DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION By ROBERT E. WEBER LOOKING BACK The history of mankind has been punctuated by man's quest for greater accountability. Man began his existence unaccountable-in an environment of primal horde anarchy where he was subject to the vagaries of nature. But his human attributes empowered him to improve upon this uneasy relationship with nature until he was able to produce the surplus which made the beginnings of civilization possible. Once mere survival was no longer at stake and civilization was possible, man created the division of labor; he formulated rules to govern behavior; he devised laws: and he prescribed tasks for his society and invented institutions to facilitate the workings of society. His dreams for the workability of society are manifest in his notions of justice, responsiveness, efficiency, fairness, economy, responsibility, ethics, equitableness, quality, reward, and trust. But most of man's institutions are imperfect and man had to devise new institutions and solutions continually in the hope that each new order would be better than the old. Moreover-and this is the astonishing thing about mancreated things-man's institutions often behaved in ways that were not intended and they had the capricious facility for developing an existence of their own-something over and against man, so that his own creations became alien to him (and him to them) and caused him to experience dissatisfaction, powerlessness, and anomie, which, in turn, sometimes became the spur for increased accountability. As a matter of fact the meaning of "unaccountability" (strange, inexplicable, mysterious) overlaps with the meaning of alienation (estrangement, helpless, powerlessness). It is the recurring unaccountability in some of the major task areas of culture--learning, governance, security, production and tradethat has generated an enormous malaise among us and causes us to raise anew basic questions about the humanity of our endeavorswhether our major institutions, although man-created and man-operated, are aloof from man and run out of human control or whether they are truly man-serving. But the questions we raise are pertinent to the time in which we ask them. In other words, there are limits to the accountability that might be achieved and these limits are precisely the limits of the behavior sciences (with special emphasis on measurement): the level of evolved human consciousness: and the limits imposed by the nature of largescale, complex, bureaucratic systems. However, sub-perfect man need not use his imperfection to escape all responsibility, for there are great historical statements of accountability-the oath of Hippocrates or the (109) 0 Magna Carta, for example-which light the way for him and which reaffirm humanity. There are also ways of tempering his institutions with countervailing forces (e.g., the rule of kings by divine right tempered with noblesse oblige and laissez faire economics with enlightened self-interest) and there are mechanical procedures for achieving interim measures of accountability. The ulitimate form of accountability or the expression of the wish to be accountable is, of course, love-it springs from pride in doing, the non-coerced giving of one's self, candor, openness, responsibility, humanness, and a natural and spontaneous feeling of what the philosophers call the "sense of oughtness." With this as something to aim for, our modus vivendi must necessarily depend on the evolution of new individual and group statements of accountability, the formulation of new human and professional standards, and the utilization of all the techniques at hand that are man-ennobling in the workings of society. ACCOUNTABILITY IN EDUCATION The concept of accountability in education, although not necessarily referred to as such, has been with us for a long time-students have been accountable for their courses of study, homework, attendance, punctuality, paying attention, and behaving in an orderly manner. Parents, too, are accountable, in the sense that when their children began their schooling the children had to fulfill certain basic requirements: they had to know how to talk, they had to be toilet trained, and they had to be at least minimally socialized. While it is true that chief administrators were always accountable to their Boards of Education, this has been on a process basis and it has generally skirted the question of end-products-the increments of achievement gained per dollars expended per units of time. Now, however, a shift is taking place toward greater emphasis on accountability for the system itself rather than on having the major burden placed on the student; that is, the definition of accountability now tends to be conceived as a measure of the effectiveness of achieving well-defined goals relative to costs (and sometimes other considerations, such as time) and the periodic community-wide reporting of this performance, hopefully in nonjargonistic terminology. This shift had its origins in the period immediately following World War II. To be sure, there are historical antecedents. In a free enterprise economy (or in any system in which resource allocation decisions must be made) man has, of necessity, been preoccupied with profit and loss sheets, time and motion studies, quality control, inventory control, and the like, in the interest of increasing both productivity and profits. These are the more ethically neutral aspects of accountability. However, a major impetus for increased efficiency and quantified measures came with the development of techniques of cost/benefits analysis and the design of systems such as PPBS (the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System) and related systems. As this was happening, Congress became increasingly concerned over what it was actually getting for its appropriations of funds. Thus, as new Federal funding programs emerged, they contained in them a built-in constraint for evaluation, which contributed greatly to the current thrust for accountability. Examples of program areas requiring varing degrees of evalua tion are education, juvenile delinquency, anti-poverty, and manpower training, to name just a few. Still another factor in the push for accountability was the beginning of a movement, a few years ago, for a National Assessment in Education in the general population. Closer to the operating schools, Dr. Leon Lessinger and his colleagues in the United States Office of Education provided major leadership by introducing us to new concepts in accountability and creating accountability training programs. The realization of widespread educational failure, particularly as manifested in the publication of reading scores and the emergence (in the twentieth century) of a new phenomenon-involuntary illiteracy (functional illiteracy among persons who had attended school for twelve years)-shocked citizens into clamoring for better uses of their money. (It is worth inserting here that while it is true that the most disturbing data on reading retardation come from ghetto schools, recent information on reading proficiency in the suburbs is also bleak. For example, Prof. John R. Bormuth at the University of Chicago found, in "good" suburban schools, that "65%, 38%, and 40% of the children in the upper elementary, junior high school and high school grades, respectively, read so poorly that they were able to gain little or none of the information contained in their average textbooks and roughly 34% of the graduating seniors were similarly illiterate with respect to the average passage in a sample of passages taken from newspapers and news magazines.") Lastly was the development of the socalled knowledge industry, the rapid growth in the number of private corporations partially or totally preoccupied with problems of human growth and development, and specifically education. A combination of knowledge corporation" practices for measuring efficiency, Federal guidelines, and the desires of serious