Accounting for Accountability
Proponents claim that educator accountability is a recent invention of great promise, but it has a long and troubled history. Nevertheless, it has become more pervasive and demanding, and it is likely to endure, and to evolve.
By Gregg B. Jackson
The contemporary idea of accountability, that is, holding not only students but also teachers, principals, schools, and even school districts accountable for student performance, is a recent invention. -- Diane Ravitch
Contrary to the claims of many proponents of educator accountability, the historical record indicates that accountability has had a long and troubled past in this country. What forces have contributed to its use? How has it evolved over time? With what reactions? And what do the answers to those questions suggest for the future of accountability?
Early Accountability
High-stakes accountability for student learning was first demanded of American educators in the 1600s by Protestant theology. Martin Luther had asserted that the glory of God could be appreciated only by personal and direct exposure to the revelation of the Bible. In addition, the Calvinist sects believed men and women were predestined to heaven or hell, and one's destiny was suggested by how closely he or she complied with God's will. Thus, the failure to teach children to read Scripture suggested eternal damnation for both the child and the parents or teachers who had failed in their responsibilities.
The Connecticut School Law of 1690 held parents and masters of servants directly accountable:
It is hereby ordered that all parents and masters shall cause their respective children and servants, as they are capable, to be taught to read. . . . Grand jury men in each town do once in the year at least visit each family they suspect to neglect this order. . . said parents or masters shall be fined twenty shilling for each child or servant whose teaching is or shall be neglected. (Cohen 1973, p. 402)
The early 19th century in America was a period of self-conscious nation building. States were eager to distinguish themselves from their Colonial legacy, and they soon exercised new powers. Massachusetts was the first to establish a state board of education in 1837, and others quickly followed. Horace Mann, the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, required his schools to report data on their operations, which he used in lengthy "Annual Reports" to highlight the schools' shortcomings. His intention was to provoke public support for improvements. He publicized data showing that most school committees had not visited their schools in the past year, many had hired teachers without examining their knowledge of the subjects to be taught, and almost half of all students were absent on a given day (Good and Teller 1973; Perkinson 1976).
Mann also discovered that students in the early 1800s had been imposing their own forms of accountability on teachers. The older boys of one-room schoolhouses would "turn out" teachers whom they deemed excessively cruel. Mann found that 300 to 400 school rebellions occurred each year in Massachusetts schools, closing one-tenth of the schools before the term was scheduled to end. Some of these were gentle rebellions, in which parents conspired to keep their children at home in hopes that the boycott would force the school committee to dismiss an objectionable teacher (Cubberley 1934; Good and Teller 1973; Kaestle 1983).
Mann's legislative proposals often included both mandates for improvements and financial assistance for local school committees. If the mandates were ignored, the funding was cut off (Perkinson 1976).
Mann, in his many speeches and writings, had advocated using more engaging pedagogy and less harsh discipline. Boston's public school masters, who were reputed to be the best in the state, banded together and publicly ridiculed Mann's proposals. Mann responded by praising Bostonians for the generous funding of their public schools and went on to suggest the school masters were squandering the money by insisting on their old ways of education. He then convinced the Boston school committee to replace its oral examinations with written examinations that could be administered widely and in a more standardized manner. The examinations were administered in 1845 to about 530 students, selected from each school's 8th grade. The test consisted of short-response questions on vocabulary, grammar, arithmetic, history, geography, and science. Thirty-eight percent of all test items were answered incorrectly. The school committee was disappointed and published the results for each school, intending to embarrass the school masters and motivate improvements (Caldwell and Courtis 1924).
Examples of test-based accountability occurred in several other cities during the late 19th century. For instance, in 1874, the first school superintendent of Portland, Oregon, created a uniform curriculum that was required in every elementary school, and he developed an examination to determine if students had been "thoroughly drilled in the work assigned" (Tyack 1974). Most students failed in that first year and were retained in their grade another year. The next year, there was moderate improvement, but still large numbers of students failed. The superintendent published in the local newspaper the names of all students, their schools, and their scores on the test. That incensed parents and teachers, who forced the superintendent's resignation. His successor discovered that some teachers had urged slow students to withdraw from school or urged their suspension before the examination to prevent injury to the teachers' reputations.
