The New Accountability

Finally, but foremost in teachers' minds, students themselves are a central element in the particular challenge of the high schools. They play multiple roles in the process and products of standards-based accountability: they are the bottom line and the intended beneficiaries, a resource and a result (see Chabrán in this volume).

 

High schools differ in critical ways from elementary schools, not simply in the early hour at which the school day begins, or the larger size of physical and organizational structures; they are full of adolescents, and the interactions between teachers and teenagers are quite different from those with younger children. High school students are not like younger students who “can be compelled to perform, ” explained a music teacher, who splits his time between teaching elementary and high school classes. Instead, as young adults they see a teacher as “more like a peer, ” so that “[teachers] have to earn their respect” and students have to be “convinced” that there is a reason to engage in schoolwork. Nor, a principal observed, are high school students quite like adults: “they don't react like us.”

For many teachers and administrators, buying time is the only action that makes sense for high schools. Unless the standards are phased in, grade-by-grade, reaching them seems impossible. They talk frequently, and intensely, about what we came to call “behindedness”-the huge gap between what the standards demand and the skills their students have (see Lemons, Luschei, and Siskin in this volume). While elementary schools may have students scoring two or three years below grade level, high schools have students who may be as many as five or six years behind.

In high-stakes accountability at the elementary and middle school level, schools are the principal objects of sanctions. But in high school, high stakes are also aimed at students. State accountability policies are moving to make diplomas contingent on externally set exams, or on demonstrated competencies in externally set performance reviews (Goertz and Duffy 2001). As an English teacher in New York reminded us, when scoring a high stakes test, “You're looking at a paper; that's a human being. That's a kid reading or trying his best to get through state requirements.” Ironically, in a system theoretically designed to benefit students, high school students may be the only people held directly accountable as individuals for achievement scores.

The view of accountability that emerges from our research is that schools vary in their responses to external pressure depending on their level of internal accountability, the way they manage their internal structures, the ways in which they define and distribute leadership, and the ways in which they address the knowledge and skill requirements of the new demands of policy. Capacity inheres not in the presence or absence of these factors, but in the relationships among them. Accountability policies produce variable responses among schools based both on the initial capacities of schools and on whether schools increase or improve their capacities as they are responding to the requirements of new policies.

The central message of this article is that educational accountability systems work-when they work-by calling forth the energy, motivation, commitment, knowledge, and skill of the people who work in schools and the systems that are supposed to support them. Accountability systems themselves do not directly “cause” schools to increase the quality of student learning and academic performance. At best, they set in motion a complex chain of events that may ultimately result in improved learning and performance. Our work suggests some ways that policymakers and school professionals might think more powerfully and systematically about the relationship between accountability systems and the results they produce in schools.

Making schools accountable through state testing was the preeminent educational reform of the 1990s. Thirty-nine states now administer some form of performance-based assessment; twenty-four states attach stakes to their tests; and forty states use tests scores for school accountability purposes (Stecher and Barron 1999). Proponents argue that using student scores on curriculum-based tests as a measure of school effectiveness encourages teachers to teach the curriculum. It sets a minimum standard against which schools can be judged; and it quantifies school “quality” in a way that parents and politicians can easily understand. By setting student improvement goals for schools, the state can motivate school personnel to reach continuously higher, while also identifying those schools unwilling or unable to meet the prescribed goals.

In our study, “with remarkable consistency, across the states and types of schools, teachers and administrators struggle with the short term, and immediate problem of how to motivate students to perform on the tests” (Siskin and Lemons 2000, 6). Approaches to this problem were varied, but two motivating factors that surfaced frequently and which also resonated with our conversation with students were (1) having a sense of school pride and (2) having a culture of “community” found in our orthogonal schools or in a particular subject area, such as music and band, where teachers talked about students as having real ownership of their learning.

Both Kentucky and Vermont are states where the consequences of the assessment system are focused somewhere other than on the students, if at all. In Kentucky, stakes are felt at the school level, and in Vermont, it is less clear that the effect of a school's performance on the state assessment, which is published, is felt by any particular actor. In speaking with teachers and administrators in both these states, it became clear that one of their main challenges is getting students motivated for the courses or the state assessment when these forms of accountability do not hold any meaning for them.