Sunday we celebrated the American ritual known as graduation at my high school. On leave this year, I was able to relax and sit amongst the faculty while our students were each presented with a diploma. From this new vantage point I noticed little things I missed when I was "running the show"—like each graduate taking a brief moment to wipe their sweaty palms before coming to the stage. It also gave me a chance to watch the faces of those that had made this moment possible; the pride of parents, grandparents, teachers, bus drivers, custodians, and community members that filled our hot and sticky gym.
Looking around I realized that we were all "accountable" for this moment, and I was saddened at how cheapened this word has become in the debates about our public schools.
In my Webster's dictionary and thesaurus the definition of "accountability" and "accountable" that best fits current discussions of schooling is built around the notion of "transactions." Here being accountable is to "keep an account," a "record of credits and debts" which will be balanced at some point.
This definition of accountability leads us to think that every input has an equal output, that there is a ledger that is easily balanced. Every debt must be collected or someone will be "liable" (which is the fourth synonym given by Webster's for accountable). Accountability is something we do to someone else—we hold them accountable (or liable).
In terms of school accountability, someone will be liable if a child does not meet a clearly measured goal within a clearly defined time period. To avoid being liable, school people focus most of their energy on notching up test scores regardless of whether or not these scores have any connection to success after school. The object is to make someone liable, to be held in our short-term debt, and to ultimately be punished if the debit is not erased.
There are growing indications that Americans are less than happy with the road this notion of accountability is taking us down. Polls note the rise of dissatisfaction with the federal NCLB legislation (Phi Delta Kappa Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools and Scripps News) and concern is voiced over the emphasis being placed on standardized tests as the only measure of what our children are learning. Perhaps it is because we want another form of accountability.
To be accountable is also, Webster's tell us, to accept "responsibility for one's actions," to "give a statement explaining one's conduct" — in a word, it is to be responsible (the first synonym listed for accountable). The difference is subtle, but important. We hold someone else liable; we take on responsibility. It was this type of accountability that was on display in our gymnasium Sunday.
Seeing school accountability as a question of taking responsibility for insuring that every young person walking that stage on Sunday is prepared for a life of learning and citizenship changes the focus of school improvement. We would not talk about being liable for test scores, but about being responsible for the future lives of our children. Our focus could then turn to the larger notion of sharing responsibility for the overall welfare of our children.
Schools would be responsible for developing in the young the habits that make engaged democratic citizenship possible. Convener Deborah Meier argues that the most important skill required of citizens is the exercise of informed judgment. This would mean taking into account multiple sources of information, weighing that information, thinking through issues with a sense of the needs of both ones self and the larger community, and so on. If schools were "accountable" (read "responsible") for developing such habits in the young we would have an entirely different set of ways of looking at how and what our children learn that would go well beyond our current, narrow vision of academics. (The Forum has just released a briefing paper on performance assessments that capture such learnings. You can find it HERE).
As a nation we would have the responsibility of providing all future citizens with an equal access to quality public schools. We would all be accountable for what we do (or do not do) to insure that every child, no matter where they live or grow up, has access to good teachers, safe schools, challenging curricula, and opportunities for after-school and higher education. Our current discussions of accountability as liability say nothing about this—it is a silence that should embarrass us as a nation as we tolerate a disparity of school funding and community resources found nowhere else among advanced democratic nations.
America would also have to shoulder the responsibility of every child coming to school with a healthy body and from a safe neighborhood. It is hypocritical at best to merely insist that schools are liable for the education of our children if we are not, as a nation, willing to be responsible for every child being ready to learn coming to school well-fed, healthy, and safe.
Communities and families would be responsible for helping every child value education and demonstrating through our actions a commitment to democratic life. We teach our children by what we do, and if do not demonstrate our commitment to community engagement and exercising our own informed judgment we cannot hold others liable for what we are unwilling to model.
All of us in that gym, fanning ourselves and shedding the occasional tear of joy, were responsible for the young people on that stage Sunday. We were there to accept responsibility for our actions, by accepting these young people as fully enfranchised members of our community and nation. If we want to be serious about educational accountability, we should model it after this type of face-to-face responsibility for young people as future citizens as opposed to reducing them to a faceless collection of test scores.