By Chris Thinnes.

We seem to have forgotten there could be any other way

to hold ourselves accountable.

– Steve Seidel

‘WE MIGHT WELL HAVE VIEWED IT AS AN ACT OF WAR’

I remember Sir Ken Robinson recounting, a few years ago, the challenges of his family’s adjustment to American culture when they moved to Los Angeles several years beforehand. He said he had been told by European friends, time and time again, that he’d have to accept the fact that Americans simply don’t understand or appreciate irony. Not long after moving to the States, though, he tried to reconcile the state of American education with the tenets of its prevailing policy framework. He considered its title — No Child Left Behind — and began to realize that traditional European wisdom had it wrong. Given the fact that, by that point, millions of children were already being left behind as a direct result of No Child Left Behind, it stood to reason that Americans were actually great connoisseurs of irony.

By now, the ironies of the last three decades of neoliberal education policy — rooted in high-stakes testing and accountability protocols intended, absurdly, to hold schools responsible for resolving macroeconomic crises and systemic inequities they didn’t create — have festered into abject breaches of the public trust about which any humor may now seem untoward. We have witnessed not only the utter failure of federal policy to achieve any of the fundamental goals with which it was foisted on the American public — to support educational excellence, to promote educational equity, or to improve economic competitiveness — but also the onset of crises that further threaten education in a democracy and, thus, democracy itself. The vision and direction of a vital public institution has been abdicated, in ever increasing increments, to the dictates of private interests; pedagogy has been reduced to the mechanistic transmission and testing of a narrowed curriculum; the voices of students, teachers, and families have been alienated from public discourse; the rights and opportunities of underserved and under-resourced children have been savaged; and both the practice of civic engagement, and the discovery of purpose and passion, have been trivialized for a generation of American students. Appropriating the rhetorical bombast of A Nation at Riskseems entirely credible in the shadow of these betrayals of education and democracy: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational policy that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Yet these betrayals were fomented from within – by the U.S. Department of Education, by state and federal legislatures, and by elected and appointed officials who have abdicated their public mandates in order to become the foot-soldiers of neoliberal politicians, philanthropists, pundits, and policy wonks devoted to the broader project of surrendering our public institutions to market forces. Their failure credibly to respond either to the sweeping failure of their policies, or to swelling public outrage about them, illustrates another fundamental peril of the moment in which we find ourselves: the refusal of such entities themselves to be held accountable to the public will.

“The authoritative pose,” Paul Thomas recently insisted, “is earned” through actions that demonstrate humility and credibility beyond the power conferred by one’s status. ‘Accountability,’ from this perspective, is a relational and positional construct — in which one entity may be vested with the authority to hold another to ‘account,’ but each entity is both obligated and entitled to mutual dialogue, understanding, and action: such relationships, in a democracy, are bound by reciprocal engagement and responsibility. The failure by current authorities to abide by such a covenant is both a breach of trust, and an abuse of power.

The sweeping disregard of professional and popular discontent with the current accountability system, the disavowal of rafts of research demonstrating the adverse consequences of high stakes testing and accountability policy, and the failure of these federal and state entities and officials to invite or to allow meaningful dialogue with educational professionals, or with the broader public, about the future of our schools begs the question of legitimacy – both of the current regime, and the levers of power it controls. Any entity that demands the accountability of students, teachers, and schools – and dispenses the punishments of retention, firing, or closure — must itself be held accountable, at minimum, to a basic standard of transparency, integrity, and responsiveness in order to maintain the trust of our profession and the public.

If such an entity refuses to demonstrate the requisite humility and credibility with which their authority is vested, then we have every right to reject as illegitimate — no matter how impractical it may seem — the demand that we be held accountable to its dictates. Ever increasing numbers of students, teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, and school boards repudiating the current accountability system, and the will of its architects and enforcers, bear witness both to the recognition of this right and the viability of this response.

REIMAGINING ‘ACCOUNTABILITY’

These interruptions to the proliferation and entrenchment of high-stakes testing and accountability policy foretell an impending crisis for the institutions and individuals whose dominance of education policy and manipulation of public perception has, at long last, begun to weaken. And it is at precisely this moment of impending crisis – with the evisceration of public faith in the current system, and the absence of viable alternatives as a remedy — that we might be well advised to consult the playbook of a most unlikely strategist: Dr. Milton Friedman, the Godfather of neoliberal economics and the patron saint of disaster capitalism.