About the same time, in Quincy, Massachusetts, the school board raised the stakes. Suspecting problems in the schools, the board members personally conducted the annual oral examinations of students. The board found the results shocking. Students could read from their textbooks but not from comparable unfamiliar materials. They knew the rules of grammar but could not write a letter. The board fired the district superintendent and replaced him with Francis Parker, who advocated progressive education. Parker doubled enrollments and reduced truancy. When the Massachusetts State Board of Education later assessed Quincy student achievement, they found that the children now excelled at reading, writing, and spelling and ranked fourth in the state in arithmetic. Despite those favorable results, Parker's approach provoked a running battle in the district, with some board members and parents worried that his progressive methods undermined the fundamentals of education, and Parker finally resigned in frustration (Cremin 1961).
Bureaucratization and Accountability
As industry boomed in the middle and late 19th century, it expanded the demand for education and increased the wealth available to support it. By the 1850s, the population in urban centers was skyrocketing, increasing almost tenfold by the end of the century. The struggle to finance and build enough schools and hire sufficient teachers soon exhausted volunteer school board members. Most city boards responded by hiring superintendents to manage their expanding school systems.
To meet the heavy enrollment pressures that threatened to outstrip financial resources, the superintendents applied the corporate bureaucratic model to schools, complete with its emphasis on hierarchical control, specialization, efficiency, and accountability for results. One-room schoolhouses were replaced with school buildings having at least one classroom for each grade level, with each school under the supervision of a principal. Class sizes were expanded to 50 or 60 students, partly because of the influx of students and partly because teachers could handle more children when all were at similar levels. Instead of an occasional visit by the town selectmen, teachers were supervised daily by a building principal, who in turn was monitored by the superintendent.
Inspired by "scientific management" techniques of the early 1900s, school systems began to tie a portion of a teacher's pay to ratings of her or his perceived competency. This was expected to improve effectiveness and efficiency of the teaching force. For instance, the superintendent of Chicago schools implemented a merit system in 1902 by which teachers would receive a pay increase for each of their first seven years of service, if their effectiveness rating was above 70%. The rating was to be determined by the principal or another supervisory staff member at an unannounced time. As was common at the time, these were "secret ratings," made without revealing the criteria to be used and without reporting to individual teachers their scores (Smith 1979). The Chicago Teachers' Federation strongly opposed this system. Four years later, a school board member examined the records of 25 randomly selected schools and found no correlation between teachers' efficiency ratings and their salaries, after controlling for their years of service and grade level of teaching (Peterson 1985; Reid 1982).
Various rating scales, rather than direct measures of student achievement, were used to judge teaching performance in the first two decades of the 20th century. Teachers usually strongly opposed merit pay systems, and the ratings were often found to be unreliable (Elsbree 1939; Urban 1989). Subsequently, standardized achievement tests were used in place of the ratings.
A National Education Association study in 1918 found that 48% of 309 studied cities used merit pay incentives. A 1928 survey found a marked decline in the use of merit pay, down to 18% of the districts. This decline continued until the 1950s and 1960s, when the idea was again adopted by two states and about 10% of the nation's school districts, only soon to be again widely abandoned (Johnson 1984).
Development of Standardized Testing
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, teachers commonly tested students to motivate them and to assess their mastery. Most of the testing was devised by individual teachers and administered orally.
Dramatic changes in student testing occurred during the early decades of the 20th century. Several factors drove the changes. Industrialization had substantially reduced the cost of paper and printing. Superintendents were eager to standardize tests throughout their large systems in order to monitor the progress of students in the various classrooms and schools. The science of psychology was developing, and one branch pursued development of standardized assessments of human characteristics. Madaus observed that "changes in assessment technology over the last 200 years were all geared to increasing efficiency and making the assessment system more manageable, standardized, easily administered, objective, reliable, comparable, and inexpensive as the numbers of examinees increased" (1993, p. 20).
A 1918 publication identified more than 100 standardized tests of student performance (Tyler 1970). A 1920s survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Education found that 57% of elementary schools in 215 cities used tests to compare their school to others, and 38% used the test results to judge the efficiency of teachers (Rothman 2001).
School "Surveys"
Soon after the development of standardized achievement tests, the tests were used in "surveys" of city school systems. Surveys were comprehensive assessments of an entire school system, usually focusing on organization and administration, teacher qualifications and pay, curriculum, instructional practices, and such student outcomes as achievement and graduation rates.
