The Three Faces of Education Accountability
The term "accountability" appears time and again in education policy, debates, and research. I've written it a thousand times over many years, declaring it an essential element of improving schools and ensuring that children are learning. But what does accountability mean?
The dictionary isn't helpful. Merriam-Webster simply says that accountability means "the quality or state of being accountable...especially an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions."
Google's AI definition is better, describing accountability as
the obligation or willingness to accept responsibility for one's actions, decisions, and conduct, and to explain or be answerable for them, especially in a professional or public context. It involves taking ownership of tasks and their outcomes, a willingness to admit mistakes, and the proactive effort to correct them or take initiative to complete additional duties.
"Ownership of tasks and their outcomes," "proactive effort to correct [mistakes]" — such phrases come closer to what people normally mean when they discuss accountability in education, though their definition often has more to do with outcomes than tasks. Within the education-policy realm, we often underscore that emphasis on outcomes by using terms like "results-based accountability" or "outcomes-driven accountability." This means a school should be judged by how much its students learn and how much the school adds to their learning. The implicit corollary is that such judgments should lead to consequences: applause and reward when results are satisfactory — as when students reach a benchmark or goal — and change or intervention to set matters right when they are not.
Construed in this way, accountability goes well beyond education — to athletes whose performance is judged by how fast they run, teams whose standing is based on scores and wins, candidates whose fate rests on how many votes they attract, and firms that are evaluated by their return on investments. Within education, this kind of accountability may also go beyond schools. It can apply to individual educators — a teacher's promotion, retention, or compensation may hinge on how well his students learn or how many pass a test. It can extend to students, too, as when they're promoted to the next grade only when they've met a specified standard of performance. That may mean passing particular courses or achieving a minimum exam score.
Just because this is familiar in education policy doesn't mean it's popular. Teachers don't like "teaching to the test" and hate being judged by student performance, which is only partly within their control. Neither parents nor children like it when students are held back. And everyone wants a diploma. But today's pushback to outcomes-based accountability is strengthening, and it's coming from more directions, including advocates, politicians, and policy wonks on all sides. From the left, we hear that test-driven accountability is discriminatory and unjust; from the right, we're told that it cramps the freedom of principals, teachers, students, and parents by imposing an intrusive system of government rules, norms, metrics, and watchdogs. No wonder political support for the familiar accountability regimen is ebbing fast — and that so many are pushing for alternative indicators of school quality and student success.
But is this the only way to think about accountability in education? Since publishing "The Accountability Challenge" in these pages two years ago, I've come to better understand that the version of accountability I've long supported isn't the only approach. Accountability comes in other forms that work in different ways and appeal to different people, who then cling to their chosen form as if it were The True Faith. Understanding the roots and appeal of those variations helps explain the pushback that outcome-based accountability is encountering today.
TRINITARIAN, NOT UNITARIAN
Accountability in education can take at least three forms, each arising from a distinct understanding of how institutions work and what can improve them. We might label them the results-driven approach, the marketplace approach, and the professional approach.
Results-driven accountability is built into federal laws such as No Child Left Behind (before it was replaced), state strategies for boosting school results, similar strategies at the district level, and charter schooling. It blends the concept of auditing with a behaviorist view of human and institutional actions, though it differs from the regulatory regimes that traditionally governed public education, which have more to do with following rules than delivering results. My preferred version of this approach cuts schools considerable slack so long as their results are satisfactory. Then they need not follow a thick volume of regulations.
The distinction is important because it explains why we're looking at three approaches to accountability, not four. The would-be fourth approach is the old-fashioned compliance regime by which public schools (and most public sectors) have long been governed and controlled. It has nothing to do with "taking ownership of outcomes"; instead, it obligates schools and educators to follow directions but does not hold them responsible for results. In short, it's all about inputs and processes. One can follow standard procedures, pay uniform salaries, and fill out all the forms without ensuring that students are learning, so we should not let that approach masquerade as "accountability," no matter how often union leaders and school administrators murmur that word. They're merely talking about the bureaucratic ways that suit them best.
Because results matter, schooling — like most human endeavors — should be part of a results-driven regimen. Most of us do better work when success begets rewards and failure begets embarrassment or punishment. We also do better when someone's watching. Firms thrive when their auditor checks to make sure the books are balanced and the CEO's rosy profitability reports are grounded in reality. People run faster when someone times them. Children are likelier to turn out the lights and go to sleep if they know parents will come back to check on them. But that doesn't mean parents should make a habit of checking: The children need to learn that getting enough sleep is their responsibility, just as it is the treasurer's responsibility to keep honest accounts.