As we’re reminded in Naomi Klein’s brilliant Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Friedman insisted that “only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change.” The inception of a morbid preoccupation with just such a crisis in our schools — catalyzed by the alarmist rhetoric of A Nation at Risk and the cynical politics it spawned, and entrenched by the false promises of both publicly appointed and self-anointed ‘leaders’ — signaled the dawn of the current era of high-stakes testing and accountability policies. When this policy framework fully collapses in the coming months in a crisis of public faith, we’ll find ourselves empowered by a public hunger and the political plausibility to implement radical alternatives. For that reason, we must ensure that we diligently prepare ourselves in the spirit of what Friedman called “our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Problematizing a recent proposal for a ‘new’ model of test-based accountability, affirming Yong Zhao’s demonstration of the absence of any correlation between national test scores and future economic productivity, and repudiating the persistent claim that test-based accountability schemes will remedy broader systemic inequities, Anthony Cody recently and righteously reframed the prevailing debates about test-based accountability systems as “a monumental distraction” and “a shell game,” and begged an urgent but deceptively simple question of us all: Do we need an a new accountability system for our schools? For many of us, it couldn’t be clearer that the time has come not only to repudiate, but entirely to reframe the accountability system. But just how we might proceed to create an alternative system is a more deeply vexing question still.

To date, the prevailing debate about ‘accountability’ has centered on a construct of ‘accountability’ mired in the “technocratic logic”[1] of A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top. The construct postulates that standardized psychometric testing data can be used adequately to assess students’ learning, reasonably to interpret a teacher’s impact on students’ achievement, and fairly to punish the failure of teachers or schools to ensure students’ adequate yearly progress. Theoretically, these mechanisms were proposed to promote educational excellence, social equity, and economic opportunity for all learners. Judging from the rising tide of public consciousness, we have amply demonstrated the limitations of this logic, and borne witness to its catastrophic results.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

How can we move beyond the preoccupations of the current accountability debate — beyond arguments about the inadequacy of current tests, the insistence on less frequent testing, recommendations for better or fairer tests, or repudiations of the uses to which testing data is put? How can we transcend the myopic, punitive, and deficit-based notions at the root of the accountability system’s failure? As the foundations of the current structure continue to crumble in a rising tide public skepticism, anger, and demand for new alternatives, we must turn our attention not only to critique, but to creation; not only to demolition, but to design.

For that reason I would suggest, however presumptuously, that we extend Anthony Cody’s crucial driving question from whether we need a new system of accountability for our schools, to whether we need a new definition of accountability with which to begin anew, to which such a system might be tethered, and from which public faith might be restored. Let us take the time diligently, collectively, and credibly to reclaim the term, to reinvest it with meaning, and to advocate fiercely for a fundamental reimagining of ‘accountability’ that can accomplish five goals:

(1) to honor our subjectivity and agency — as students, educators, parents and guardians, and concerned citizens – in the design of a new system, and the determination of appropriate entities and protocols to facilitate and safeguard that system;

(2) to deepen rather than to cheapen teaching and learning in our schools;

(3) to inspire the remediation of systemic social and economic inequities by the individuals, offices, and institutions that have the authority and responsibility to do so;

(4) to recognize the fundamental principles of responsibility and integrity that educators always and already maintained in relationship with students, parents and guardians, colleagues, and the broader communities in which schools are situated; and

(5) to enrich a shared understanding of the purpose of education beyond the simplistic, market-based construct of “college and career readiness” that has dominated national debate about our schools since the early 1980s.

Such a process shouldn’t begin by proposing viable but incremental improvements to the current accountability system, but by identifying the most important questions we need to ask in order radically to transform it. These should be rooted more in divergent thinking devoted to reimagining accountability, rather than in convergent thinking about proposals to salvage or redeem accountability as it’s currently defined. No questions should be too daring; no possibilities should be ignored. Now is the time to draw on our reservoirs of radical hope, and dreams of untested feasibilities, that Paolo Freire insisted were essential conditions of critical pedagogy and transformative educational leadership.

