The abuse of accountability - in the education system - Column

School Administrator, June, 2002 by Charles Nevi

Sports News Item: When Dan Muscatell was promoted from an assistant coach to interim head coach of the woman's basketball team at the University of Oregon, he stressed the change was in title only. The coaching staff would continue to function as a team. The only change, Muscatell said: "Now, there just will be somebody to blame."

Educational accountability has become like apple pie and motherhood, Everyone favors it; none dares speak against it. School district officials feel pressure to feature accountability prominently in their planning and public statements, and cries for accountability have become essential fixtures in political campaigns in which education is an issue.

Unfortunately, the accountability rhetoric is often greatly oversimplified and makes sense only in political and public relations campaigns, where truth and complexity are sacrificed to slogans and sound bites. Because of the difficulty of grasping what accountability is and who can exercise it, accountability often is reduced simply to a question of who should be blamed when something goes wrong. Educational accountability becomes twisted into a process of test, blame and punish.

* Test. Accountability is invariably linked to testing, usually a single test and preferably one for each grade level, based on high standards for all students and high stakes.

* Blame. Low test scores, inevitable on many of the state tests that have been developed, result in blame. Fingers are pointed at teachers for inadequate preparation or for failing to teach the proper curriculum, at principals for losing control, at students for being unmotivated, at parents who don't care and at the state legislature for being unresponsive to local needs. Of course, the superintendent is rapped for not demonstrating leadership.

* Punish. The blame is followed by punishment. A teacher or principal is reassigned. A superintendent is fired. If individual blame is not possible, entire faculties are threatened with reassignment. If individuals or groups cannot be readily identified, then funding is withheld as an alternate form of punishment.

Unfortunately, those closest to the site, especially the superintendent, usually receive the most punishment. Those equally responsible but more distant--notably legislators and state departments of education--seldom receive their deserved share of criticism for the state of educational performance.

Silent Victims

Not frequently enough noted is the punishment of students. The emphasis on high-stakes tests narrows the curriculum and places additional pressures on students.

Schooling is not promoted as an experience of growing, developing and exploring interests. The purpose of schooling leans more and more to test preparation. As measures of accountability show improvement, dropout rates increase. Collateral damage may be too strong a term, but the concept is the same. The battle for accountability must be won at any cost. Unseen and unheard victims include the students.

This throw-the-bastards-out mentality offers little consideration to identifying what the actual problems may be and what can be done to correct them. The blame and punishment are in themselves a cleansing process, a ritual sacrifice to the gods of accountability that will magically result in an improved educational system.

It should be obvious to any thoughtful observer that equating accountability with blame and punishment doesn't make good educational sense. The success of the educational process depends on too many people and too many variables for this blaming approach to be useful. Also, it frequently results in punishing the wrong people, the students being the best example, and allows others to shirk responsibility for failing to provide adequate resources.

A more helpful approach to accountability goes beyond high-stakes testing to multiple forms of assessment, followed by allocation of resources based on the assessments.

Considerable support exists for the idea that accountability is related to testing, but accountability should not be limited to testing, especially to a single high-stakes test. Accountability is more complex than what test scores might reveal. Why not also consider ongoing classroom assessment of student progress and dropout rates? You could argue that in the information age student retention is a more significant measure of accountability than test scores.

Counting Resources

Accountability equates with responsibility, power and authority to make something happen. Accountability thus includes the process of allocating and reallocating resources based on identified needs. At the state and national levels, providing new resources must be an integral part of accountability, For districts and schools, the process requires possible reallocation of existing resources. Expecting change without resources is an abuse of the concept of accountability.

A resources orientation to accountability offers more promise as a means of measuring the successes and failures of education. The process seeks understanding and improvement rather than blame and punishment. Tangible results are sought in building and developing rather than in terminations or financial penalties. Viewing accountability as a process of assessment and allocation of resources does not always result in clearcut, simple solutions to educational problems. But in the long term it will lead to more significant improvements in education.