Desegregation, Accountability, and Equality: North Carolina and the Nation, 1971-2002

Abstract

Using North Carolina as a lens to illuminate broader national developments, this paper examines how and why educational policy in the United States turned away from a civil rights agenda of opportunity and embraced test-based accountability as a way of promoting racial equality. We show that comprehensive desegregation, enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Great Society Programs expanded educational opportunities for African Americans, fueled significant increases in black educational achievement and attainment, and brought African Americans closer to equality with whites by the 1980s. We situate the turn to accountability in a political context shaped by an increasingly conservative political environment, and examine three overlapping waves of testbased accountability that began in North Carolina in the late 1970s and spread throughout the epaa aape Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 22 No. 117 2 region and the nation in the decades that followed: the minimum competency movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the standards based reforms of the 1980s, and the more comprehensive and coercive forms of high stakes testing in the 1990s. We argue that the southern political leaders who shaped U.S. educational policy turned to test-based accountability as a politically expedient alternative to the task of equalizing educational opportunities for African Americans. Civil rights organizations endorsed test-based accountability, but we find little evidence that test-based approaches improved African American educational outcomes. Opportunity policies, we conclude, did more to promote racial equality in educational achievement and attainment than test-based accountability.

The Origins of American Test-Based Educational Accountability and Controversies About Its Impact, 1970–1983

“…This article examines the origins of testbased accountability in the United States, beginning with its emergence in Florida and following its course through national debates that it sparked and a major trial in federal courts. It departs from earlier accounts in the extent of detail provided with respect to academic disputes at the time and the historical context of major policy decisions (Baker, 2015;Baker et al, 2014;Hamilton & Koretz, 2002;Shepard, 2008). By the mid-1980s, the opening battles in a continuing war over this particular approach to school reform largely had been settled from a policy standpoint, but arguments that occurred then offered lessons for the future.…”

“…Other states outside the South approached accountability in collaboration with local districts, setting goals and issuing standards for discussion and implementation (Herron, 1978). But Southern states generally took a different path; over the next 6 years, seven of the nine states to require universal testing for high school graduation were located there (Baker et al, 2014).…”

A History of Achievement Testing in the United States Or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy

“…For instance, after World War II, the GED was created primarily as a way to honor the military service of veterans and symbolically validate the academic worth of their military experience rather than as a way of assessing their scholastic abilities; this fact was underscored by the elaborate organizational structure created to develop and administer the test so as to maintain civilian oversight of the test, and by a passing score set close to the level of random guessing (Hutt & Stevens, 2017). Similarly, in the 1970s, lawmakers sought to emphasize the importance of getting back to basic skills by implementing minimum competency testing and high school exit examinations (Baker, Myers, & Vasquez, 2014). Although a useful political signal for politicians trying to show that they are holding the line on high standards, the reality of exit examinations in practice is that they rarely improve academic achievement or standards (Holme, Richards, Jimerson, & Cohen, 2010).…”

Towards a Comparative and International History of School Testing and Accountability

“…The story they tell is of a transition that was messy and full of conflict (including among authorities). Baker (2014) claims that the development of test-based accountability in the American South is rooted in a displacement of an opportunity agenda away from the obligation of the state and onto students and educators. In this displacement Baker sees a winnowing of the obligation of states.…”

“…Baker (2014) argues that the growth of accountability in the 1970s and since has effectively competed with desegregation as a tool to serve equal educational opportunity. Ydesen and Andreasen (2014) likewise argue that the Danish state has had a number of different options to manage education intimately connected with changing configurations of accountability stakeholders.…”