Ellwood Cubberley's survey of Portland, Oregon, published in 1913, concluded that the school system's predominant characteristic was "the maintenance unchanged of a rigidly prescribed, mechanical system. . . [with] a curriculum vivisected with mechanical accuracy into 54 dead pieces" (Tyack 1974, p. 192). The superintendent protested that the report was biased and overlooked recent changes in the school system, but he lost his job.
Cubberley claimed surveys
give to supervisors and teachers means by which they may, quite definitely, measure the effectiveness of the work they do, and learn from the charted results where to shift the emphasis and how to improve the manufacturing process. . . . The mere personal opinion of school board members and the lay public. . . have been in large part eliminated, and in their place has been substituted demonstrable proof as to the validity of a method or a procedure or the effectiveness of the administration or the supervision of a school system. (1934, p. 698).
By the 1920s, surveys were commonly undertaken in large school districts across the nation. Caldwell and Courtis, writing in 1924, noted:
Survey after survey has revealed unsuspecting inadequacy or inefficiency in American education. Both teachers and teaching accordingly have been exposed to severe public censure. Superintendents and teachers have been dismissed, school systems and methods reorganized, and advent of a new era heralded in the public press. (p. v)
Neither Mann nor Cubberley appears to have been aware that differences in socioeconomic status, English proficiency, or learning disabilities would cause some of the observed differences in student achievement between classes, schools, and school systems. By the 1920s, however, several surveys used student IQ scores in an effort to control for "performance expectancies" of students in various schools. When that was done, most children and schools within a district were found to be performing about equally well, making the surveys appear to be of limited use in identifying underperforming schools or in identifying practices that boosted achievement. By the late 1930s, surveys fell from favor (Tyler 1970).
Mid-Century Developments
In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unanimously that government-mandated separate schools were inherently unequal and ordered desegregation of such school districts. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and two decades of ugly struggle to ensure African Americans' and other minority groups' access to schools and universities without regard to race or ethnicity. The long resistance split the civil rights movement into three streams: one that continued to focus on equal access; one that focused on black pride, power, and separatism; and one that took a middle path between those two, focusing on affirmative action, specific goals for progress in education and employment, and timetables for accomplishing the goals.
Proponents of the third stream argued that the vestiges of past discrimination would long endure without affirmative efforts to correct them and that the racist power structures would undermine the hard-won access unless held responsible for equal outcomes. In addition, outcomes -- such as student achievement scores, college graduation rates, and representation in corporate ranks -- were easier to judge than intentions. Since the 1960s, most civil rights advocates have sought to hold schools accountable for minority students' learning, but there have been disagreements among them about how best to do so.
Lyndon Johnson ran for president in 1964, promising a "War on Poverty." Title I of his Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 sought to introduce new programs and provide extra help for low-income students. The underlying premise of Title I was that schools had a responsibility to provide extra help to groups of students who commonly lagged in achievement. Sen. Robert Kennedy was sympathetic but threatened to oppose ESEA if accountability provisions were not added. He feared that many school officials did not care about poor and minority students and would undermine the intent of the legislation. To minimize the chances of that happening, he insisted on adding provisions for monitoring implementation and evaluating the impacts on student learning. When the Commissioner of Education was asked if he would support such a provision, he responded, "I want it, but I haven't the nerve to do it on the executive side, because all the educators will scream bloody murder if anybody measures them" (Graham 1984, p. 79).
A few years later, the Johnson Administration laid a stepping stone to nationwide accountability by initiating the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing program. Those achievement tests were the first to be periodically administered to national samples of American students.
Soon after his election, President Nixon advocated accountability for educators. In a special message on educational reform to Congress in March 1970, Nixon noted, "School administrators and school teachers alike are responsible for their performance. . . . Success should be measured not by some fixed national norm, but rather by the results achieved in relation to the actual situation of the particular school and the particular set of pupils" (Lessinger 1970).
In that spirit, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which Nixon had inherited from the Johnson Administration, provided funding to 18 districts interested in trying "performance contracting." Each district contracted with one of six companies selected by OEO to provide supplemental instruction in grades 1-3 or 7-9 for students with lagging achievement. The contracts called for the payments to be based on standardized test score gains over a nine-month period. An independent evaluation concluded that the contractors had not boosted reading and mathematics achievement (Mecklenburger 1972; Tyler 1972). The results temporarily cooled interest in having private firms run public schools.
