Saying goodbye to educational accountability will help us reach UN’s sustainable development goals
“Our students still rank far below students in many other countries!”
“Test scores demonstrate a decline in mathematics among high schoolers!”
“Half of new teachers failed a standard test on general knowledge!”
These are just a few headlines that strikingly reflect how accountability — the process of holding schools, teachers, and students responsible for school performance — seems to have become a linchpin of educational policies around the world. This apparent interest in educational accountability has emerged out of concerns about the generally poor performance of economically and culturally disadvantaged students, increases in the number of students who need remedial or special education, teachers’ assumed lack of knowledge and skills, and the rapidly rising costs of education. Such concerns have increasingly led to a desire to hold schools and teachers accountable for their students’ progress, and attach consequences to achieving specific performance goals.
Although there are indications that educational accountability systems may raise schools’, teachers’, and students’ performances, they also have many unanticipated consequences. One of these pertains to the system’s main focus on educational output. Generally, such an emphasis on output tends to obscure the considerable heterogeneity in the background characteristics, behaviors, needs, and abilities of individual students across schools. We probably all know the type of schools in our neighborhoods in which students with primarily highly educated parents are enrolled, or those that just include high proportions of low-income and minority students. It is not surprising that such features of the school population may lead to differences in test performances across schools — performances that, due to increased transparency, may result in additional pressures in schools and teachers. For schools serving disadvantaged students, this may be particularly true. Due to their usually lower performance levels, these schools are likely to lose (financial) support from parents and community members, or face explicit sanctions from governments for not meeting their educational objectives. For teachers, a focus on educational output may increase the risk of stress, burnout, and even attrition. While they are doing their utmost to help their students learn, they are partly held responsible for output influenced by factors they can hardly control. Hence, rather than reducing the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students and reducing teacher stress, accountability systems just seem to achieve the opposite result.
Another issue is that school accountability systems tend to place emphasis on only a small number of measurable factors that spur positive change in schools. This, too, may have some unwelcome consequences. For instance, it is likely that such a limited array of factors seriously restricts the scope of education students receive. For instance, there is reason to believe that teachers increasingly adapt their instruction to tested subjects, such as reading and mathematics, as well as content and skills that can relatively simply be improved. This is usually at the expense of other important areas that are barely included in the accountability system, such as ethics, citizenship behavior, and students’ social-emotional skills. Furthermore, some schools even tend to enhance their average performance by mainly concentrating the brighter students, whose achievements may be easier to increase than those of the more disadvantaged students. Unfortunately, such practices may seriously undermine the learning opportunities of the students who are most in need of their teachers’ support. Hence, by focusing on easily measurable factors, accountability systems may erode the content of curricula, neglect other (difficult to measure) factors that positively add to individual children’s academic development, and favor the most advantaged students. Again, these are just the type of negative outcomes accountability systems wish to prevent!
So, what could we do to guarantee inclusive and high-quality education for all children, prevent teachers from dropping out, and ensure that global policies do not give way to inappropriate teaching practices? I believe that one way to reach these Sustainable Development Goals is to take leave from top-down accountability systems and make way for a bottom-up approach to improving teaching and learning. Given that today’s classrooms may become more and more diverse in terms of children’s backgrounds, behaviors, needs, and (dis)abilities, it may become increasingly important to focus more and more on the proximal classroom processes that help teachers deal with a diverse student body and individual students participate in all aspects of school life.
