The New Accountability

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.

Standards-based accountability represents a new phenomenon in the environment of public schools, one that introduces new measures of performance, shifts the evaluation of success from inputs to outcomes, and exposes that evaluation to public scrutiny. In this regard, standards-based accountability presents schools with particular organizational problems, what we choose to call “presenting problems.” Because these presenting problems do not arrive with self-evident solutions, there is potential for a range of organizational responses.

 

Standards-based accountability has generated a variety of these presenting problems. Our identification of these many presenting problems has been inductive. In other words, we have not begun with an exhaustive list of demands for which we were observing responses. Instead, we observed these presenting problems in practice, as they lived in the perceptions, anxieties, and work of high schools in four states. Consequently, we have chosen to narrow our focus and examine four presenting problems that consistently surfaced in multiple schools across our multi-state sample. These presenting problems are: (1) Interpreting the policy and relating it to the preexisting story of the school, (2) Interpreting/making sense of the data generated from the policy, (3) Determining what to do about teachers and determining who is going to teach the content demanded by new standards and assessments, and (4) Determining what to do with students at risk of not meeting the standard.