There are two essential survival skills a bad teacher needs in order to mask his or her incompetence. The first is how to put up a great bulletin board. The second is how to compile a portfolio of student work. Get these two dog-and-pony show moves down pat, add some decent classroom management skills, and you’ll have your job until the sun goes out.
Keep that in mind as you watch The Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University kill a mosquito with a howitzer, the mosquito being a “research report” from the conservative Lexington Institute titled Portfolios: A Backward Step in School Accountability. As a summary in ASCD’s Educational Leadership notes, “the review concludes that policymakers would do well to engage in a broader exploration of multiple measures, which would be a step forward—not backward—in school accountability.”
Maybe so. I’m not going to defend the Lexington scholarship or criticize Arizona’s review. However, the messenger and the message deserve to be uncoupled. Having seen hastily compiled portfolios used to justify promoting students who failed state tests, I can’t imagine using them as the basis for any legitimate accountability system.
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