Shades of Meaning

Webster’s Dictionary describes accountability as “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions.” As accountability systems become the basis for substantial sanctions and rewards to schools, teachers, and students, the word holds a range of meaning and impact for different stakeholders. We asked a number of stakeholders in the Northwest states to react to our questions and comments. Below are excerpts from their responses.

Carol Comeau

Superintendent, Anchorage School District
Anchorage, Alaska

Accountability in the big picture is responsibility for our actions and for what we are entrusted to do. In public education it’s determined by the fact that we are funded by the taxpayers, state government, and somewhat by the federal government. We have to account for the use of those funds. And we also have to be accountable for our core mission, which is to educate all students for success in life. We take it very seriously. Every child—no matter what the individual or family circumstances—deserves the very best quality education that we can provide for them. And we have to keep doing that regardless of our resources. But it is more and more difficult when we keep getting under-funded mandates, without adequate resources or, in some cases, personnel to do the job.

NCLB is only the latest example. I could go back to IDEA in 1975. I was teaching at that time and it changed everything with regard to special education. In both cases [NCLB and IDEA], the intention is totally understandable and logical, but neither one of these bills was adequately funded.

Our school board and I feel very strongly that all of our students deserve to be challenged and to be pushed to reach their potential, but to do that we cannot redirect all of our resources to only low achievers. We have directed the majority of any new funds toward the goal of meeting the needs of those children, and meeting the requirements of NCLB, certainly, but we’ve got a large and growing number of highly successful students—and a large number in the middle—that also need to be challenged and provided with a top-quality education. To redirect all of our resources to meet the requirements of this federal mandate is not appropriate.

We need to make sure this law really is an accurate picture of what a school or district is doing. To do that, progress and growth need to be at least part of the equation. Teachers are really working hard, and their students are making really good progress, but they’re not getting credit for it. And they should be, because that’s what teaching and learning are about.

Teresa Molitor

Lobbyist
Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI)
Boise, Idaho

When we started getting more involved in the K-12 discussion in Idaho, we got the feeling that the majority of those in the education industry didn’t necessarily want to consider us a stakeholder. We have attempted to spend time at the outset asserting the fact that the business community is indeed a stakeholder, and then explaining why.

From our perspective, accountability has two parts. The first part is focused on greater student achievement, which relates to that issue of providing a diploma that actually means something. The second part is the fiscal part: How efficient and effective is the K-12 system with its resources? Because business contributes so much of the property-tax base to the state budget, that question factors into our analyses on all kinds of education issues.

Taken one step further, many within the business community have asked whether we are accountable to the K-12 system beyond mere financial support. Should we do more in terms of charitable giving or mentoring students or offering internships? What should our full contribution be to the K-12 system?

And then the other part of that question becomes obvious: What is the education system’s level of accountability to the business community? In my experience, that has been a very difficult question for them to answer. I think there’s fear about what they have failed to do in terms of providing basic skills to students in the K-12 system. Those kids need to emerge ready for the workforce or higher education. That’s a fundamental thing we would put in the accountability column for them.

Kathy Kelker

Chairperson, Billings School Board
Assistant Professor, Special Education, Montana State University-Billings
Billings, Montana

In Montana, school trustees have a great deal of local control—constitutionally and according to statute—and that makes us very accountable for local results. I have been a trustee for almost 15 years now, and we have always been accountable for student achievement. It’s not new with NCLB. To me, as a trustee, what that has meant is that we provide a learning environment where students are given the basic skills that they need to learn, and then they have opportunities to use those basic skills to gather knowledge on their own.

Our hope, as trustees, is that we can say to the community: Our students are making progress in their classes from year to year; their intellectual and social needs in the school environment are being met.

Prior to NCLB, our board always did an annual report to the community in which we provided information about how our students were doing. We used a variety of measures—not just test results—and those annual reports were well received. NCLB has changed that accountability picture because instead of using our own methodologies for determining whether our students are successful, we are now forced into a narrow arena, where test scores are the sole measure. We’re obligated to report those, and there is a general impression that they are the only thing you need in order to show accountability. Personally, I think there is a lot more to accountability than the results of a particular test.

AYP adds another layer of pressure, because we are not, as a state, well funded in terms of education. Trying to raise the achievement of students who are not proficient requires resources that cost money we don’t have. It’s a good thing to provide those services, but we just don’t have the money to do it.

With special education students, for example, I don’t think just saying “all special ed students must be proficient” is going to do it. You have to have a much more subtle approach. I never want to doom a kid to low expectations, but you also can’t put a student in a situation where they can never be successful. There is a balance. What I would prefer to do is to set short-term goals for students and have them accomplish those goals and then just keep moving, and that can happen in a very well-run program where the students are treated, at least to some degree, on an individualized basis. I think what we have with NCLB is an effort to treat all special ed students, or almost all of them, in the exact same way, in the guise of having high expectations. And I am absolutely convinced that will not work.

