“School accountability is gone, fallen into a ditch, without so much as a shovel of dirt to give it a half-decent burial,” began Paul Peterson in a recent review of the platforms of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Whereas test-based accountability was much in evidence in both platforms in the past, now it is not to be found in either.
There is more than a faint echo of Shakespeare’s Marc Anthony in Peterson’s opening summary:
But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there. And none so poor to do him reverence.
A bit like the Roman Empire itself, it seems like a better question to ask of test-based accountability is not “why did it fall?” but rather- how did it last as long as it did? It’s hard to quantify exactly how many civil wars Rome suffered, but let’s put the over/under at 30. Sprinkle in an even larger number of assassinations of emperors and barbarian invasions, mix in an occasional plague etc. These things do not exactly make for a stable society.
Test based accountability likewise has powerful opponents in the form of unionized employee interests but also suffers from broad lack of public enthusiasm. The effort to nudge schools into better learning was well-intended and had at one point broad bipartisan support, but it failed to generate broad supportive constituencies needed to sustain policies against opposition.
The most robust form of accountability, the kind that produces meaningful rewards and consequences for schools, is financial and comes with an exit option. Delightfully, the exit option form of accountability can be decentralized and thus difficult for opponents to simply turn off/undermine.
The old-style accountability is dead. Long live accountability!
