Can We Measure What Matters Most?

This book examines the idea of educational accountability, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make schools better? Do business management theories and practices make organizations more effective? What if the most widely used management theories and assessment tools dont work? What if educational accountability tools dont actually measure what theyre supposed to? What if accountability data isnt valid, or worse, what if its meaningless? What if administrators dont know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we cant measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. How is a business-model of economic efficiency supposed to increase the competing, and perhaps mutually exclusive, ends of schooling, such as human development, student learning, personal satisfaction, social mobility, and economic growth? What if students dont learn much in schools? What if schools were never designed to produce student learning? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.