school administrators moved the concern for accountability still further. As a result of all this, parents and school board members have now taken up the cry. How do we respond to this cry? At the State level, we are trying to get our thinking straight about accountability so that in our efforts to respond to the cries of anguish and anger we do not react with ill-conceived measures that at best have only fad value and constitute a mere sop. To begin with, concern about culpability and punishment for past educational mismanagement and failure is fruitless. It is much more important to focus our attention or redress, rectification, and improvement-how to make things right and, by definition, better. Neither is it the intent of those of us concerned with accountability to see education run on a strictly business basis. An aircraft manufacturer knows how many pounds of aluminum goes in one end of his building, how many pounds comes out the other end, and what it costs while it is in the building to bend it into various configurations. That may be well and good for his purposes, although the recent phenomenon of cost over-runs shows that this is far from being an air tight system. The point is that children cannot be equated with pounds of aluminum nor can teachers and administrators be equated with servomechanisms. The educational system is an inherently human system and must be preserved as such. And it can be preserved as such within 1 John R. Bormuth. Illiteracy in the Suburbs, Department of Education, University of Chicago, mimeo, 1970. the framework of the accountability concept. Our main purpose is to come to an understanding of how we can be accountable and to either devise or identify evolving accountability assessment techniques and put them into the hands of administrators to be used as management tools, in supplementation of the "sense of oughtness," to increase the quality of the end-products of the system-the students. Thus, for example, we are trying to understand the differences between negative accountability-the things we are accountable not to do (e.g., damage the personalities of children)-and the things we are accountable to do. We are also trying to discover the best ways to facilitate the accountability process. As indicated earlier, some accountability stems from the sense of "oughtness." Other accountability comes about as the result of externally imposed constraints. However, it seems to us that accountability is a two-party phenomenon, an accouplement in which one party must demand or make his wish for accountability known and the other party must respond out of the sense of “oughtness" and/or as part of a defined duty. Accountability does not readily come if it is not asked for or mandated. So both parties will have to become educated: the one as to the ways and techniques of being accountable and the other as to what can be expected in the way of accountability, the forms of demanding it, and the information that is needed prior to making demands. The current academic areas receiving the most vigorous attention. in terms of accountability, are reading and mathematics. However, we should not limit our focus to these two areas even though they are. obviously, basic. The notion of accountability, in broadest terms, goes beyond measures of teaching/learning effectiveness. For example, we are accountable to the intellectual curiosity of the children and hence must provide a relevant curriculum; we are accountable for extraacademic services and therefore must improve our comprehensiveness: and we are accountable for making the right diagnosis of learner needs, interests, and styles and for formulating the right prescription and can no longer use labeling (including mislabeling) as a method of escaping responsibility. We are also accountable for functional illiterates who are high school graduates, for children needing but not receiving special education, for both de jure and de facto dropouts, and for the non-college bound student who receives no post-secondary education/training benefits. Accountability is also an interdependent web. Thus, institutions of teacher preparation are accountable for turning out requisite numbers of adequately trained teachers; textbook publishers are accountable for the effectiveness of their materials; test makers are accountable for the applicability and reliability of their measurement instruments: administrators are accountable to teachers for giving adequate amounts of guidance and supervision and they are accountable for stating system objectives: Boards of Education are accountable to the citizenry for the nature and quality of educational program; and the State, among other things, is accountable for its own performance, particularly in the areas of leadership and technical assistance, and for providing the funds to carry out the accountability responsibility. 2 Teacher unions were omitted from this list since they face the first-order burden of resolving the apparent irreconcilability between tenure and accountability and the conflicts between union objectives and the public interest. We are all, in differing ways, accountable. And it should be added here that we are accountable not just for failure; we are also accountable for less than optimum success. When we are dealing with a broad range of individual differences and abilities it makes sense only to talk about the optimal. At the State level, we are also making distinctions between needs accountability and operational accountability, that is, accountability for meeting needs and accountability for performance in meeting those needs. In terms of operational accountability, the minimum number of parameters appear to be as follows: (a) Cost, (b) Efficiency, (d) Appropriateness. While a program can founder when one of these parameters is inade quately addressed, it is the more likely case that in a planning or program development matrix, the administrator, because of chronically limited funds, will work out various trade-offs. He should, of course, account for these trade-offs quite explicitly. In terms of needs accountability (pending findings of a formal Needs Assessment Project), there are over a dozen measures that school districts could be urged to take immediately (with State assistance), some costly and some not so costly, but all within the state of the art, that would meet more needs and increase the quality of education. These are stated in random order as follows: 1. Expand extra-academic service capabilities at all levels. 2. Provide inter-racial and inter-ethnic experiences requisite for living in a pluralistic democracy. 3. Establish materials and technology centers. 4. Expand evening school and adult education programs. 5. Establish special programs with increased holding power. 6. Participate more fully in all Federal and State nutritional programs. 7. Provide special education for all children who are in need of it, including pre-school for children with learning disabilities. 8. Inaugurate student-initiated programs of participatory education wherein released time and academic credit would be given for independent study and social service (and without eligibility requirements). 9. Modify the standard curriculum so as to make it more relevant. 10. Provide post-secondary opportunities for all non-college bound students, including student loan programs comparable to those for college students and expand vocational offerings downward and laterally. 11. Utilize all existing techniques of individualizing instruction. 12. Make maximum use of paraprofessional personnel. 13. Require all administrators and master teachers to maintain vigorous and continuous in-service training programs instead of abdicating this responsibility. These recommendations are only illustrative; obviously a host of other recommendations could also be made. In planning for the implementation of these recommendations, the basic principles of operational accountability should be thought through. However, in attempt |