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Illinois School Board Journal
March/April 2002

Shifting the focus for accountability

by Linda Dawson

Linda Dawson is IASB director of editorial services and Journal editor.

The focus of public education is shifting, and as it shifts, who is accountable for student achievement?

Creation of state learning standards, adopted now in 49 states, shifted the focus from curriculum direction determined by local school districts to a process mandated by state standards of learning.

More recently, the federal government, with the passage and signing of President George W. Bush's education bill (the "No Child Left Behind" Act), imposed an even greater demand on the performance of individual schools, a shift away from accountability at the district level. The act requires statewide assessments in reading and math for grades 3-8 by the 2005-06 school year. Currently, only nine states (California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah) administer standards-based tests in all of those years.

And, according to education theorists Richard Elmore and Susan Furhman, the new approaches to accountability shift the focus from inputs (providing adequate resources and complying with regulations) to outputs (test scores and proficiencies).

As a result, local school boards are caught in the middle: Their schools are being held responsible for increased student achievement, while the standards to which they are accountable are determined outside the district.

Individual schools within each district face their own problems: How can they be held responsible for increasing student achievement if they have no say over the financial resources that could hire more teachers, pay for staff development or buy new curriculum materials?

No one can find an argument against the standards movement pushing for education reform when stated in terms of having all students achieve to their highest potential, according to reform analyst W. Patrick Dolan. But by laying accountability at the doorstep of the local school and teachers, and not at the feet of the school board or district, the movement puts pressure on the traditional pyramid power structure.

Currently, members of the community are accustomed to looking at the school board and superintendent for accountability. When things don't go in the perceived right direction, stakeholders can exercise their right to vote one or more members off the board. Or they can exert pressure on the board to remove a superintendent.

Now, however, the shift in accountability tips the scales in a different direction. The multiple-choice question becomes, "Who should be accountable for increasing student achievement?"

A. Students

B. Teachers

C. Administrators

D. Board of Education

E. Parents/community

F. All of the above

The idea of student accountability has been around since the 1960s, according to Robert J. Marzano and John S. Kendall, although it has been known by changing names: "outcome-based education," "competency-based education" and "mastery learning." Whatever its name, they said in their book A Comprehensive Guide to Designing Standards-Based Districts, Schools, and Classrooms, the movement began to decline in the 1980s when educators began to realize that the test barriers they had constructed for students to pass were not an incentive to improve achievement.

Now outcome-based education is re-emerging, this time shifting the focus on test results from individuals to the school. And the stakes are getting higher. "No Child Left Behind" says schools that fail to improve test scores after two years stand in line to receive money to improve their instruction. But after six years with no improvement, existing staff and administrators could find themselves out the door.

That means teachers will find themselves under closer scrutiny, more accountable for the out-comes of their students. For years, teachers have closed the door of their classrooms and gone about their business of educating students. Now, accountability is at the door, knocking insistently to ask what's going on in the classroom and trying to determine how it can be done better.

"We've tended to treat what goes on in the classroom as a relatively idiosyncratic process that's determined largely by the personal characteristics and attributes of teachers," Elmore said in an interview with Bob Farrace of Principal Leadership. "What the accountability movement does is take the lid off that and say, look, there have to be some ways to teach that are effective."

But sharing those effective practices is not always easy. So much more goes on in a classroom than can be measured with a paper and pencil test. And why should teachers -- or schools -- be forced to share their best practices, even with others in their district, if test scores are used to reward or sanction based on rankings?

"Teachers view themselves as full-service professionals, responsible not only for cognitive learning but also for social, emotional and moral nurturing," says Larry Lashway, research analyst and writer for the ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management at the University of Oregon. "The accountability system seems to devalue that effort."

Plus, he says, looking solely at tests doesn't take into account "the excitement in the eyes of a student who has just mastered a new task or who has just achieved a hard-won bit of personal insight." Those rewards often are what keep teachers in the profession, sometimes more than monetary incentives.

