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Preface
When Stuart Smith at the ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management offered me the opportunity to write a monograph on accountability, I accepted without hesitation. The topic was both timely and substantive.
Moreover, as a teacher and administrator myself, I have a strong professional interest in the issue. Most of the time, I have reasonable confidence that I'm earning my salary, but if someone asked me to prove it, I'm not sure I could come up with a convincing answer. In a profession devoted to the long-term growth of hearts and minds, what could count as measurable results?
In retrospect, a little hesitation would have been in order. Accountability has become the 800-pound gorilla of school reform, and it casts its shadow on just about every policy debate in education. Every time I read a book or article, I seemed to find a new dimension to the issue, and my research would merrily head off in an entirely different direction.
Fortunately, early in the process I discovered the Southern Educational Research Board's monograph on accountability, with its five-part analysis of standards, assessment, public reporting, incentives, and professional development. That struck me as a logical structure, and it allowed me to keep the project manageable and reasonably coherent.
As always, my intent throughout the process has been to provide a concise overview of the issue for school leaders, teachers, policymakers, and whomever else might have a professional interest in the topic. While that audience is always looking for practical, go-right-out-and-try-it solutions, in this case they may have to settle for a better understanding of the issues. The accountability literature is still short on recipes. At best, a diligent searcher can find clues, but those clues will be useful only with reflection, sensitivity, and no small amount of courage. My hope is that conceptual clarity will at least provide a starting point for the leaders who have to guide their schools through the accountability maze.
I do, however, urge readers to exercise caution in the conclusions they draw. First, although I have rather loosely used the term research literature to describe the sources for this work, most of what is out there is not the kind of rigorous experimentation we associate with that term. Certainly, there is nothing in the research that shows that accountability works-or doesn't work. It is simply too early for that kind of conclusion. Instead, most writings on accountability range from thoughtful analysis to ardent advocacy. The best are very, very good, but still subject to further debate.
Second, whatever their source, the ideas presented in this book have gone through the same filter: me. While I try to maintain reasonable objectivity and openness, my efforts to synthesize such a large body of work are bound to have biases and blind spots. For that reason, when readers encounter an idea they want to pursue, I encourage them to use it just as a starting point, not as the definitive word.
The nature of this kind of research has changed since I did my first ERIC/CEM monograph several years ago. The range and richness of Internet-based resources grows steadily, and like many other researchers, I have been gratified by the quality and the convenience of those materials. However, we have not yet reached the point where libraries are dispensable, and I continue to be blessed with an abundance of good ones: the Washington State Library, the Olympia Timberland Library, and the libraries of The Evergreen State College and Pacific Lutheran University.
As always, I'm grateful to the Clearinghouse for offering me the professional challenge of undertaking this work, and especially to Stuart, who was supremely supportive throughout a lengthy process that began in one millennium and ended in another. Stu's ability to see past the ever-slipping deadlines to the finished product played no small part in keeping me on track.
Larry Lashway
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