Getting Accountability Right and Retaking Public Education

by: John Tanner

It is an understatement here in early 2025 to suggest that public education is under assault. At both the federal and state levels there seems to be this perverse desire to do away with one of our most democratizing of institutions. In the past when I criticized such efforts I was arguing against a hypothetical future, but no more. The future is here and those of us who care about public education had better figure out what to do about it.

I have appreciated any number of writers giving voice to the positives that might emerge, particularly those who write in my own field of accountability studies. Their optimism is much needed. But I am also concerned in that literally every article or opinion I have read is encouraged by the chance to finally measure what matters. It is that sentiment toward measurement that concerns me. The idea seems to be that we picked the wrong things to measure, or not enough things, and that should we be measuring different things we might finally be able to account for what matters and set the whole thing right.

My wish is for something of a parallel to a Grinch moment, this one in particular:

“Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store."

"Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!"

I’d like to change some words:

“Maybe accountability,” they thought, “doesn’t need tests galore.”

“Maybe accounting for what matters will require something more.”

That is obviously terrible poetry, but it gets to my point that until we stop thinking that accountability and testing/measurement are commensurate with one another we are never getting out of the mess that we've been in for at least the past 30 years.

That is anything but an anti-testing or measurement statement. Testing is a research function that belongs inside of schools, handled by highly technical researchers who understand how to work with the data that emerges without it corrupting into meaningless gibberish. New and better ways to assess are helpful and welcome. But even if we had the capacity through AI or some as yet unforeseen technology to measure literacy or numeracy or anything that matters in a student's life perfectly it would remain an inadequate tool to present on its own as an effectiveness signal.

More than any topic I have written about in the last 10 years is the complete inadequacy of compliance-based accountabilities to signal effectiveness, and every time any data point, test score, graduation rate, etc, appears in an accountability environment it has a line drawn in it at some point with the disingenuous labels on either side of pass/fail, adequate/inadequate, or whatever.

A more unhelpful gesture may have been invented but I haven't found it yet. Take graduation rate as the simplest of the examples but what happens here happens every time that line is drawn. If you draw a line at some rate and declare all schools above it effective at graduating students and all schools below it as failures you have stated anything but the truth. Many schools above that line will achieve their graduation rates simply by opening the doors. Many schools below that line will be effective at serving large numbers of at-risk students and their efforts represent best practice that should be shared broadly.

That line ensures participation trophies for a great many schools that did nothing and failing marks on a great many schools doing marvelous things. That results in real damage to the schools and the leads to the inability of the entire profession to improve by removing a chance to learn from actual best practice.

It doesn't matter what the metric is, those kinds of compliance lines are all equally ignorant of what is happening on either side of them.

I share some slight amount of optimism at what opportunities may lie ahead for accountability, but we will blow it once again if all we do is think that different or better tests or metrics get us out of or beyond this mess. They won't. They can't.

I have argued and written repeatedly that the way schools have been told to account for what they do is at the heart of so many problems faced by schools because it fails to account for what matters to those that matter. More or different tests pushed into an old accountability environment is simply new wine and old bottles and accomplishes nothing while sucking up huge amounts of effort and energy.

What is needed are lessons on how accountability works in the professions and how best to apply those to school environments. In my work I frequently declare that a school leader requires neither policy nor permission to do this work and do it well, and a great many have taken me up on that despite the fact that the policies are unhelpful and in the way.

The opportunity as I see it isn't that the removal of policy opens up a possibility. Every possibility to do accountability well existed yesterday, exists today, and it will exist tomorrow regardless of what happens. The opportunity as I see it is that all of this is a reminder of the effects of a terrible accountability approach. It is my hope and dream that we can once and for all as a profession realize the potential that a great accountability environment affords us and put that in place. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can start to reclaim public education’s rightful place as one of the most trusted, if not the most trusted of our public institutions.

Wouldn’t that be something?