What accountability should do, Lashway says, is force teachers to take a good, long look at how they view student capability. If a teacher works hard, but students fail to achieve, has that teacher asked them to work beyond their capacity to learn? Does that mean the teacher is ineffective? Or is the teacher being asked to do the impossible by holding everyone to a single high standard?

"In many schools, individual teachers' conceptions of their own responsibility have the greatest influence over how schools address accountability issues," says Richard Elmore, this time writing with Fuhrman in the September 2001 Phi Delta Kappan. If the teachers believe all students can achieve, they have already reached a higher level of internal accountability than is present in many buildings.

Instead of working harder, longer and faster doing things the same way they have always been done in an attempt to improve test scores, teachers in schools that have high internal accountability continually look for ways to do things better, even when scores are already good.

Elmore believes test scores will remain static or worsen in schools that don't work on their internal accountability problems. "And those schools that have solved the internal accountability problem are going to get better … without regard to the socioeconomic status of their students."

But just demanding that schools -- and teachers -- change to be more accountable internally is not the answer.

"People resist change not because they will have to alter their behavior but because they will have to let go of their existing framework and find new ways of making sense out of the world," says Lashway. For that reason, changes are better accomplished from the inside out, not the outside in.

Craig Colgan, a Washington, D.C.-based education writer, points to the experience in Memphis, Tennessee. After six years of attempting to implement school reform models, the district scrapped all its efforts when its new superintendent said that the plan "not only did not result in high achievement gains but also hurt morale and resulted in achievement setbacks for some students."

The conclusion of experts examining the experience, Colgan says, is that mandating broad changes within a district, even with good support and multiple options, will not succeed.

In order to ensure success, according to Steven Ross of the University of Memphis, "you have to make sure teachers are involved right from the beginning, that they can learn everything they can, that the process is as democratic as you can make it, and that the district brings in evaluation from a third party."

And there must be an administrator, especially at the building level, who has the skills and the knowledge to help attain this internal accountability, Elmore says.

When that happens, test scores can get better, as evidenced by a Brooklyn, New York, school recently profiled in The New York Times. After three years of being listed as one of the state's failing schools, P.S. 307 in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has improved enough to be dropped from the list. While things are still not stellar (only one in four students meets state standards in English, one in three in math), a change in attitude seems to have boosted achievement.

The change came in the wake of the assignment of a new principal who "set about changing the school from a place that accepted failure to one that demanded success," the Times article says. While the improved scores may just be "a random spike," changes have been made in processes to lower class size, shift money to hire more teachers, reduce the number of paraprofessionals in the classroom and add 40 minutes of instruction time.

All of these changes cost money, and that money comes from decisions made by local boards of education. So while the focus of accountability may have shifted to individual schools, as policymakers, school boards still own a big measure of responsibility for seeing that it happens.

"I don't think policymakers at the state and local level have any conception of the investment in professional development that's going to be required to pull this (increased student achievement) off," Elmore says. He believes the entire movement for increased accountability has gravitated toward testing because, even though it carries its own price tag, testing is the least expensive, easiest to administer measure that can be used to critique schools.

What's being ignored, he says, is instructional capacity.

"Capacity," according to the Consortium for Policy Research in Education where Elmore is co-director, "is the ability of the education system to help all students meet more challenging standards." While most emphasis has been on increasing teacher capacity through traditional professional development, that ignores other important areas, according to CPRE Policy Briefs written in December 1995. Those areas include formal and informal networking, assistance from colleagues, shared vision within a school or district, time and material resources, and a willingness to look outside the organization for ideas.

Providing opportunities to develop those areas is up to the school board, whether through allotment of money, time, community engagement or creation of a vision to share. Developing policies around those ends can ensure they happen.

