The New Accountability

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.