In education, results-driven accountability generally begins with setting standards — student-learning and school-performance targets that an agency or legislative body promulgates — alongside tests, assessments, and other metrics by which progress against those standards is gauged. Once standards and performance measures are in place, it's possible to calculate and judge school performance.
When the state, district, or charter-school authorizer has that information, it acts. Making results transparent and public — through letter grades, data dashboards, school report cards, and such — is often the first step. More forceful actions may include bonuses and accolades for high performers, as well as renewal of a school's charter. For low performers, interventions may be drastic: dismissing a teacher, replacing a principal, revamping the curriculum, closing a school, seeking a new operator for the charter school, and so forth.
In fact, the charter sector offers the purest form of results-driven accountability. There, a school typically operates with a five-year contract that grants its leaders significant flexibility to operate as they see fit. At the end of that contract, an authorizer gauges its performance against the agreed-upon targets and determines whether to renew its operating license or to close it down. In practice, it's rarely that simple, but the concept is straightforward.
Now consider the marketplace approach to accountability. This method starts with Adam Smith's "invisible hand" — the view that self-interest is a powerful motivator of individual behavior and that competition is a potent driver of institutional behavior. In education, this involves enabling parents to select their children's schools (or education-related services) from among many options, with dollars flowing to the chosen schools (or vendors) and away from those that lack customers. The providers that attract, satisfy, and retain their customers, Milton Friedman explained, will thrive, while those that don't will lose clients and revenue, thus being forced to either change or perish, to be replaced by new entrants and other options.
There's an implicit contract at work here, too, between vendor and customer — school and parent — in the understanding that the school will meet the family's educational needs, or the family will take its children elsewhere. When parents determine which school receives those thousands of dollars per student each year, they have real leverage. The threat of leaving — or not sending their next child to a school, or saying bad things about the school to neighbors — should be enough to induce the school to change, presumably to improve (at least in terms of what families want from it).
Devotees of school choice in its many (and burgeoning) varieties typically believe that a dynamic education marketplace will simultaneously meet the needs and aspirations of families while also serving the public interest by ensuring that only good schools endure — and that more schools will arise to take the place of those that few want to attend. Friedman, for example, was convinced that competition in an education marketplace would yield quality control. In Free to Choose, he and Rose Friedman wrote that "As the private market [takes] over, the quality of all schooling [will] rise so much that even the worst, while it might be relatively lower on the scale, [will] be better in absolute quality."
Results-based and marketplace accountability in education appear before us all the time. But we must not overlook the third version, professional accountability, which helps explain educators' resistance to the two versions described above. It has deep roots, traceable to guilds of the Middle Ages, when expert tradesmen in various fields monitored and managed entire sectors of the economy. The modern equivalent is what lawyers do when they (now often with state enforcement powers behind them) decide who "passes the bar" and can join their profession and "disbar" those who don't behave properly. It's what doctors do when they decide who "passes the boards" for their specialty and evict those guilty of "malpractice." It's what faculty in university departments do when deciding who may enter their ranks and who receives tenure.
Professional accountability entails self-policing via peer review, and is intended to maintain standards, ensure that competent people are serving clients and patients, and strengthen colleagues' performance while disciplining those whose performance is shoddy or ethics shaky. But it also regulates who is admitted to the profession, and can therefore be used to discourage competition, keep prices high, and preserve monopolies. A millennium ago in Europe, says Wikipedia,
only guild members were allowed to sell their goods or practice their skill within a city. There might be controls on minimum or maximum prices, hours of trading, numbers of apprentices, and many other things. Critics argued that these rules reduced free competition, but defenders maintained that they protected professional standards.
This version of accountability incorporates the concept of expertise: the dual proposition that members of the profession possess specialized knowledge and skills that others lack, and that those individuals are best qualified to say how something should be done and judge how well someone has done it. In our realm, this translates to "educators know best and should be in charge; others ought not question their judgment or second-guess their conclusions." "Others," in this case, include parents and elected officials, and all the annoyances — like external standards, assessments, and competition from others who don't belong to the "guild" — they bring with them.
Self-absorbed and defensive, yes, but mature professions also take some responsibility for quality control by policing their members, particularly in cases of major transgressions. We see elements of this in K-12 education in the codes of ethics that teachers' unions and other educator groups promulgate. The National Education Association has such a code. That of the American Federation of Teachers even looks forceful, providing (along with much else) that "the AFT may inform the alleged offender's affiliate or employing entity of the offending behavior and complaint or initiate disciplinary proceedings."