Let’s not start with answers, then, but with questions. In order to reimagine ‘accountability’ — and, thus, the ‘accountability system’ — what questions do you think we need to ask?

Others will contribute, no doubt, more substantially than I to the development of this discussion. But here are some questions, essentially and intentionally undeveloped at this juncture, that come immediately to my mind in no particular order:

• The prevailing policy construct defines ‘accountability’ on a deficit-based spectrum that emphasizes failure, culpability, and repercussions. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ from an assets-based perspective?

• As a parent I value my child’s school’s efforts to be transparent and proactive with its policies; as an administrator I value teachers efforts to be intentional and responsive in their practice. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to correlate with healthier notions of personal and public integrity and transparency?

• The architects and enforcers of current policy have violated the public trust by failing to be responsive to professional experience, public perception, or empirical research. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to ensure the humility and credibility of officials charged with supporting a new vision?

• Schools did not create the macroeconomic crises for which education has been absurdly held responsible. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to clarify the actual purpose and consequence of schooling, and to demand personal and public integrity of the offices and institutions that must ameliorate these macroeconomic crises?

• The current accountability framework, rooted in standardized testing of a narrow range of cognitive proficiencies, entrenches the reductive goal of education as preparation for future schooling and employment. Schools must also help students learn to participate as active members in a community. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to embrace the goal of participation in a democratic society?

• I have long been haunted by Deborah Meier’s assertion in The Power of Ideas that “Kindergarten is the one place— maybe the last place—where teachers are expected to know children well;” that children’s individual interests and needs are served, and that relationships are cultivated as the core of student learning. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to support the independence, autonomy, personalization, voice, and choice of all K-12 learners?

• In Reggio preschools, and in a variety of elementary schools that have adopted Reggio-inspired documentation practices following the collaboration of Reggio Emilia educators with researchers at Project Zero, researchers have identified an alternative construct of accountability: “accountability to self (looking at what one intended to teach in relation to what actually happened); accountability to each other (contributing to collective learning as well as one’s own); and accountability to the larger community (evaluating the relationship between the school’s mission and classroom practice).”[2]How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to draw on such inspiring examples of democratic ‘accountability’ practices?[3]

• Privileged educational reformers are susceptible to parroting the rhetoric of civil rights — particularly with reference to students of color and the so-called ‘achievement gap’ — with facile claims about educational equity and opportunity that will be realized through higher expectations of rigor and grit. How can we redirect the conversation about supporting students of color by developing cross-cultural competencies in our schools? How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to ensure that all school personnel develop the cultural competency skills required for the active inclusion and engagement of all members of the learning community?

• Many prominent architects and advocates of the current accountability system went to school, and/or send their children to school, at independent and private schools. They appreciate these schools’ fidelity to mission and vision, rather than datametrics; the voice and choice these schools provide to students in course selection; the relationships students cultivate with teachers; and the freedom these schools enjoy from the restrictions of state and federal policy. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to recognize what privileged folks identify as desirable conditions of schooling for their own children, but not for other people’s children?

• The voices of students, teachers, parents/guardians, and administrators have been systematically excluded from the prescriptive design of high-stakes testing and accountability policy. How might we reimagine ‘accountability’ to support the collaborative determination of a shared vision for our schools, and a process to inspire and ensure our collective pursuit of those goals?

As the sun sets on the era of high-stakes testing and accountability policy, let’s dream together about how a new day might begin. What questions do you think we’ll need to ask in order to reimagine ‘accountability’?

Chris Thinnes is a former English teacher, veteran independent school leader, and public school parent in Los Angeles. You can follow @ChrisThinnes on Twitter, check out his personal blog, or find out more about him. 

[1] Jal Mehta coined the term in his brilliant 2006 dissertation, The Transformation of American Educational Policy, 1980–2001: Ideas and the Rise of Accountability Politics.

[2]Krechevsky, M., Rivard, M., & Burton, F. R. (2009). Accountability in Three Realms: Making Learning Visible Inside and Outside the Classroom. Theory Into Practice, 49(1), 64–71

[3] This question, in a nutshell, is the driving question of my current research in LMU’s doctoral program in Educational Leadership for Social Justice.

Image by Imtiaz Tonmoy, used with Creative Commons license.