Although the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association repeatedly denounced performance contracting in the early 1970s, AFT president Albert Shanker did voice support for some forms of accountability. He noted that it could provide teachers "with the greatest protection they had ever known, by protecting successful teachers from unfair criticism and providing help to the less effective teachers" (Landers 1973).
Accountability Moves to Center Stage
By the 1970s, the country was suffering from acute "stagflation"-- low economic growth and double-digit interest rates. Japanese companies had dominated the consumer electronics market and gained a notable share of the automobile market. The Cold War had dragged on for three decades. Americans feared that their nation was in decline.
Simultaneously, politicians were losing faith in education experts' prescriptions for improving schools. The 1960s and 1970s had witnessed an unprecedented expansion of innovative programs advocated by these experts, but the NAEP test scores for the nation remained almost unchanged throughout the 1970s, average SAT scores declined, and comparative international achievement testing showed 13- or 14-year-olds in the U.S. near the bottom of those in Western countries on mathematics and near the middle on science. While knowledgeable researchers recognized important caveats in interpreting these data, policy makers and the public did not. Meanwhile, U.S. per-pupil expenditures (in constant dollars) doubled between 1960 and 1980 (National Center for Education Statistics 2002). Politicians who had previously relied on education experts for curricular, pedagogical, and programmatic strategies to improve the schools began to have serious doubts and were eager for new approaches to boosting student achievement.
At the behest of business leaders, governors, and state legislatures, states responded in the mid-1970s by adopting minimum competency testing programs. By 1981, 30 states had such programs. Generally, only students were held accountable, by being denied promotion or graduation if scoring below a specified level on designated tests. Many states, however, also published the results by school or district, intending to bring embarrassment and public pressure on those schools with poor performance (Office of Technology Assessment 1992).
Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of Education convened a National Commission on Excellence in Education, which issued the 1983 A Nation at Risk report. It proclaimed: "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament" (p. 5). The report recommended enhanced curriculum, more hours of instruction, and nationwide testing of achievement at major transition points to "(a) certify the student's credentials; (b) identify the need for remedial intervention; and (c) identify the opportunity for advanced or accelerated work" (pp. 27-28). It also recommended that "Salaries for the teaching profession should be increased. . . and performance-based. . . tied to an effective evaluation system. . . so that superior teachers can be rewarded, average ones encouraged, and poor ones either improved or terminated" (p. 30).
The Reagan Administration did little to implement these recommendations, focusing mostly on the consolidation of education programs, budget cuts, and the promotion of school vouchers and school prayer. It did create and publicize a "Wall Chart" showing each state's average SAT and ACT scores, dropout rates, poverty rates, teachers' salaries, and per-pupil expenditures. The chart was hailed by some as a long-overdue means of tracking state education effectiveness, and it was vilified by others as inadequate and misleading for that purpose. A much-expanded version of the Wall Chart has long been published by Education Week in its annual "Quality Counts" issue.
In 1986, the National Governors' Association, chaired by then-governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton, issued a report titled Time for Results, which declared, "We'll regulate less, if schools and school districts will produce better results" (1986, p. 3). Two years later, the National Governors' Association explicitly urged states to "link results to rewards and sanctions"(National Governors' Association 1988, p. 5). By 2000, before the No Child Left Behind legislation, 33 states had test-based accountability systems. Many of those systems also took into account graduation rates or other outcomes. Some required all schools to meet absolute standards, some set growth ("value-added") standards, and some combined the two approaches. It is fairly widely agreed, however, that the state standards ranged from high to low and that the incentives for teachers, schools, or districts ranged from strong to weak (Goertz 2001; Viadero 2001).
In the late 1980s, states also began adopting drastic responses to "academically bankrupt" schools and districts. By 1996, 22 states had statutes that allowed for state takeovers of foundering districts, mayoral control of school districts, or reconstitution of chronically weak schools (Seder 1996).
In 1988, the Reagan Administration proposed a reauthorization of ESEA that required states to specify standards of academic skills to be achieved by Title I students, to identify schools failing to make good progress toward those standards, and to provide assistance to those schools. A Democrat-controlled Congress approved those provisions with only one dissenting vote in the House and in the Senate (Cross 2004). States were slow to comply.
When George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan, he decided to promote education excellence and called an Education Summit of all governors. With the energetic support of Governor Bill Clinton, the summit agreed to develop "National Education Goals." During the closing comments, Clinton stated:
This is the first time in the history of this country that we ever thought enough of education and ever understood its significance to our economic future enough to commit ourselves to national performance goals. . . . And this is the first time a President and Governors have ever stood before the American people and said. . . we expect to be held personally accountable for the progress we make in moving this country to a brighter future. (Woolley and Peters 2009)
The National Education Goals declared, "By the year 2000, all children will start school ready to learn; . . . American students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement" (U.S. Department of Education 1992). Bush introduced an "America 2000" bill that was intended to foster achievement of the goals by preparing voluntary national tests in five core subjects at grades 4, 8, and 12 and preparing report cards at the school, district, and state level. The bill also would have amended ESEA to allow low-income children to use Title I funds as vouchers to attend private schools. Largely because of controversy over the voucher provision, the America 2000 bill never passed.
When Clinton succeeded Bush as president, he continued his support for the National Education Goals. The first legislation that he introduced was the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which proposed substantial funding for local districts and states to develop action plans for achieving the goals. After considerable legislative battling, a compromise bill was passed.
Clinton also pushed for more accountability in his proposals for the 1994 reauthorization of Title I of the ESEA. The Clinton bill required states to establish content standards for all students (not just Title I students), to develop aligned assessments, and to measure student progress. In exchange, the bill provided some regulatory relief. A proposed amendment to require states to adopt "opportunity to learn" standards, which would help ensure that all students would have a good opportunity to achieve the content standards, provoked contention along party lines (with Republicans in opposition) and was considerably watered down before the bill finally passed. Six years later, as Clinton was leaving office, most states had made only limited progress toward implementing the accountability provisions of the 1994 legislation (Planning and Evaluation Service 2001).
All the National Education Goals were to be achieved by the year 2000. That year came and went without any of the goals being achieved, with hardly anyone noticing, and with few criticisms of the former presidents and governors who had volunteered to be "held personally accountable for achieving the goals" (Planning and Evaluation Service 2001).
President George W. Bush's 2001 reauthorization of the ESEA, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), allowed the states to set their own standards but mandated more frequent testing, reporting by several subgroups, and Adequate Yearly Progress targets, such that "all students" would meet "challenging State academic achievement standards by the year 2014." Schools and districts falling short would first receive extra help and then be subject to increasing sanctions, and parents of pupils in schools that repeatedly fell short would be allowed the choice of transferring their children to other public schools and using their child's share of Title I funds for private tutoring. In exchange, programmatic regulations were loosened and more funding was promised. Formulated with considerable bipartisan negotiation and cooperation in Congress, the legislation was passed by overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House.
Trends in Educator Accountability
Contrary to common assertions by advocates, the practice of holding educators accountable for students' learning is not a new invention. Clearly, there is a long heritage of such accountability in America that goes back to our Colonial period.
Educator accountability for student learning has been promoted by both conservatives and liberals. It has been imposed by the Calvinists of Connecticut, President Nixon, and President Bush, as well as by Horace Mann, Robert Kennedy, and President Clinton.
Although educator accountability can be found in the back hills of history, the topography of the accountability has changed considerably over time along four dimensions. It has become more widespread, more specific about the standards to be met, targeted at higher levels of the bureaucracy, and more demanding.
Educator accountability has become more pervasive over the past three centuries. As documented above, only sporadic reports of educator accountability are found through the mid-1800s. The secret ratings of teachers and associated merit pay systems became widespread in urban school districts at the beginning of the 20th century, but many students at that time were still in small rural schools. Similarly, the "school surveys" of the 1920s were limited mostly to urban school systems. Starting with the 1988 amendments to Title I of ESEA, the federal government has required all states to impose accountability on their public schools. By the year 2000, more than half the states had accountability systems that provided some forms of reward or sanction for educators that were based at least partly on their students' achievement test scores, although the standards set by some states were low and the rewards or sanctions were weak.
The standards to which educators are held accountable have become far more predictable than in the earlier eras. The 19th-century school masters of Boston and the superintendent of Quincy probably felt blindsided when their boards announced for the first time that they would test student learning. The turn-of-the-century criteria for the secret ratings of teachers were not publicized and not subject to appeal. The early 20th-century school surveys, which resulted in many firings, did not give prior notification of what would be assessed or by what standards of adequacy. By the time that performance contracting began in the late 1960s, the contractors knew in advance which tests would be used and the criteria for calculating the fees that would be paid to them. Since then, states and the federal government accountability schemes have generally provided educators with considerable advance notice of the instructional targets, the means of assessing student learning, and the criteria for judging educators' performance.
Educator accountability was first targeted at parents and teachers. But as school systems bureaucratized, the higher levels were subject to its grasp. Horace Mann began the trend, seeking to hold accountable both Boston's school masters and Massachusetts' rural school committees. By the late 20th century, the federal government was holding states accountable for student learning.
Federally imposed educator accountability systems have become far more demanding over the years. The federal government attached very weak forms of accountability to the 1965 ESEA legislation and then increasingly tougher forms in the 1988 and 1994 reauthorizations of ESEA. President George W. Bush upped the stakes in NCLB with more frequent testing, tougher sanctions, and especially the requirement that "all" students meet challenging standards. The historical record suggests that none of the prior accountability plans made educators accountable for all students' meeting high standards. Indeed, both the 1690 Connecticut School Law and Nixon's speech on accountability acknowledged that some children were not going to meet the desired objectives despite the most skilled efforts of their teachers.
Future of Educator Accountability
The historical developments have implications for the future of educator accountability.
The fact that educator accountability has long existed suggests that it will not soon disappear. It has been applied for at least three centuries in this country. On the other hand, the fact that various accountability schemes have been abandoned soon after adoption does not bode well for any specific accountability plan. Secret ratings and merit pay, school surveys, and performance contracting all gained brief popularity and then were abandoned. Some were subsequently resurrected and then abandoned again.
A few of the forces that previously pushed accountability are no longer present. Calvinism's theological tenets have a weaker grip on the country, and the advances in achievement testing appear to have tapered off.
However, several other forces are likely to maintain pressure for educator accountability. The intellectual capital produced by formal education has become increasingly important for individual success and national prosperity. Through the mid-20th century, physical strength, manual dexterity, and intellect each commanded wage premiums because they were essential for many important jobs. Mechanization, automation, and an information-focused economy have since eliminated many of the jobs requiring physical strength and manual dexterity. Most of the remaining well-paying jobs require sophisticated intellectual skills, and that has made parents, employers, and policy makers increasingly concerned about the outputs of education.
As the American education system became more hierarchically structured, there were increased calls for accountability. That happened when states became involved in what previously had been mostly a local responsibility, when cities replaced one-room schoolhouses with graded schools and a district superintendent, and more recently as the states and the federal government became more involved in funding and guiding education. Accountability holds several attractions for policy makers who are funding many schools. Testing is less expensive than most educational innovations, it can be relatively quickly implemented when using commercially available instruments, and the results are visible (Linn 2000).
Finally, over the past two decades, accountability has gained increased popularity in many other facets of state and federal government. About half the states have adopted outcome accountability for their public higher education systems (El-Khawas 2003; McLendon, Hearn, and Deaton 2006). During the latter half of the 20th century, federal legislation that was intended to improve federal agency functioning has doubled its reliance on performance accountability measures (Light 1997). The most prominent example is the Government Performance and Results Act of 1994, which was first introduced by a Republican senator and then most ardently championed by Vice President Al Gore.
All these factors suggest that educator accountability in the United States is likely to be retained for the foreseeable future, though details of accountability plans are likely to change. Those who expect the election of more liberal administrations at state or federal levels to reverse several decades of expanded accountability will probably be disappointed. Most of the existing accountability has been the result of bipartisan legislation, despite partisan debates about some of the details.
For six years, NCLB has been the dominant force behind education accountability. That legislation is largely the result of a slow evolution of accountability systems over the past three centuries, including Reagan's and Clinton's reauthorizations of ESEA. The only radical element of NCLB is its insistence that all students meet challenging academic standards in order for a school to avoid sanctions. The George W. Bush Administration allowed some flexibility in the interpretation of the word "all." It is likely that the Obama Administration will make further changes in this and undoubtedly some other provisions of the legislation, but they have already indicated a strong desire for accountability. The order of the day will be engineering better accountability systems rather than abandoning them.
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Woolley, John T., and Gerhard Peters. "Remarks at the Education Summit Farewell Ceremony, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Charlottesville, September 28, 1989." The American Presidency Project Online. Santa Barbara, Calif.: University of California, 2009. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=17579.
GREGG B. JACKSON is associate professor emeritus of education and public policy at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (gjackson@gwu.edu) ©2009, Gregg B. Jackson.
