As a follow-up to last week’s blog post on state testing, Looking In The Wrong Place, my plan for this week was to write a companion piece on school accountability. Looking in the right place (i.e. previous posts) for inspiration, I found that across the past four years I’ve already shot my shot, said pretty much all that I have to say on the subject of school accountability. As summed up in a post from earlier this year, Running In Circles, Chasing Our Tales:
As much difficulty as we might have crafting coherent internal and external tales about assessment, our struggles with accountability are tenfold because federal accountability (in contrast to state and local accountability) is a cloth wholly fabricated out of thin air by laws and regulations with no grounding in the reality of schools or statistics.
What is accountability and an accountability system? Is it a rating, an evaluation, an intervention, all of the above, none of the above? What does the amalgam of proficiency, growth, and absenteeism it produces tell us about school quality or effectiveness? As Nate Bargatze might say, “Nobody knows.”
Of course, I still had the option to write another post. After all, the cynical among us might say that repackaging old ideas is kind of the rock upon which our profession in built. And as long as we seem to be content just spinning our wheels on school accountability, why go through the trouble to reinvent those wheels. Everything old is new again.
But rather than spending a sunny summer Sunday reframing or rearranging the words from my previous posts (or asking ChatGPT to do so), I decided to follow a time-honored summertime tradition and treat you, my loyal readers, to a week of the best of my thoughts and words on school accountability. A veritable, if not venerable, “shark week” on school accountability – with just a little snark thrown in for good measure. After all, if there’s one thing that school accountability needs above all else it’s a good measure.
Besides, in a family-friendly blog such as this one, it’s difficult write about school accountability year after year searching for creative ways to avoid using terms such as cluster****, s***show, and adequate yearly progress.
So, across the next four days, Tuesday (8/19) through Friday (8/22), I will repost my thoughts on school accountability from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 – one post per day.
But for those young’uns out there who prefer to binge your content, a link to each of the posts as well as a brief summary is provided below.
Build Back Better: School Accountability
(originally published: November 17, 2021)
When it comes to talk of innovation and improvement, school accountability often takes a back seat to assessment. But as we begin to build back better after the pandemic, here are 13 thoughts on making school accountability great again.
Are You My Accountability System?
(originally published June 20, 2022)
It seems obvious that school accountability is a shared responsibility. As is often the case, however, when everyone is responsible, is anybody accountable?
Clearing Our Heads On School Accountability
(originally published July 24, 2023)
It will be impossible to improve or reimagine school accountability systems until we are ready to acknowledge that the premise on which current systems are based is patently false.
Getting Back To Basics (And Proficient) With Accountability
(originally published June 5, 2024)
First Law of Holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
First Law of Blogs: If you find yourself feeling really emotional, don’t post.
The field routinely ignores the first. I regularly ignore the second.
So, let’s talk school accountability.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 