EDLL

Why is it that the loudest yelps for accountability in schools come from those who themselves are unaccountable?  Not only are they unaccountable in the world of education, where the punitive measures of accountability are limited to students, teachers, principals, and superintendents, leaving policymakers, business leaders, and bureaucrats astride education like a colossus. But also are they free of accountability in the worlds of business and politics; in the former this absence of ethical concern is a matter of ideology and in the latter the bounty of hard-won and costly campaigns, the coin of the realm. 

Everything is upside down. We bear witness to the shame of nine year old children suffering the consequences of accountability (such as the stigma  of failure) that are righty due to the failure of adults. A prominent architect of NCLB argued very sincerely before the Texas State Board of Education that the new state tests will be the way to get schools to address "opportunity to learn" concerns. Despite not having the teachers, textbooks, and buildings needed so that students have the opportunity to learn before being tested, he reasoned in the upside down logic of the current accountability system that the tests would force the schools to do what they had not done for decades. This is to ignore a fundamental civil right, that you cannot be tested on material you did not have the opportunity to learn! In this laissez-faire world view,  states have the comforting delusion that they have done their fair share in helping schools by simply establishing standards and a curriculum, creating tests, and calibrating the accountability system. It is now up to the schools and districts to do the rest, that is, the real work of education. While local institutions should be held responsible, this accountability for only "those below" reglects the long history of national and state neglect for issues of equity, teacher quality, adequate funding, and academic excellence.

Accountability is thus a concept for those below, not for the leaders who require unfettered freedom to create wealth or to manipulate influence into legislation. This is work  not for the feint of heart and clearly not for so quaint a notion as accountability.  Indeed personal integrity, remaining true to a set of humane values and depth of character, is now reserved for the private sphere, for family and community life, but it is only a hindrince in the "rough and tumble" of business and politics. Like the Puritan censors of the town commons, they find comfort by projecting their own unbridled passions onto others and hence conceive of them so ungoverned that they must be held in check by the punishments and incentives of a rigorous accountability system. The very premise of such a system is that students and teachers, as well as superintendents and principals, are not giving all of their discretionary effort, that they cannot be relied upon to act according to their own intrinsic motivations.

It is this lack of accountabiility for the policymakers that causes concern with the dominant reform for ESEA reauthorization, that being, mainly to transfer power from the federal government to that of the states. It fails to address the need for a more comprehensive system of accountabiility, holding all actors fairly and equally accountable. This transfer is necessary but not sufficient. For state agencies have many masters -- governor, business, labor, legislators, various interest groups, the U.S. Department of Education, other parts of regulatory system. This is a massive complex of interwoven interests and influences that profoundly circumscribes the independence of various agencies to follow their separate mission. It is highly unlikely that the state education departments can serve the true interests of local school districts, students, and teachers. Their authority is highly mediated by opposing interests. At the same time, the agency itself is comprised of many parts, each often acting on its own and in conflict with other parts. It is a buzzing Leviathan of incoherent directions and interests. This makes it inevitably remote and unresponsive to their constituents and clients.