Accountability: Overview

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Critical Issues in Urban Education

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The University of Chicago

Critical Issues in Urban Education

40 classificações

Urban school reform in the United States is characterized by contentious, politicized debate. This course explores a set of critical issues in the education and educational reform space, with a focus on aspects of the field that have sparked controversy and polarized views. We will dig into these debates, situating them within the larger history of public education and school reform, and considering the viewpoints, the evidence, and translation of issues into educational policy. We will consider three broad topics in this course: 1. Federal Strategies in School Reform: How has the federal government legislated and incented public school reform? 2. School Choice: How does school choice aim to improve schools? 3. Accountability: What is the history of accountability in American public schooling? What are the policies and practices associated with accountability? Learning Goals This course will enable participants to: 1. develop an informed historical perspective about public schooling in the United States; 2. understand the unique contextual elements of the American approach to public schooling; 3. analyze and assess divergent viewpoints about American public school history and school reform policy. Teachers may be able to receive continuing education credit for successful completion of this course. To earn continuing education credits students must purchase and earn the Course Certificate, which they can then submit to the credit-issuing agency in their state. Students should also fill out the requisite paperwork stating that the affiliated provider is the Graham School at the University of Chicago, and that average time for certificate-level course completion is 18 hours. Students outside of Illinois should contact their state’s accreditation board to determine whether this course is eligible for continuing education credit. Note that it is up to the schools or districts that employ teachers to decide whether this course meet their requirements.

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School Accountability: History, Theory of Action, Policy

The idea of accountability, or holding students, teachers, schools and school districts responsible for school performance, has become a key focus for practitioners, policy makers, and citizens. Why did the concept of accountability emerge and why has it become so central, so controversial? This week, we will learn about the concept of accountability in schools, which emerged in the United States in the 1990s. We will examine the history of the accountability, and the many forms this idea has taken. In doing so, we will consider pressing questions about how we ensure high quality schooling while not making accountability an ends in itself.

Accountability: Overview7:09

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Sara Ray Stoelinga
Sara Liston Spurlark Director and Clinical Professor
Urban Education Institute

[MUSIC]

Welcome back.

Today, we're moving into the third unit of the course that's focused on student

accountability.

Today, I'm going to be providing an overview and

a summary of what we'll be talking about relative to this unit.

So to start, again, I'm sharing two different quotes focused on

accountability and accountability practices.

And I think in some respects like the other quotes that we've used for

different units and different segments of the course, it summarizes some of the key

controversial issues around the concept of accountability.

On the one hand, those who are opponents to the concept of accountability or

think that we don't have the aspects of accountability quite right,

this focus on the reliance upon or focus on standardized testing

as the kind of focal point of accountability in schooling.

And on the flip side, a set of beliefs that, to professionalize teaching,

to improve schools and to have a sort of accountability to the use of

public money that we need to have some sense how schools are doing and

how teachers are doing and kind of rigorous and active ways to measure that.

So, accountability really is exactly this.

It's a set of practices or strategies to gather information and

data that informs the public about how schools, teachers,

districts and states are doing relative to public schooling.

There are many different ways to think about school accountability and

a lot of different topics that could have been chosen to discuss this.

And so what I've done is just to choose a couple of different lenses and

focal points that I think will give you a flavor of the major issues around

school accountability and district accountability, but

in no way is this exhaustive in terms of

the full body of understanding how school accountability practices happen.

So to start, in some ways the notion of school accountability emerged on the scene

in school reform or in the school reform landscape in around the mid 1990s.

It's important to note and some of our experts who are a part

of the voices of the field aspect of this course have told us

the school accountability or the idea of actually measuring

school quality predates the 1990s by quite a long ways.

In some ways, if we think back to ESEA and the passing of that piece

of legislation in the 1960s, already we see evidence of the push for

particular schools to make public certain aspects of their performance,

but this kind of renewed focus on school accountability in

the 1990s was marked with a focus on schools across the board.

Having more transparency and having a set of indicators to really

differentiate between schools and so the 1990s is

kind of the modern school reform era approach to school accountability.

It's important to understand that accountability takes a lot

of different forms.

And over the course of the history of school reform,

we've seen both the focus on outputs and inputs.

Outputs meaning,

understanding the performance of students, how students are doing.

Inputs meaning,

trying to control the quality of things like teacher credentialing or the number

of students that a student has to take to graduate from high school or whether or

not the courses students are taking are of a certain college readiness standard, etc.

So school accountability really takes into account both inputs and outputs,

but what we've seen is a shift towards measuring the outputs side from

the earlier school accountability systems that focused more on inputs.

An important note in this is the intersection with the conversations

we've had in the course with the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top.

There are many people who mark the beginning of the school accountability

era to these pieces of federal intervention in schools, but

it is the case that we see that school accountability,

the kind of pressure towards school accountability existed before

the No Child Left Behind Act and before Race to the Top.

But certainly, both of those federal initiatives have shaped and

defined school accountability in the kind of modern school reform era.

We're going to see many types of indicators that are brought to bear

to measure school and district quality and

we're going to be highlighting many of those.

So once we move beyond the kind of summary of accountability issues,

which will be the focus of the first part of the school accountability unit,

we're going to take a deep dive into teacher evaluation and effectiveness.

Again, in the late 1990s is when we began to see in the field an emergence of

focus on the importance of measuring teacher quality to improve schools.

Part of this is motivated by a set of literature and

research that marks teacher quality or

teacher effectiveness is a very important aspect of student outcomes and

another piece of this I believe is motivated by or

shaped by an increase in the number of indicators or

statistical methods to capture teacher quality.

And so this combination of the deepening concern about or

focus on teacher effectiveness coupled with the emergence of different and

more rigorous ways to measure that, I think are part of the motivation behind

the renewed focus on teacher evaluation and teacher effectiveness.

Again, it's important to know that the No Child Left Behind Act and

Race to the Top have certainly contributed to and shaped teacher evaluation efforts

has have the emergence on the scene of value added or

student growth approaches to measuring teacher quality.

So this idea of taking all of the test scores in a particular classroom for

a teacher and doing statistical calculation to understand how much

student growth an individual teacher is getting,

which is both new to the field and also somewhat controversial.

So that will close out the overview portion and next,

we will move into the set of segments that focus on summary of the school

accountability issues starting with the historical lens.

[MUSIC]

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