"Accountability represents a fundamental shift at the policy level," says Lashway, and demands that policymakers take a closer look to make certain not only that their missions are aligned with their methods, but that their policies don't work against each other. His prime example is a state facing a teacher shortage that clings to a system that rewards teachers for taking early retirement.

In addition to aligning policies with the desired results, boards also need to make sure they are not standing in the way of an administration and teaching staff willing to get the job done.

According to Linda J. Dawson and Randy Quinn, partners of The Aspen Group International, "Boards seem wed to an inherited 'system' of reactive governance that is rife with a belief that their job is to: watchdog the finances by reviewing bids and line item expenditures; assume a posture of approving decisions with little or no expert knowledge about curriculum or delivery; second-guess and challenge, sometimes even overturn, personnel decisions; challenge their superintendents to provide basic operational information in a multiplicity of formats for rehashing at the board table to prove board members are 'in the know.'"

A board member from Jefferson County, Colorado, put it this way: "Boards aren't making a difference because they literally choose to deal in minutiae. They like mucking around in operational details. Great! You can go and be a very good manager somewhere. But boards are about leadership! That literally means boards must set a vision for student achievement in concerns with the community and discipline themselves as members to make meetings and discussions focus on just that -- students!'"

To do that, boards must re-educate their communities as to the board's role, says Neil Duresky, a board president in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

"Our job as a board is to link within the district and community, find out community values and determine what student achievement should be, hire the best administration to make it happen, and link back to the community that is holding us as a board accountable for student achievement," he says. "In the process, we educate them about our true role!"

In doing this, the board also has the opportunity to truly lead by holding themselves more accountable to each other and the district.

"Boards can and must reform themselves to address with unerring focus the needs of all students in their districts," Dawson and Quinn say. "They must rise above pettiness, lack of discipline, demanding and often uncivil citizens with single issues, a reticent or unresponsive system and its employees, to demand focus on students and what they are achieving -- or failing to achieve."

In the final analysis, accountability becomes the key to standards-based reform by providing the incentive for students and educators to meet standards, according to "Measuring What Matters," a report from the Committee for Economic Development. "The press and the public too often use test scores to compare schools and districts and identify 'winners' and 'losers,' when what matters more for educational improvement is what scores tell us about how much students know and whether their achievement is improving over time."

The tests to measure that achievement will continue to be just numbers on paper. How students, teachers, administrators, school boards and communities deal with those numbers -- the real measure of accountability -- will demand attention from all sides.

"Building Capacity to Enhance Learning -- A Conversation with Richard Elmore," Principal Leadership, January 2002

Colgan, Craig. "Memphis Blues," Principal Leadership, January 2002

Dawson, Linda J. and Quinn, Randy. "Do Boards have the Will and Discipline to Focus on Student Achievement?" Wisconsin School News, April 2001

Elmore, Richard F. and Fuhrman, Susan H. "Holding Schools Accountable: Is It Working?" Phi Delta Kappan, September 2001

Elmore, Richard F. and Fuhrman, Susan H. "Research finds the false assumption of accountability," Education Digest, December 2001

Hartocollis, Anemona. "How Troubled P.S. 307 Climbed Off the Bottom," The New York Times (online edition), January 16, 2002

Lashway, Larry. "Accountability: A Positive Force for Change," Principal Leadership, January 2002

Marzano, Robert J. and Kendall, John S. A Comprehensive Guide to Designing Standards-Based Districts, Schools, and Classrooms. Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory, 1996

"Measuring What Matters -- Using Assessment and Accountability to Improve Student Learning," Committee for Economic Development, Research and Policy Committee, December 15, 2000

O'Day, Jennifer; Goertz, Margaret E.; and Floden, Robert E. "Dimensions of Capacity," CPRE Policy Briefs (online at http://www.ed.gov/pubs/CPRE/rb18/rb18b.html) December 1995

Olson, Lynn. "Testing Systems In Most States Not ESEA-Ready," Education Week, January 9, 2002