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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.
From the beginning of our research, it was clear to us that schools construct their own conceptions of accountability-to whom they are accountable, for what, and how. A common misconception of policymakers is the belief that policies determine how individuals and organizations think and act-what problems they regard as important, how they organize themselves to work on those problems, what results they regard as evidence of their success. One version of this misconception is the belief that schools were “not accountable” before the current wave of accountability policies, and now they are. Our research suggests that all schools, consciously or unconsciously, have well-worked-out ideas of accountability, and, most importantly, that they respond to new accountability policies by adjusting their existing ideas of accountability to the external influences introduced by the new policies. Accountability policies, in other words, work on the margins of existing organizational norms, structures, and processes in schools. We came to this view of accountability by asking people in a variety of schools-public, private, religious, large, small, elementary, middle, and high-how they solved the problem of to whom they were accountable, for what, and how (Ablemann, Elmore, 1999; Benveniste, Carnoy, and Rothstein, 2003). What we learned is that all schools have deep-seated norms and predispositions that determine their conceptions of accountability. It is not the case that some schools are accountable and others are not. All schools are accountable, but different schools solve the accountability problem in very different ways. Many schools have very diffuse notions of being accountable “to the children, ” which often ends up meaning that individual teachers enact their own views of what their students need, unmediated by collective views within the school about what the organization believes, or what parents demand, or what public policy requires. A few schools have strong collective views of what they stand for, and well-developed organizational processes that bring those beliefs into action. We characterize the former schools as having weak, and the latter as having strong, internal accountability. It became clear to us that the strength and focus of internal accountability in schools was a key determinant in how they would respond to any external accountability system. For this reason, our research has focused on schools' responses to accountability policies, not primarily on how schools implement these policies. This may seem a subtle distinction-after all, aren't schools supposed to respond to policies by implementing them?-but it is a distinction essential to understanding the import of our research. In our framework, a school's response to external accountability policies is determined primarily by its prior status on a number of dimensions that we group together under the general heading of capacity. External accountability systems work not by exerting direction and control over schools, but by mobilizing and focusing the capacity of schools in particular ways. The people who work in schools, and the systems that surround them, are not just active agents in determining the effects of accountability systems. Their knowledge, skill, values, and commitments, as well as the nature of the organizations in which they work, determine how their schools will respond. Schools have a variety of initial conceptions of accountability, and they vary considerably in their organizational capacity. So, not surprisingly, accountability policies provoke a range of responses that reflect the range of variability in these initial conditions. Our research was designed to study this range of responses, and to try to understand how policies might be more thoughtfully designed to take account of it. As we began to focus more explicitly on high schools, it became clear to us that internal accountability was only one dimension of a school's capacity to respond to external accountability systems. How much teachers know about their subjects and the pedagogical knowledge required to bring students to a level of understanding in those subjects is a key element of capacity, How leadership is defined and distributed in the school is another. How the school is organized and how people in the organization solve problems related to instructional practice is another. The resources available to the school-time, money, information, materials, and external support-are still another. Capacity, as we shall see, inheres in the relationships among these factors. Variations in capacity determine how schools respond to external pressure for accountability. And “making schools more accountable for student performance” means understanding these complex relationships, and ultimately how to enhance schools' capacity to respond to the messages they receive from accountability systems. The American comprehensive high school provides a rich, and daunting, terrain in which to study these issues. High schools are, in many ways, the acid test of accountability policies. They are typically large, complex, and loosely-coupled organizations. They are usually balkanized into subject-based departments, each with its own distinctive culture. They deal not just with the problem of how to teach the content for which they are responsible, but they must also cope with the accumulated successes and failures of all prior years of schooling. Finally, high schools are the place where major life decisions are made about students in their transition to adulthood and further education. High school is where the impact of accountability systems is most apparent. It is also difficult to imagine a less promising institutional structure for being responsive to external pressure for change and improvement. (See Siskin, chapter seven, in this volume) The purpose of this essay is to consolidate and focus the major themes of the book around the relationship between accountability and capacity. I will first summarize our major findings around the dimensions of capacity and how they work in determining the way schools respond to accountability policies. I will then explore some of the implications of these findings for the design and implementation of accountability policies in the future.
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