Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education

The committee will synthesize the research related to incentives and test-based accountability in K-12 public education. The committee will build on work in this area that was the subject of a February 2005 workshop at the NRC and that highlighted the tension between the economics and educational measurement literatures about the potential of test-based accountability to improve student achievement. Although each of these literatures provides a useful and somewhat mixed perspective about that potential, the economics literature tends to have a more favorable view whereas the measurement literature tends to have a more critical view. The goal for the committee is to synthesize these and other relevant research literatures into a framework that integrates the scientific arguments for and against the use of test-based incentives in public education and provides advice about the types of test-based accountability that are most likely to be successful. The committee will write a report that summarizes relevant research and its implications in a concise way that will be readily accessible to policy makers. The report will be written to inform the current debates about changing the many federal and state policies that use test-based incentives to improve K-12 public education. If appropriate, the committee may issue a Letter Report in advance of the final report of the study.

The project is sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The approximate start date for the project is December 1, 2006.

January 12-13, 2007 Meeting #1

November 16, 2007 Workshop on Multiple Measures

November 16-17, 2007 Meeting #2

Membership

Michael Hout, Chair, University of California, Berkeley
Dan Ariely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
George P. Baker, Harvard University, Boston, MA
Henry Braun, Boston College, MA
Anthony S. Bryk, Stanford University, CA
Edward L. Deci, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Christopher F. Edley, Jr., University of California, Berkeley
Geno Flores, San Diego City Schools, CA
Carolyn J. Heinrich, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Paul Hill, University of Washington, Seattle
Thomas J. Kane, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Daniel Koretz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Kevin Lang, Boston University, MA
Susanna Loeb, Stanford University, CA
Michael Lovaglia, University of Iowa, Iowa City
Lorrie A. Shepard, University of Colorado, Boulder
Brian Stecher, The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA