Making school reform work

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

ACCOUNTABILITY may be the hottest word in primary and secondary education nowadays, but it is a recent arrival on the scene. As long as we trusted the existing public school system to do a satisfactory job of educating children, accountability was not an issue. One was more likely to speak of the system's "governance," assuming that conventional public-sector mechanisms--a bureaucracy answerable to elected officials, thence to voters and taxpayers--would furnish whatever oversight and quality-control were needed. One seldom hears talk of accountability in the highway department or the water and sewer agency. The demand for accountability arises when something goes wrong, when people are discontented with an enterprise's operations or a system's results--and when they believe that it could work notably better.

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared us a "nation at risk" due to the poor performance of our schools. For two decades, we have sought to rectify that situation. We have asked who is responsible, and who should take the necessary steps to solve the problem. But the demand for accountability in education is driven by more than discontent. First, a body of research dating back to James Coleman's path-breaking studies has found that there is no direct relationship between the amount of resources a school receives and its level of academic performance. This realization has led education reformers to emphasize results rather than inputs and has made us more attentive to the systems by which those results are prescribed, fostered, and measured.

Second, between press accounts of highly successful schools and more formal "school effectiveness" studies, there is ample evidence that at least some children are getting a solid education. This proves that the situation is not hopeless and also encourages further questions. of accountability. Who, we want to know, can be held responsible for the fact that some schools succeed while others do not? Despair may not fan the flames of accountability, but envy does.

Lastly, increased efficiency and accountability in the business world has led some to believe that similar reforms could be made to work in the public school system. Thanks to keener management, better ideas, and stiffer competition, many faltering industries have been successfully overhauled. Large, rigidly structured companies have learned new strategies for boosting efficiency and productivity. If it can happen in those sectors, why not in K-12 education? Such comparisons intensify the demand for accountability in our public school system.

Three ideas of accountability

Several different reform schemes have been tried, driven by competing ideas about how to achieve improvement in K12 education and boost pupil and school performance. Those ideas in turn reflect distinct understandings of accountability.

Some education reformers would have us "trust the experts." This within-the-system approach goes beyond simply placing confidence in the local superintendent and school board and looks to national educational bodies for advice. As in medicine, law, or the clergy, it is characterized by habitual deference to what leaders of the profession deem the best way to do things, and by the craving for peer approval among its members. Thus we find educators pushing for schools to teach math in the manner propounded by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)--less drill, more conceptual understanding--for having all colleges of education vetted by the National Council on Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), and for rewarding superior teachers, as selected by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We find enthusiasm for "school wide" reform designs developed by such education gurus as Theodore Sizer and James Coiner, and for schools shaped by the "multiple intelligences" theo ry of learning propounded by Harvard professor Howard Gardner.

Though government funding may be involved, and some of the national groups may wheedle their way into state policy and thus become virtual arms of the regulatory system, the basic dynamic of this approach is nongovernmental. Its major source of influence is found in the creeds, belief structures, and status hierarchies of the education profession. Indeed, embracing professional accountability is not unlike joining a religious sect and upholding its tenets. Like other true believers, those who feel primarily accountable to their peers are apt to pay only grudging attention to outside voices, to policies set by elected officials, or to bureaucratic control systems. They'll look for ways to surmount the hurdles that "know-nothing" laymen have placed in the path of true professionalism.

Other reformers would have us "trust, but verify." This standards approach is the most popular form of education accountability in government and business circles. It was the inspiration behind George W. Bush's recently enacted "No Child Left Behind" bill, as well as Bill Clinton's "Goals 2000" program and the former Bush administration's "America 2000" program. It commands the spotlight at national "summits," in governors' addresses and in legislative corridors. The standards approach is a top-down, externally mandated strategy for inducing change in education. The government will stipulate what children are supposed to learn, test to see whether they've learned it, and impose consequences on students, educators, and schools depending on the outcome. The essential mechanisms are easy to describe, though hard to do well: A higher level of political authority--usually a legislature or state board of education, outside the education profession itself-- prescribes the skills and knowledge that a child, classroom , school, school system, or entire state is supposed to master. That same authority imposes tests or other measures by which to determine whether and how well its standards are being met. A fully wrought accountability system then dispenses rewards and sanctions meant to change behavior and yield improved results. It is a nakedly behaviorist theory, intended to alter individual actions and institutional norms through an array of external incentives.