How Can School Accountability Reflect the Purposes of Education?

Academics, grad rate are necessary but insufficient measures

It’s alive and well: the perennial question of whether school accountability systems measure the right things. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of this genre and have eagerly consumed all the recent entries. But the latest flurry of reflections about accountability largely skips over a couple of important questions, and that oversight is getting in the way of finding good and practical solutions.

In this blog, I’ll suggest a way we can put those important questions front and center so that the accountability systems we design can truly serve students. But first, here’s a highlight reel of recent reflections on school accountability.

In a New York Times op-ed, Ross Wiener—who helped lead the push for No Child Left Behind-style accountability in 2001— argued that those test-based accountability systems reflected an overly narrow view of school quality. Mike Petrilli, of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, responded by suggesting that NCLB produced real improvements in student learning.

First, Clarify Our Expectations for Schools

Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute applied an athletic-competition metaphor to the two pieces, refusing to award victory to either side and pointing out that accountability must be accompanied by other supports including high-quality curriculum and instruction. Petrilli provided round-ups of additional contributions here and here. Wiener issued a reminder about schools’ multiple purposes.

I’m glad we’re having this conversation. Unlike Pondiscio, I’ll refrain from assigning scores, which readers familiar with my limited grasp of sports will appreciate. I’m also not wading into the “did NCLB work?” question, which others continue to debate. Instead, I’m recommending that we grapple with two broad and inseparable questions:

• What are the purposes of public K-12 education?

• How should accountability systems reflect these purposes?

Determining what to measure in an accountability system requires clarity about what we expect schools to help students learn and become. It also requires careful consideration of which outcomes should be measured, which should be publicly reported, which should carry consequences and which should be used only to inform school improvement.

What Are Public Schools For?

Let’s start with the purposes of public education, which Wiener addressed in his recent post. These purposes are contested, and I won’t litigate them here. But we can probably all agree that public schools should prepare students for a variety of postsecondary pursuits. The National Governors Association’s Let’s Get Ready initiative captures this breadth by addressing “workforce readiness, civic engagement, and well-being.” The Aspen Institute has offered a similar formulation. If these were our chosen purposes for K-12 schools, what knowledge, skills, and mindsets should they cultivate to achieve them? 

I won’t claim to have the answer, but as a starting point I’d argue that the outcomes that state accountability systems prioritize—such as math and English language arts (ELA) achievement and graduation—are necessary but insufficient indicators of whether schools are preparing students for life after high school. Employer surveys routinely point to communication, problem solving, collaboration, and critical thinking as areas where graduates need stronger preparation. And we’re in crisis on youth well-being and opportunities for civic development. Schools cannot address these challenges on their own, but they reach most young people for several hours each weekday, and many students do not have access to high-quality opportunities to learn outside of school. 

Of course, expecting schools to address a breadth of student needs and outcomes leads to too many goals and insufficient attention to the most important outcomes. This concern is legitimate, but it does not follow that addressing students’ well-being, relationships, or civic development necessarily detracts from academic learning. On the contrary: Research suggests that supportive school climates, strong relationships, and other supports for student well-being and civic development can contribute to academic learning. 

A second concern involves durable or cross-cutting skills such as collaboration and problem-solving. These skills are intertwined with academic learning, and we’ve argued elsewhere against stand-alone measurement of them. But that doesn’t mean schools should ignore whether students have opportunities to develop and demonstrate them. 

I suspect others will disagree with these takes, which is why it’s important to have this wide-ranging conversation. But if we accept that schools bear some responsibility for outcomes other than academic achievement and graduation, we must ask how accountability systems should reflect that responsibility. Not every purpose of schooling needs to be incorporated into a state rating, and not every aspect of student well-being or civic development should be measured. We need to be clear about what we’re asking accountability systems to do, which is the question I take on next.

How Should Accountability Systems Reflect These Goals? 

My colleague Chris Domaleski has pointed out that “accountability” can mean many things and can be associated with a variety of decisions. And Scott Marion has wisely cautioned that recognizing the numerous ways schools contribute to student learning and well-being doesn’t mean states should keep adding indicators to summative ratings. These arguments suggest a critical question for accountability system design: What evidence is useful for what purposes?

School improvement is a particularly salient purpose in the recent debates, as ESSA-style systems often promise to inform that process. But by themselves, these systems are poorly suited to serve this purpose on their own because the information they produce is infrequent and disconnected from the organizational and instructional decisions that contribute to school improvement. As Robert Pondiscio wrote, “Accountability provided urgency and focus. It did not provide the instructional playbook.” 

Building a Purpose-Driven Accountability System

This challenge won’t be solved by adding more indicators to summative school ratings. Indeed, as Scott Marion and others have noted, doing so poses several risks. A more coherent, purpose-driven system might retain a focused set of state accountability indicators for identification and monitoring, while using other forms of evidence such as climate surveys, course access data, civic learning opportunities, or early-warning indicators for public reporting, improvement planning, or local inquiry. Depending on the purpose, some measures could be designed locally, particularly if cross-school comparability is not needed.

This is all easier said than done. Some important actions include the following:

Clarify your goals. What do we want for students, what can and should schools do to help get them there, and who gets to make these decisions? An inclusive, cross-constituency approach to gathering and synthesizing input can be helpful, as we’ve written about elsewhere.

Specify the system’s purposes and the evidence needed to achieve each purpose. This step can benefit from a validity argument that describes the intended interpretations and claims and identifies the needed evidence to support them. For example, a state might retain existing ESSA indicators for the purposes of identifying the lowest-performing schools and providing comparable data for monitoring, administer an annual climate survey for public reporting and informing school-level interventions, and allow districts to select additional indicators related to civics, workforce preparation, or student well-being for local planning.

Build legitimacy and trust by demonstrating the system’s utility and benefits. When educators, families, students, and community members see how the system produced useful information that benefited teaching and learning, they will be more likely to engage with the system.

The choice facing accountability system designers is not between a narrow system that fails to acknowledge the broad purposes of schooling and a complex, burdensome system that dilutes attention to crucial goals. A coherent, purpose-driven approach can help ensure that accountability systems are clear about what they measure, modest about the inferences and decisions those measures can support, and useful to the many constituencies who rely on these systems for decision-making.

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages