Wherever education leaders gather these days, accountability is a hot topic of conversation. State and local reforms, along with the No Child Left Behind Act, are reshaping student, teacher, and administrator evaluation and dramatically recasting the consequences for below-par performance.
But in hundreds of focus groups conducted by Public Agenda in recent years, the word “accountability” has rarely surfaced. People often talk about testing and grading, or good teachers and bad ones, or wonderful principals versus weak ones. People circle around the concept, but when focus group moderators ask questions about “accountability,” they get more quizzical stares than anything else.
We should not assume from this reaction that people don't care about accountability in education or that they have no opinions about how it should work. Generally, most people believe in motivating students, teachers, and administrators to do their best. They also believe in imposing consequences for lack of effort, repeated failure, or demonstrated incompetence. But the detailed, passionate conversations on accountability that dominate education policy debates have not filtered down to most people, even those with children in public schools. An age-old rule of public opinion comes to the fore once again: Just because something is “the buzz” in Washington, D.C., or the state house doesn't mean that people are talking about it on Main Street.
Getting Down to Specifics
Public Agenda has probed public and parent views on accountability in surveys and focus groups, although we rarely used the word itself. We have also explored the views of teachers, principals, and superintendents and delved into the assumptions and reasoning patterns that lie beneath both public and professional views.
Four questions are often intertwined in the leadership debate about accountability: What should we do to make students more accountable for their effort and learning? How should we hold teachers accountable for their skills and effort? How should we hold principals and superintendents accountable for school quality? And finally, what should we do when a school repeatedly fails? Although all of these issues fit comfortably under the accountability umbrella, many people view them as distinct questions with sometimes surprisingly different answers.
Holding Students Accountable
Public Agenda studies have repeatedly found that public school parents believe that standards and testing help students learn more. Strong majorities of parents, teachers, employers, and even students themselves say that students, to be promoted, should be required to pass a standardized test and that those who fail should go to summer school or repeat the grade. Majorities support the concept of a high school exit exam. And the majority of high school students who are required to take such an exam acknowledge that it makes them work harder in school.
Support for using tests to motivate students is among the most oft-explored and settled areas of public opinion. Most people believe that youngsters—like many adults—generally match their effort to what we require of them. More than half of parents and teachers say that most students do the minimum amount of work needed to get by, and more than 7 in 10 middle and high school students agree. People appear to view tests as a normal part of education and an entirely acceptable way to hold students accountable.
That said, majorities of those surveyed do not envision schools as academic pressure cookers in which a single standardized test taken on a bad day could derail a student's future (see fig. 1). Nor do they want schooling to turn into a testing marathon where teaching amounts to little more than test preparation. People expect schools to be interesting, supportive, humane environments that set reasonable standards, offer extra help for kids who struggle, give students second and third chances, and allow some level of individual treatment for special cases. The public wants schools to hold kids accountable, but they also want schools to recognize that kids are kids.
Figure 1. Don't Judge by Tests Alone
Holding Teachers Accountable
Public Agenda focus-group participants talk readily about good and bad teachers, and parents sometimes describe their efforts to place their own children in classes with good teachers. Yet most parents probably have not given a lot of thought to the question of how to get teachers to do their best or what to do about those who do not perform acceptably.
Although schools can hold teachers accountable in many ways, much of the current discussion focuses on proposals to give financial rewards to teachers who excel or to tie teacher pay to student achievement, often measured by students' standardized test scores.
At first blush, most parents of children in public schools seem to support financial incentives for teachers who perform well. In Public Agenda surveys, nearly 6 in 10 public school parents say that it's a good idea to tie teacher financial incentives to improvements in students' academic performance.
But the results become cloudier when we ask explicitly about rewarding or sanctioning teachers on the basis of standardized test scores. When asked what should happen to teachers whose students regularly get higher test scores compared to other teachers at the same school, 37 percent of parents say that the teachers should get more money, but nearly half say that the teachers should just be praised, and 10 percent say that nothing should be done. Asked what should happen to teachers whose pupils fail at higher rates, only 20 percent of responding parents would remove them; 72 percent would give them more training but leave them in the classroom. Many parents evidently differentiate between the general idea of rewarding excellent teachers—which a majority of parents support—and the specific approach of paying teachers on the basis of test scores—which draws less support.
This same sharp distinction occurs among teachers (see fig. 2). In a Public Agenda survey, healthy majorities of teachers approve of financial incentives for teachers who work in low-performing schools in tough neighborhoods, who consistently work harder, who teach difficult classes with hard-to-reach students, who consistently receive outstanding evaluations from principals, or who receive National Board for Professional Teaching Standards accreditation. But only 38 percent of teachers support more pay for teachers whose students score higher on standardized tests.
Figure 2. Rewards
Some critics have suggested that teachers are merely afraid to be judged by hard-and-fast criteria, but our research suggests a more complex picture. Part of teachers' doubt stems from their views about standardized testing itself. Although strong majorities support testing as a way to motivate students and identify strugglers, significant numbers have reservations about testing's current forms. More than 6 in 10 describe testing as a “necessary evil”; 53 percent consider it a “seriously flawed measure of true student achievement.”
Teachers also point out that learning is a two-way street, which depends on not only the teacher's skill and drive but also each student's effort. Teachers in focus groups complain that some students just don't exert the level of effort needed to learn, and nearly 6 in 10 teachers surveyed say that it is unfair to hold teachers accountable when so many factors that affect student learning are beyond their control.
Teachers also believe that measures other than accountability for test scores would do more to strengthen teaching and enhance learning. When Public Agenda asked new teachers (with five years' experience or less) about 11 different ways to improve teacher quality, tying teacher rewards and sanctions to student achievement was in the bottom third of the list, with just 12 percent of the new teachers identifying this as a “very effective” approach. By contrast, 86 percent said that reducing class size would be very effective.
Holding Principals and Superintendents Accountable
The amount of survey data on public attitudes about accountability for superintendents and principals is fairly limited. More than 6 in 10 public school parents surveyed by Public Agenda endorse the idea of replacing tenure for principals with employment contracts that would depend on their school reaching specific goals. Large majorities of parents (76 percent) also say that publicizing test scores makes principals as well as teachers work harder to improve a school's performance. Still, these findings do not prove that large numbers of parents have thought carefully about these ideas or regard them as especially high priorities.
Most principals (89 percent) surveyed by Public Agenda endorse the general concept of giving administrators “far more autonomy to run the schools while holding them accountable for getting results.” Yet when it comes to using students' standardized test scores to judge a principal's performance, only 34 percent of principals approve. Like teachers, many principals have doubts about the ways in which tests are used and what they really measure; they also believe that many factors affecting test scores are beyond their control.
Holding Schools Accountable
Much of the current policy discussion focuses on holding individuals accountable, but No Child Left Behind also includes sanctions for schools that repeatedly fail to bring students to acceptable academic levels. On the face of it, the public seems to support this concept. According to a recent survey (Rose and Gallup, 2002), 81 percent of respondents favor holding public schools accountable for how much students learn. Even so, many people in the United States have yet to focus on how No Child Left Behind could affect local public schools. In a survey of voters conducted by the Public Education Network (2003), 42 percent admitted that they had not even heard of the law.
A number of surveys have asked people what should happen in a school where large numbers of students fail to learn. Typically, people reach for solutions that would provide more funds and services and resist those that would sanction such schools financially. In fact, focus group participants sometimes seem mystified by the idea of reducing the money available to a school in trouble—the intuitive approach is to give it more. In a Harris poll (2001), 83 percent of respondents say that a failing school in a low-income area should get additional funds to raise standards; just 13 percent say that it should not. In another survey, only 32 percent of people say that they favor giving federal money to schools in which students score well on standardized tests and withholding it from schools where pupils do poorly (CBS News/New York Times, 2001).