Such codes generally focus on an individual's actions — akin to the dictionary definition of "accountability" with which we began — not the impact of those actions. Physicians' ethics statements say nothing about curing patients, and those of lawyers are silent on winning cases, though they take seriously attorneys' behavior vis-à-vis their clients. I have yet to find an educators' code that addresses student achievement.
Still, monitoring colleagues' actions and doing something about inappropriate behavior is a limited form of accountability. Traditional teacher evaluations — classroom observation by principals, department heads, etc. — are similar: The observer looks for approved behaviors, including practices believed to be pedagogically effective.
For a prominent effort to give teachers' quality a stronger peer-centered base within their profession, consider the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, now almost 40 years old, whose mission is "[m]aintaining high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do." Some states and districts now pay more to teachers who are board certified. Another form of professional or expert accountability, more often found overseas, is the "inspectorate" model — also deployed in institutional accreditation — wherein a team of veteran educators visits a school, perhaps for several days, and conducts a 360-degree review of that school's operations, including instructional effectiveness, which may be gauged from observing classrooms, examining student work, and reviewing test results and other "summative" data.
SHORTCOMINGS AND OVERLAPS
None of the three approaches to accountability works perfectly on its own. While I still put most stock in the results-based kind, it's far better at identifying troubled schools, ineffectual teachers, and low-achieving pupils than at fixing them. Yes, its forceful application by some states and then by the federal government yielded some macro-gains in achievement, especially for poor and minority kids, in the 1990s and early 2000s. But those trends plateaued around the early 2010s and have declined since.
Weak schools tend to stay that way indefinitely unless governments and authorizers engage in drastic interventions, which are often beyond their competence and invariably draw heavy flak. As a result, they're seldom even attempted. Charter authorizers are more likely to intervene in (or close) schools due to fiscal mismanagement than academic mediocrity. A state's "value-added" approach to evaluating teachers can sometimes identify ineffective instructors, but it's hard to make them more effective and — in the face of tenure laws and union protections — even harder to let them go. Besides, teachers hate this approach, so their unions fight it, which feeds into a larger "war on testing" into which parents are recruited.
The marketplace approach also has both strengths and weaknesses. If the market offers an ample supply of solid school choices — which calls for smart philanthropy, sound state policies, adequate funding, and astute authorizing — it can satisfy customers. But market dynamics serve as quality control for schools only when consumer information is thorough, honest, and accessible; when providers are ethical; and when consumers are discerning.
In practice, schools that depend on attracting students will boast about their virtues and conceal their failings — and in the absence of comparable external metrics, they get away with it. Moreover, many parents aren't good at choosing effective schools — or don't put learning gains atop their selection criteria, which means plenty of mediocre schools survive in a competitive world.
As for the professional approach to accountability, it can craft excellent plans for correcting a school's or educator's weaknesses, but it has practically no mechanism — or stomach — for enforcing them. Too often, professional accountability turns into a mutual protection enterprise that's more diligent at defending inept practitioners than at self-policing, even as it vigorously opposes both government audits and market competition while giving cover to self-serving regulations. A scathing study of teacher evaluations by The New Teacher Project, for example, found that few instructors are deemed unsatisfactory, that weak classroom performance usually goes unaddressed, and that professional development seldom does much good.
SYNERGY
That no single accountability approach is sufficient unto itself has a corollary: Combining them works better. The results-based and marketplace approaches are complementary, not alternatives and certainly not opponents. The former provides data on school performance that informs the marketplace, while the latter provides alternatives for students who would otherwise be trapped in schools that results trackers have flagged but aren't able to set right. Insofar as the results-based version has hope of fixing bad schools, it largely depends on professionals. At the same time, school inspectors have much greater impact when a government agency or authorizer that receives their report presses the school to make the recommended changes. And both marketplace pressures and results-based regimes help to offset the protectionist side of educator professionalism.
In the real world, we seldom see any one form of accountability operating alone. In a celebrated 1955 essay titled "The Role of Government in Education," Milton Friedman recognized that education serves a public function, meaning government has a role in setting minimum standards for student learning:
A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but to other members of the society; the education of my child contributes to other people's welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society....What kind of governmental action is justified...? The most obvious is to require that each child receive a minimum amount of education of a specified kind.
For their part, those who design government-centric accountability systems often make room for professional judgments, school-repair strategies, and even elements of school choice. Public schools are inherently subject both to results-style accountability as mandated by federal, state, and local authorities, and to marketplace forces, particularly when they lose pupils to other schools that families choose. Their teachers are also subject to classroom evaluations and other forms of professional accountability. We should certainly applaud the self-enforcement of ethics codes as well as moves to reward teachers who earn markers of excellent performance.
