Article Review on The Concept of School Accountability in America

This was a very interesting article. I feel education is presently at the face of the nation's political agenda: everyone, regardless of political persuasion, wants to see an improvement in the performance of America’s schools. This accord ends suddenly though when seeking ways to determine how to enhance ways for school performance. 

In my current school district, we are battling this same issue – “How do we become a successful school district?” “Will we be taken over by the state?” School accountability in education is a wide idea that could be discussed in many ways, such as using political processes to assure accountability, introducing market-based organizations to increase accountability to parents and children, or developing peer-based accountability systems to increase the professional accountability of teachers. The most commonly considered definition of accountability involves using educational data-based tools aimed at increasing student achievement. From reading this article, I have identified the stakeholders as engaged outsiders such as entrepreneurs, business community representatives, school board members; practitioners such as educational administrators; policy advocates from a wide assortment of organizations and researchers from universities and think tank-based facilities. Although not listed, but I feel the parents are stakeholders as well since the have children that attend the schools. These stakeholders were divided into four focus groups who participated in discussions and observations about school accountability. What I found to be the most revealing was how these focus groups viewed what accountability is. I was very surprised to discover that the stakeholders had different views on what accountability means to them. Some of the focus groups concentrated on school outcomes while others focused on process and implementation in schools. Some focus groups felt that there was success, or has been success from the accountability movement in the focus and attention in equity, in promoting greater transparency, in helping schools and families and communities become more data-literate, and also that there was an improvement in test scores as a result of accountability. According to Savvy Decision Making, focus group data can help stakeholders identify a range of opinions on a topic as well as comprehend these opinions.

Accountability systems are our main instrument for informing the parents and communities about school gains and progress. These systems can set expectations for what it means to be a effective school, which send a clear signal that states, districts, and schools must raise achievement for all groups of students including high performers and underachievers. So I think that it is really important that all stakeholders realize that they have a vital role to play, and so their opinion matters. Most importantly, it matters what parents expect from schools, it matters what educators think that children should learn and when they should learn it and how they should learn it, and also the politics matters. Politics matters because they are the domain who funds education so quite naturally, they have expectations. When children’s education is paid for with public dollars, no matter what sort of school those children attend, the public has the right, even the obligation, to know the academic performance of students. They also want to insure students are learning the skills and knowledge that they will need to succeed to become college and career ready. Schools that take public funds to educate children but cannot demonstrate their educational efficacy have to be informed or asked to improve their educational standards. This is why a lot of school district are taken over by the state or given improvement grants. Rothstein, Jacobson, and Wilder demonstrate that educational stakeholders value a wide range of outcomes including not just academic performance and educational attainment but also areas such as citizenship, work ethic, and critical thinking.

In summary, the school accountability measures put in place by many states and the federal government will likely change some of the ways schools operate. Of course, this is the intent of these policies. There are new education polices enacted each year on the national and state level. But when planning these systems, policy makers must be mindful about the incentives for schools to manipulate their resources in an ultimately unethical manner and to ensure that the schools labeled 'exceptional' or 'failing' honestly have earned these ratings. Being an administrator for the past five years, I have realized that education is a big political factor. It is at the heart of so much that is wrong with public education. It is sort of like a gme of tug-a-war. On one side, education politics is often about increasing funding while evading responsibility for results and on the other side, it’s mostly about local control and unregulated school choice.