The New Accountability

Public schools and their leaders face a new political landscape, one where standards-based accountability is the “distinctive hallmark” of state educational policy (Abelmann and Elmore 1999). While details of the particular policies vary, almost every state has now established a centralized curriculum and/or performance standards, assessments to measure student learning, and stakes for schools, staffs, and/or students. They have, simultaneously, decentralized the decisions about how to reach those standards, thus providing a theoretical horse swap of increased accountability for greater autonomy. By directly confronting the technology of teaching and learning, and by forcing schools to assume responsibility for educational outcomes (often in terms of test scores), these policies present new and dramatic challenges for schools (Elmore 2000). However, while standards-based reform is purportedly designed to improve student achievement for all children, it is less clear how (or whether) schools will achieve this critical goal. Policy, be it accountability or otherwise, is not good at mandating the actions of individual schools and their leaders; policy can only establish incentives to encourage or motivate desired actions or behaviors. Thus, the ultimate success of delivering on the goal of increased student achievement for all children will require leadership to mobilize organizational resources to change the way schools operate.

Music teachers are concerned about being pushed further outside the technical core of schooling by standards-based accountability actions of the state and by the predictable responses of their schools. From the vantage point of the Kentucky music department, teachers relate how, as a department and as a subject group, they received and responded to the shift in policy. They responded early, with direct action, and with unanticipated results.

 

Once it seemed clear that the state of Kentucky was moving to a new testing system, and that testing would be the new measure of school success, music teachers recognized the shift as a direct threat to their survival. Jobs might be lost altogether, or music turned into more of a “dumping ground” to relieve the “real” teachers of the discipline problems that interfered with their academic work: “For so long, music teachers were thought of [as if] the only reason we existed was to give the real teacher an off period. And we're still dealing with that issue, and it's tacky…but it's a real issue all across this country. Music teachers are not real teachers. But we are.” Under this new wave of accountability policy, to be real is to be tested. So these music teachers, and others across the state, joined together to orchestrate a movement to have their subject count.

In the complex organization of the comprehensive high school, teachers are likely to identify themselves, not only as subject specialists, but as members of a particular department that provides them with the primary social, political, and intellectual context for their work (Siskin 1994). These departments, especially in large high schools, can be like different worlds, where English teachers may never have met their science colleagues, and have little or no structured opportunity to see themselves as part of the same collective professional community, to develop shared expectations about student work, or about what teaching should be (Siskin 1991). The distances between departments and the “two worlds phenomenon” tend to be even more pronounced between teachers in the “core” academic departments and those in the “special” subjects like vocational education or the arts (Little 1993; see also Goodson 1993; Siskin 1994).