The public also expresses mixed opinions about replacing staff at failing schools. Fifty-six percent say that school districts should terminate principal and teacher contracts in a troubled school, but 40 percent say that they should not (Rose & Gallup, 2002). Only 39 percent of those surveyed by Harris (2001) would replace the principal at a low-income school where students were not doing well; 49 percent would not. And when Public Agenda asked about overhauling failing schools by replacing teachers and principals with new staff and keeping them under strict observation, a majority of parents (58 percent) considered this a good idea, but a majority of teachers (74 percent) did not. Whatever the fate of the school and its staff, a large majority of the general public (86 percent) agrees that parents should be able to transfer their children to other district schools with better records (Rose & Gallup, 2001, 2002).
Although helpful, these findings share a weakness: They are based on hypothetical examples, not on actual community experience. Surveys show that people are far more likely to believe that their local public schools are reasonably good compared with schools nationally (Rose & Gallup, 2001, 2002). Therefore, if a neighborhood school is labeled as failing or a well-liked principal is replaced, people may rally to the cause and defend their school and principal against federal, state, or district pressure, at least initially.
Communicating About Accountability
In view of the public's limited understanding of accountability issues, school leaders face a daunting task: guiding schools and communities through new and unfamiliar territory as more accountability initiatives become law. How can school leaders pave the way for this period of change? Some longstanding communications basics could ease the transition.
Don't Surprise People
Public knowledge about No Child Left Behind is modest, and few people assiduously follow state and local education debates. Even though people say that they want accountability in education, the details may come as a surprise, and some people may feel as if the rules have been changed in the middle of the game. School leaders need to shoulder the burden of explaining what the new federal, state, or local laws and policies mean to parents, teachers, administrators, and the community. People need time to absorb a new reality and prepare themselves for new forms of accountability, especially testing and promotion policies that affect students or teachers directly. Leaders will get more cooperation if people understand exactly what is going to happen, when, and why. When people don't know the facts, rumor and hearsay can easily get the upper hand.
Learn About Different Perspectives
National surveys cannot predict how every community will respond, but they offer reliable forecasts of common concerns and questions that may arise. Accountability affects parents, teachers, students, and administrators in different ways, and each group typically brings its own distinct anxieties to the issue. Leaders will be better armed to address these concerns if they know ahead of time what the concerns are likely to be.
Enlist the Teachers
In the best case, a school district's teaching corps can help parents and students understand new policies and deal with them realistically and constructively. In the worst case, teachers may impart inaccurate or incomplete information and undermine or derail a district's best-laid plans. Despite their potential influence in the community, a majority of teachers say they are often out of the loop in their district's decision making. Clear, timely communication with teachers—including building-by-building discussions about what changes mean and how they can be handled professionally—could help teachers play a positive role as change moves ahead.
Keep the Human Touch
Accountability measures—whether aimed at students, teachers, principals, superintendents, or schools—need to have elements of human judgment and intervention embedded in them. An unduly bureaucratic system that communicates through cold announcements from officialdom, allows little meaningful appeal, and operates with a “that's your tough luck” attitude will foster growing resentment. An approach that allows time to explain, delivers bad news in kind and sympathetic ways, gives staff members real chances to improve their performance, and has the wisdom to permit reasonable exceptions has a much better chance of success.
Avoiding the Other Potential Backlash
Much has been written about whether there will be a backlash to standards and testing when real accountability for students and schools begins to kick in. Periods of frustration and doubt are inevitable. Already, some states and districts have made mid-course corrections. To the degree that these adjustments focus on aspects of accountability that are unrealistic, overly complex, or flat-out inhumane, they may serve to bolster public support for higher academic standards.
But school leaders also need to be alert to another possible backlash. In recent years, as communities have begun to hear more about higher standards, testing, and greater accountability, parents' attitudes about standards in local public schools have improved. The judgments of local employers and college professors also have become more positive, even though these groups still have serious complaints about public school graduates' academic skills. Public Agenda surveys show that no more than 2 percent of any group sampled—whether parents, teachers, employers, or professors—want to return to the policies of the past (see fig. 3).
Figure 3. Few Want to Turn Back
The message is clear. If people sense that school leaders are turning their backs on the progress that many believe public schools are making, if people believe that the days of widespread social promotion are scheduled for a comeback, then we may see a backlash of a different kind against public schools. The public will accept adjustments and modifications to standards and accountability—but they will not accept a U-turn back to “the old days.”
