of assessment: summative and formative. From the formative point of view, assessments aim at giving feedback that can be used by students in their learning. From the summative point of view, assessments promote awards and recognition for further institutional accountability.
However, assessment should not be defined as the only contributive factor to institutional accountability. Such issues as the lack of economic opportunities, poor access to health and social services, and even community safety may challenge students and promote poor results. Teachers and leaders have to understand that students cannot ignore the world around them. Students may be concerned about the inability to buy a book or spend less time on treatment. They have to think not only about education and the achievement of high academic goals. Therefore, it is expected that educational facilities continue their cooperation with governmental, healthcare, social, and cultural organizations within their communities. This cooperation should help to develop fair and reasonable assessments for students so that they can increase achievements and improve overall institutional performance.
Assessment-Accountability-Achievement Relationships
Taking into consideration the challenges of educational leaders, the obligations of teachers, and the attitudes of students to assessment and accountability, the relationship between student assessment, institutional accountability, and student achievement cannot be ignored. Each issue gains its significance only when they are taken together. Assessments help students check their knowledge, define their gaps, and clarify what kind of work can be done to achieve more. Teachers use assessment to contribute to institutional performance and demonstrate their leaders the results of the work done. College educational leaders, in their turn, are able to analyze the general impact of their facilities on the community and the US population as a whole. In general, this type of relationship serves as the best evidence of the importance of a learning process and the identification of the role of each participant in it.
References
Bell, L., Neary, M., & Stevenson, H. (Eds.). (, 2009). The future of higher education: Policy, pedagogy, and student experience. London, UK: Continuum.
Chambliss, D. F., & Takacs, C. G. (2014). How college works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hernandez, R. (2012). Does continuous assessment in higher education support student learning? The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning, 64(4), 489-502.
Metz, T. (2010). A dilemma regarding academic freedom and public accountability in higher education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 44(4), 529-549.
Rabovsky, T. M. (2012). Accountability in higher education: Exploring impacts on state budgets and institutional spending patterns. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 22(4), 675-700.