Accountability in Public Education

..It's time to put more money, better tracking of teachers' performance, higher standards and real accountability behind the law. Let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance, or three chances, but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching...I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.

----President Obama at the 19th annual Legislative Conference of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Dinan (2009) reports that the last few decades have seen an intense national push for 'accountability' in the American educational system, a term that can be defined as holding educators responsible for meeting identified student achievement goals using methods of planning, evaluation, and reporting (Hopmann, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to formulate and provide research support for the position statement that the national push for accountability has been a positive element for education and should, despite its problems, be continued in the future. In other words, the position taken in this paper is that accountability is mandatory for any effective educational system even if its implementation is accompanied by problems, and the national push for it is justified.

Review of the Accountability Research

The fact is that despite its problems, and it clearly is not without problems, accountability has improved ed

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being recognized and rewarded. The foregoing findings strongly support the idea that accountability and any pressure toward achieving it in schools, has led to real and meaningful improvement in student and school performance. However, as noted in the primary position statement provided in the introduction to this paper, the recognition that accountability is beneficial and important for schools is not without the realization that it can also be associated with some very real problems and restrictions. With respect to the foregoing, the Hoover Institute (2003) points out that gains in student performance associated with accountability are not as straight-forward as might be thought. Specifically, the Institute states that there is a good deal of research indicating that when schools make gains in relation to accountability, the degree of gain is often dependent on other factors. For example, once accountability are implemented, it has been found that there are greater achievement gains in student performance if the state either rewards the schools for performance improvement and/or sanctions them for poor performance than there are in schools where accountability is not reinforced by state policies and practices. What

Category: History - A