Bill proposing changes to accountability system misses the mark

 As published on Boardhawk, March 18, 2025

https://boardhawk.org/2025/03/bill-proposing-changes-to-state-accountability-system-misses-the-mark/

The bill before the legislature to modify our Education Accountability System, HB25-1278, is not about teaching and learning. It seems a missed opportunity.

We need to connect accountability to what takes place in our classrooms. Three disciplines are integral to what we assess: reading, writing, and mathematics.

What data are most essential to Colorado’s accountability system? They come from our two major assessments: CMAS (grades 3-8) and the PSAT/SAT (grades 9-11). Both assess how well students perform in three subjects: reading, writing, and math.

The task force that did yeoman work to study our accountability system came up with many recommendations for improvement. They inform HB25-1278, perhaps on its way to passage by the legislature, in spite of its cost. (The Fiscal Note from the Legislative Council states: “For FY 2025-26, the bill requires an appropriation of $5,561,704 to the Colorado Department of Education.”)

But not a word in the bill on the teaching of reading, writing, or math.

A former English teacher looks at the many steps HB25-1278 “requires” of the Colorado Department of Education. Some feel peripheral. Technical fixes. Modifications in the current system. But nothing about a more fundamental “fix”—how to improve teaching and learning. And yet isn’t it what and how we teach, and how well students gain skills and knowledge, that leads to the rise or fall in a school’s accountability rating?

“Peripheral”? To make my point, five examples from the bill.

“Requires the department of education…

• to divide state assessments into shorter sections with age-appropriate time frames to evaluate students;
• to provide guidance … on encouraging student participation in state assessments;
• to include college entrance exams in the student academic achievement performance indicator;
• to study academic opportunities, inequities, and promising practices in schools and improvements to the state accountability and accreditation system;
• to create a statewide education accountability dashboard and review and make recommendations to the state board of education ….” (Colorado General Assembly – Bill Summary.)

A bill of this kind cannot speak to the day-to-day challenges schools and teachers face in trying to help students meet and exceed expectations on our state assessments. But that is where the blood, sweat, and tears take place. That is why this bill feels remarkably bloodless. Disconnected from the heart of the problem.

It also feels backwards. Alter the accountability structure, but don’t address what this structure is supposed to measure: student achievement and growth, specifically, in three disciplines.

An old English teacher often looks at our results in reading and writing.

Since 2016, on CMAS, for grades 3-8, no grade has yet shown that even 50% of its students can Meet or Exceed Expectations.

Since 2017, Colorado juniors have taken the SAT. Their 2024 scores on the Reading/Writing portion were the lowest they have ever been; less than 60% were able to Meet or Exceed Expectations.

Two specific results from last spring are especially alarming:

• 35% of our 8th graders—17,599 students—performed in the lowest two categories, not even Approaching Expectations, on the literacy portion of CMAS.
• 30.6% of our 11th graders—17,326 students—scored in the lowest category, Did Not Yet Meet, not even Approaching Expectations, on the SAT’s Reading/Writing assessment.
  

More alarming still: in math, even more Colorado students are far from proficient.

A reminder: these are the results largely determining why many schools and several districts are on Performance Watch.

If we implement all the recommendations of the task force—at no small cost in time and resources—and do not address, for starters, how to improve the reading skills of our students, I fear we will have committed that proverbial sin – moving chairs around the deck of the Titanic.

CDE might be “required” to do all of the above and more. My own recommendation is a simple one. CDE should reassess its latest Strategic Plan. Its goals for reading (its on-going narrow focus) stops at grade 3. That cannot be. A decade after putting the READ Act in place, how can we still act as if the problem–and most of the attention–is all about the K-3 years? Don’t we have sufficient evidence to acknowledge a reading crisis pervades the K-12 system?

I agree that our accountability system can be unfair and needs an update. But what schools and teachers consider unfair, every day, is that they cannot do more to help their students who are struggling to read, write, and do math well.

Let that be our focus. It’s the best way to be accountable.