The Challenges of Accountability

Beyond the Rock and the Hard

Place

Craig Jerald

The Challenges of Accountability

> Educators must stop lamenting the challenges of accountability . Educators should start making improvements.New York Times Newspaper in July ran an important article on a serious scandal in the city school system:

“Growing numbers of students-most of them struggling academically are being pushed out of New York City’s school system and classified under bureaucratic categories that hide

their failure to graduate.(Lewin & Medina,2003,p.A1)

• The theme of the article was link between such behavior and external accountability policies.

• The authors wrote the suggestion between “pushouts” and accountability.

“Those students represent the unintended consequence of the effort to hold schools accountable for raising standards. Given

the pressure on schools to show good results, it is understandable that principles would have little interest in

holding onto low performing students.(p. A1)”

• Greater accountability always been accompanied by worried talk of “unintended consequences.”

• When professionals in other field act in bad faith, no one calls for less accountability.

Choosing to break the rules and take actions that harm students will always be just that: a choice.

• begin to excuse such choices by substituting euphemisms.

• Strip education administration and instructions of its professional and ethical dimensions.• Creating another unintended consequence:

“Those who attempt to defend the education profession in such ways end up undermining

and cheapening it.”