After 25 Years, Is It Finally Time to Smell the Accountabaloney?

An early advocate of the education accountability movement looks back on 25 years of reform and questions whether the movement lost sight of children.

In June, Ross Wiener, an early advocate of the No Child Left Behind accountability movement, published a remarkable essay in The New York Times: I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.

I couldn’t help thinking his essay might just as appropriately have been titled “How, After Two Decades, I Finally Learned to Smell the Accountabaloney.“

Wiener has finally arrived at a question Accountabaloney has been asking since its earliest days: Were the things schools were being held accountable for actually the things that mattered most to children’s success?

Longtime Accountabaloney readers won’t find much of what Wiener has to say surprising.

We’ve been smelling the Accountabaloney since 2015

Accountabaloney began in September 2015 with The Sunshine Solution Solves the Wrong Problem.

I wrote:

“The primary problem with high stakes, standardized tests is the ‘high stakes’, not that the test is standardized.”

Standardized assessments can provide valuable information to teachers and parents. But when their results determine student promotion, graduation, teacher evaluations, and school grades, the consequences can distort the education they are intended to improve.

I pointed to Campbell’s Law, which warns that attaching high stakes to quantitative measures can corrupt the very processes being measured.

In February 2016, I followed up with What Do Florida’s School Grades REALLY Tell You?, opening with a warning from educator Arthur Costa:

“What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure.“

I asked parents to remember the moments that made their children’s education meaningful: the hands-on science experiments, creative projects, poetry slams, art, music, and inspiring teachers who made learning exciting.

None of those experiences earned a school a single point toward its A–F grade.

I questioned whether Florida’s school grades measured the quality of children’s educational experiences or simply their performance on the limited measures the state had chosen to reward.

Now, ten years later, Wiener is raising remarkably similar concerns.

When accountability became the mission

From 2002 to 2009, Wiener held senior policy positions at The Education Trust, an influential organization that championed standards-based accountability as a civil rights strategy.

The underlying argument was compelling: Too many low-income students and students of color were being denied access to a quality education, and schools needed to be held accountable for their academic achievement.

There were some early gains, particularly in elementary mathematics among Black and Hispanic students. But progress was less encouraging in reading and higher grades.

Now, more than two decades later, Wiener acknowledges that reformers, despite their good intentions, had effectively transferred their commitment to children onto standardized tests.

Somewhere along the way, improving test scores had become a substitute for improving children’s education.

By elevating standardized test results above nearly everything else, the reform movement changed what schools prioritized. What could be easily measured became important. What was harder to measure—creativity, relationships, practical skills, civic engagement, character, and a sense of purpose—was pushed to the margins.

This has been the central argument of Accountabaloney from the beginning.

What has the research taught us?

Wiener’s reconsideration isn’t simply philosophical. He points to a growing body of research suggesting that standardized test scores capture only part of what matters to children’s academic success and development.

Consider some of the evidence he highlights:

• High school grades predict college success better than standardized test scores. A University of Chicago Consortium on School Research study involving more than 55,000 Chicago Public Schools students found that high school GPAs were five times stronger predictors of college graduation than ACT scores. Grades reflect sustained effort, work habits, and achievement across multiple subjects over time. If college success is an important educational outcome, why did accountability systems place so much emphasis on standardized test performance?
• Schools contribute to long-term success in ways test scores cannot adequately measure. Another University of Chicago study examined schools’ effects on students’ social well-being and work habits. Researchers found that schools fostering these qualities improved outcomes including high school completion, college enrollment, and reduced school-based arrests. Measuring schools’ contributions to social-emotional development alongside their contributions to test scores explained substantially more of their effects on longer-term outcomes.
• Too many students are struggling emotionally. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that approximately 40% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. About one in five had seriously considered suicide, and nearly one in ten had attempted suicide. These figures do not mean standardized testing caused the mental health crisis. But they raise an important question about an accountability system that measures academic performance while largely ignoring student well-being.
• Students are increasingly disengaged from school. Wiener points to student experience research from Transcend, documenting how many students experience school as boring, irrelevant, and disconnected from their interests and aspirations. Students want meaningful work, positive relationships, and opportunities to exercise some control over their learning. Chronic absenteeism and disengagement cannot necessarily be solved by placing additional pressure on schools to raise test scores.
• Young people are struggling with trust and civic connection. Wiener cites research from Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute finding substantially greater willingness among younger adults than older adults to justify political violence under certain circumstances. While such attitudes cannot be attributed to school accountability policies, Wiener argues that schools have a civic and developmental responsibility extending beyond academic achievement.
• What Americans want from education is broader than what accountability systems measure. Research from the Populace Purpose of Education Index asked Americans to identify their priorities for K–12 education. Practical skills ranked first, critical thinking second, and demonstrating good character third. Preparing students for college ranked 47th out of 57 priorities. Standardized test performance ranked 49th. These findings suggest a substantial disconnect between the goals Americans privately value and the outcomes that dominate many school accountability systems.

These studies don’t establish that high-stakes testing caused the problems they describe. But they demonstrate how much of what matters to children’s development lies outside the accountability system.

Academic achievement matters. But standardized test scores alone cannot tell us whether schools are providing the education children need to succeed in life.

Education is about more than acquiring academic content. It’s about learning to think, solve problems, build relationships, develop character, discover interests, and contribute to society.

It’s about becoming a capable adult and an engaged citizen.

But here’s the thing: Public school teachers and parents have been saying this for decades.

They warned that high-stakes testing was narrowing curricula, crowding out art, music, recess, and creative learning, and putting enormous pressure on children and educators.

These weren’t hypothetical concerns. They were describing what was happening in their classrooms and to their own children.

Yet their concerns were frequently dismissed by reform advocates who insisted that stronger accountability would ultimately benefit students.

Now, after more than two decades, Wiener is acknowledging the limitations of that approach.

His reconsideration is significant. But we shouldn’t mistake a reformer’s belated recognition of these problems for their discovery.

The people closest to children were telling us all along. Why were the policymakers driving reform so reluctant to listen?

An earlier whiff of Accountabaloney?

Interestingly, Wiener may have caught an earlier whiff of Accountabaloney back in 2008. Commenting on struggling charter schools in Washington, D.C., he described a movement divided between those concerned with educational quality and those more interested in expanding market share and challenging the public school system.

Even then, Wiener recognized that expanding educational options was not necessarily the same thing as improving education.

Is expanding school choice itself a measure of successful reform, or should success be measured by whether children actually receive a better education?

Will Florida’s lawmakers wake up?

Twenty-five years ago, education reformers promised that measuring what mattered would improve education. Instead, the accountability movement too often made what was easily measurable matter more than everything else.

For decades, public school teachers and parents have warned that the high stakes attached to standardized tests were narrowing curricula, increasing pressure on children and educators, and crowding out the experiences that make education meaningful.

Now Ross Wiener, one of the movement’s influential early advocates, is finally acknowledging what the people closest to children have been telling policymakers all along.

And Floridians aren’t asking for an end to accountability. A September 2026 poll found that 77% of Florida voters believe publicly funded private and charter schools should be held to the same standards as traditional public schools.

The question isn’t whether schools should be accountable. It’s what they should be accountable for, how we measure it, and whether the consequences we attach to those measurements actually improve children’s education.

That’s what Accountabaloney has been asking since 2015.

Wiener has finally begun to smell the Accountabaloney. Will Florida’s lawmakers recognize it, too? Or will they continue doubling down on high-stakes testing without reconsidering whether the accountability system is actually improving children’s education?