There needs to be accountability at the federal level, in terms of keeping the promise they made to adequately fund the legislation. They have not kept that promise. One of the best examples is the special ed program. The original promise was that 40 percent of the funding would come from the federal level. There have been increases in funding in the past two years—Congress has been making an effort to catch up on their original promise—but we’re not even close to having the federal government at 40 percent of the cost. In Montana and in our district about 25 percent of the cost of special education is paid for by local taxpayers, in addition to their taxes that go for education in general. So there has been a kind of subsidizing of the special education program, which is mandated by an additional cost at the local level. And I don’t think that was the original intention of the people who wrote the special education law in 1975. Now, we are seeing the same thing happening with NCLB, only with a broader population of students.

Steve Wyborney

Oregon Teacher of the Year
Nyssa Elementary School
Nyssa, Oregon

The cry for constant school improvement is very important, and must be answered with the reality that, while there will never be a perfect school, the striving and straining toward becoming the best of what we have been, and the best of what we can be, is very important.

Nobody in our society is outside of the influence of our schools; everyone must claim responsibility. While we often describe how today’s schools will impact the future, a much more immediate reality is that the quality of the education that we provide to our students instantly defines us as a society.

Accountability must recognize the dynamic nature of education, and allow for risk and growth. Legislators and policymakers should be accountable to give schools room to grow and explore, to expand and seek out any new ideas that their students need.

Sometimes in the classroom we can feel a little bit squeezed between what is expected and what is available. Teachers come to my classroom and see what I am doing with PowerPoint and say: ‘This is great. I know this would impact my students. I could take this back right now, and this would be a powerful approach to use with my students. But then they say, ‘I can’t do it, though. There is no money, or support, or training.’

I’m troubled that teachers who feel the pulse of specific student needs can become aware of powerful practices that would help to meet those needs, but are then unable to make them into a reality. I think accountability in education should allow room for educators to stretch for new possibilities that will have a positive impact on their students learning and their lives.

Carol Schrader

Parent and Strategic Planning Committee Member
Hollyrood Elementary School
Portland, Oregon

Hollyrood’s mission states that a purpose of the school is “to know and value ourselves, to know and value others, and to make a positive difference in the world.” What this means to me is that a ‘good education’ helps you to recognize who you are in the context of the world so that you can be accountable to yourself and to the world. To love yourself, that is, to know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses, the good and the bad about you, and to accept yourself, is a strong foundation for learning. When you know and value yourself, you can take responsibility for your own learning: I know who I am, I know how I learn, I know what I need to ask for help with, and I know what I have to offer other people. This transitions well to knowing and valuing other people.

Through reading, scientific inquiry, and other exploration of the world, students can learn something about the diversity of experience in Portland, Warm Springs, and Nairobi, for example, and gain an increasingly complex and appreciative understanding of who other people (and places and things) are. As students learn about other people, they may be surprised by, enjoy, and be troubled by the differences, and they can avoid a warped sense of who they are—see that they are not the center of the universe, but rather one of billions of people, celebrating and struggling with who they are in the context of their world, just like the student does. And making a difference in the world is rooted in this knowledge of themselves and others; knowledge of a spectrum of wealth and poverty, of religious belief, of peaceful and violent struggle, of women and men of different racial and cultural identities, of sexuality, of music, architecture, and poetry, of science, etc. And being accountable to ourselves and to each other leads to working together to make a positive difference in the world.

Kathryn Anderson

Assistant Principal
Hollyrood Elementary School
Portland, Oregon

The tsunami comes at us in a variety of forms and a variety of times. At one moment, it might be a ‘budget tsunami,’ but it also may be a school closure or a school consolidation tsunami. But no matter what those ‘tsunamis’ are, we still have an important mission to maintain here at school. While we know that these challenges are looming for us, we still have children to educate every day and families to care for every day, and teachers’ professional growth to nurture every day. And if we don’t have a strategic plan for that, then it is a lot easier for that tsunami to sort of wipe us out. But if we have a solid foundation here of nurturing and support and academic excellence, it makes it much harder to be knocked down.

Bill Fromhold

Washington State Representative
Vancouver, Washington

I think the responsibility and the accountability for the legislature is to deal with the broad spectrum of public education. We can no longer allow structural funding issues to get in the way of the expectations that we have for the education system. So the public needs to be holding us accountable as well. I am the vice-chair of the Appropriations Committee in the House of Representatives and I also serve on the Higher Education Committee. I spent the last two years chairing a subcommittee of Appropriations dealing with the structure of the finance system of K-12. It is not, in all cases, aligned with a goals-based education system.

One perfect example comes to mind. Probably 75-80 percent of the money spent in the basic education allocation method is compensation and related benefits. The largest share of that goes to pay for classroom teachers. The compensation methodology that we use to pay teachers takes into account longevity and education level. But, in 2000, we established new professional certification standards for those teachers that are no longer related to the degree attainment of an individual. So the salary allocation and the certification standards for teachers, since 2000, are going in opposite directions. One of the things that we have recommended be considered in this [legislative session] budget process is a stipend on the current salary schedule to recognize compensation for ‘pro cert’ (Professional Certification Standards). That’s one very clear example in the biggest area of expenditure in the basic education formula where we are completely misaligned. Our accountability [in this example] may be to a teacher, but it’s to a teacher as a citizen.