Accountability Era

History

The period of increased interest in accountability, sometimes referred to as the “era of accountability,” began in the business world in the late 1980s; by the 1990s the general public began to demand enhanced accountability systems for public schools. Student achievement scores are the primary outcome measures used in accountability systems; additional outcome measures can include student attendance rates, graduation rates, student academic growth indicators, and school and district progress toward meeting some predefined state educational goal. Originally accountability became popular as a method to publicize school performance summations. As the population has grown, increasing the demand for such reporting, accountability has morphed into a means for effecting change on educational systems—it has become a type of education reform. To better understand how accountability systems became such complex systems, it is helpful to review how the purpose of public schools evolved as well as the history of curriculum and testing in the public schools.

Until the 1980s, students were the only group within schools that were held accountable for learning. The schools were responsible for providing buildings and materials, administrators were responsible for communicating with parents in addition to monitoring teaching, teachers were responsible for teaching, parents were responsible for helping their children become good students, and students were responsible for learning. It was a system of shared responsibility, even though not all accepted their responsibility equally. If learning did not occur, the assumption was that the students had not accepted their responsibility. There was no perceived need for a sophisticated accountability system with this paradigm of shared responsibility.

In addition to this lack of accountability systems for student learning, there was also a lack of agreement on the purpose of education and the appropriate curriculum. In the early 1900s, there were two mainstream philosophies of education that influenced both the curriculum and the debate about the purpose of public education. The Traditionalists supported the liberal arts curriculum for those students whose IQ scores indicated they could learn; the Progressives, led by John Dewey, supported a more utilitarian approach to curriculum, with training for employment a primary goal for all students, regardless of IQ. A short-lived group of Essentialists chanced an effort to bring a balance between the two, encouraging public schools to use the interests of the students and utilitarian strategies in the delivery of the liberal arts curriculum to all. This group was not well organized and eventually lost its supporters. It is interesting to note, however, that the Essentialists believed that all students should be taught using the same curriculum (Traditionalist) and that the teachers should deliver curriculum in a manner that incorporates students' interests (Progressives). Both philosophies are present in our current national philosophy of education.

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