Desegregation, Minimum Competency Testing, and the Origins of Accountability: North Carolina and the Nation

During the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, public education was a significant battleground in the struggle for racial equality. As the courts ordered officials to dismantle a system of educational apartheid, whites resisted, bringing blacks and whites together in ways that disillusioned many African Americans. Hoping to transcend what he called “the trauma of desegregation,” in 1977, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt proposed that all students be required to pass a minimum competency test (MCT) to receive a high school diploma. Hunt was part of a generation of moderate New South politicians who crafted a new racially neutral educational discourse that emphasized accountability and achievement rather than equality and access. Capitalizing on the perception that the quality of education had declined, these New South moderates built biracial coalitions that established high school MCTs in every southern state by 1986, replacing a civil rights agenda of opportunity with an accountability agenda of individual student responsibility.

Value Added to What? How a Ceiling in the Testing Instrument Influences Value-Added Estimation

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This article focuses on the sensitivity of value added to test score ceiling effects. Test score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across the country as education policy continues to emphasize proficiency-based reform. Encouragingly, we show that over a wide range of test score ceiling severity, teachers' value-added estimates are only negligibly influenced by ceiling effects. However, as ceiling conditions approach those found in minimum-competency testing environments, value-added results are significantly altered. We suggest a simple statistical check for ceiling effects.

Raising the Graduation Bar for the Schools: Expectations vs Outcomes

Educational reform is an ongoing concern of parents, educators, policy makers, and the public at large. The past 50 years have ushered in a new era of reform, whose major objective was to improve students' performance based on the use of statewide standardized testing and changes in graduation requirements. This study examined one such reform movement, initially developed during the late 1970s, which developed minimum competency testing standards as well as increased course demands to specify graduation requirements for public high school students. The outcomes for this reform model, both in terms of students' achievement and failure, did not meet expectations.