As Friedman recognized, schooling serves key public functions — preparing the next generation for competent adulthood and citizenship while expending taxpayer dollars — so educators are never completely in charge. Public dollars are invariably accompanied by government rules. Constructive overlaps also arise when, for example, school inspectors' reports are submitted to ministries of education for follow-up.
Yet such overlaps can also cause mischief. Professional guilds exploit government to advance their interests and protect their monopolies, as when only "certified" educators are permitted to work in public schools, when a school must be "accredited" in order to operate, and when a state's teacher-licensure rules are set by a "professional standards board" consisting of educators and education-school administrators. As school-choice options multiply in an environment of vouchers and Education Savings Accounts, the same "guilds" will strive to bring them under similar rules, even as their promoters resist moves to measure, display, and compare their results.
WHAT LIES AHEAD?
Mistrust is widespread and widening. Educators don't want their professionalism questioned or freedom constrained by nanny-state bureaucrats, external judgments, or competition from schools and service providers that scoff at their hard-earned credentials. The marketplace faithful bridle at every regulation imposed on schools and programs. Believers in government-mandated, results-driven accountability mistrust both parents and entrepreneurs to secure the public interest and often find themselves doing battle with unions and other professional groups that resist all forms of outside evaluation and intervention. At times, the debate can resemble orthodox devotees of three monotheistic religions coming to blows in Jerusalem.
True believers tend to fight even when their chosen strategies work better in combination. This paradox was easier to resolve back when Americans — including politicians, policy leaders, and education reformers — were more disposed toward compromise. Bipartisan cooperation on charter schools, for instance, long united partisans of results-driven and marketplace accountability. For a while, it even drew in the likes of union chief Albert Shanker, who saw the charter mechanism as a way for ambitious teachers to create and run their own schools out from under the district bureaucracy. Insofar as that happens (and it is still how many charter schools work), professional accountability also enters. Educators who run their own schools are far more likely to seek out and retain highly effective teachers and to monitor classroom performance than those who do not.
Yet such hybrids are harder to find today, as lines get drawn, sides are chosen, and echo-chamber walls are fortified. Even within the school-choice movement, we find heated arguments between Friedmanites who trust the marketplace to promote quality control and devotees of results-driven accountability via standards, tests, and consequences. Yesterday's teacher leaders may have gone along with limited forms of school choice and test-based accountability, but today's high-profile union heads forcefully resist both options while offering no real substitute by way of professionalism.
Once upon a time, we could count on national leaders — presidents, governors' associations, business groups, university chancellors, senior members of Congress, blue-ribbon panels, etc. — to push for the standards-driven, results-based version of school accountability, often leavened with both choice and professionalism. But little of that is visible today.
The most likely future — in the near term, anyway — consists of deeper divides between red and blue states. Neither is gung-ho for government-centric accountability. Insofar as blue states implement consequences at all, they are confined to the tepid kinds that suit the powerful teachers' unions. The state may require districts to submit plans for remediating their weakest students and fixing their worst schools, but there's no real enforcement — and they tolerate little or no school choice. Red states, meanwhile, are easing back on unpopular testing mandates and relaxing some results-inspired interventions. Though they may keep grading their public schools and may occasionally intervene (as in Texas's present Houston takeover), their elected leaders and those who advise them don't want private schools or other education providers subject to anything but market competition.
If one believes, with me, that schools need to be held to account for their pupils' learning — not least because America needs to get the most bang from each taxpayer buck — then it's hard to find much of a silver lining in this cloudy picture. But it may help elucidate how several forms of accountability overlap and the constructive synergy that can result when they're thoughtfully meshed.
It's a good thing to augment scores-based accountability with parental choice, professional judgment, and professionally devised remedies for schools that need overhauling, and for government officials to recognize that education quality and public satisfaction hinge on more than scores. It's a good thing to lubricate the marketplace with better consumer information derived from common standards, norms, and comparable metrics, and to have expert professionals lead and work in the schools that occupy that marketplace. It's also a good thing for education professionals to recognize that the fate of their schools depends on satisfying clients and authorizers, and on producing measurable results that governments and authorizers can use to gauge — and report to taxpayers — the returns they're producing on this investment of public dollars.
Understanding these synergies can widen our vision of accountability. I still declare that school results should take center stage, must be visible for comparison, and should carry consequences. Yet today's opposition to heavy-handed government, frequent testing, and overreliance on narrow metrics has nudged me to recognize that the other approaches to accountability have useful roles to play. Today, we would all do well to acknowledge that those who care about whether children are learning may get further by joining alliances than by struggling in isolation.
