How to fix educational accountability

It is worth noting that in both the medical and legal fields states play a role in which they regulate, via compliance with a set of requirements, who can enter the profession and who cannot, but they do not attempt to regulate the quality of practice. In some instances, they may address complaints against individuals and in some cases against institutions, but the effectiveness of professional day-to-day practice is outside their purview.

It is also worth noting that in almost every case the agencies assigned to oversee the actions that determine who can and cannot practice are led by seasoned practitioners.

Entry into the profession of education is similarly governed from within state education agencies that grant teacher and administrator certificates to those who have complied with the requirements. But that is where the similarity ends.

Given the importance of education in a child's life, both the federal government and state agencies have felt it necessary to undertake processes that regulate the quality of educational practice, extending this idea of compliance into the day-to-day work. The impetus for doing so is easy to see: public education remains one of our most important public institutions as its success or failure well likely be commensurate with the success or failure of the nation. And at an individual level, we are talking about the lives of those parents love most. The stakes could not be higher.

However, attempting to regulate the quality of practice via compliance needs to be seen as extraordinarily unusual and problematic, especially given that such a thing does not exist in other professions. And it doesn't exist for a very simple reason: compliance is the worst possible tool through which to promote and encourage quality practices. In fact, any attempt to use compliance to attempt such a thing will backfire badly and do more harm than good.

A simple example should suffice to make the point. Imagine that we told lawyers they had to win half their cases in order to keep their law licenses, or if we told doctors that 70% of their patients had to leave their care healthier than they were when they first sought care. That's exactly what we do with schools and educators under the current system: schools that comply with the requirement that a certain percentage of students pass a test or see their scores rise over time are declared compliant, while those that do not are declared non-compliant, as if that will promote quality practice.

Imagining what would happen in either medicine or the law if this compliance mentality regarding practice prevailed makes it easy to see what has happened in education.

First, the profession would lose its capacity to identify best practice and therefore improve itself over time. The reason for that is that being an effective professional would be defined as crossing a threshold. One set of lawyers or doctors who are true to their oaths but take on the most challenging and critical of problems would find themselves missing the threshold and the field would lose its capacity to identify what is in fact best practice as best practice given their perceived failures. Another set may choose to only take cases or patients that allow for the threshold to be easily met, in which case their efforts would be seen as successful and worthy of emulation. Best practice in such an environment is whatever saves your job, not what is best for the profession or the patients, and would quickly become cloudy at best and improvement difficult if not impossible.

Second, the stakeholders for both the medical and the legal professions are the clients and patients who seek them out. What makes those professions professional is their commitment and capacity to perceive those clients as the reason for the profession's existence, and to put the needs of the stakeholders ahead of their own. They are there to serve the client or the patient, and not the other way around.

Only now in our example it gets turned around: the patients are no longer the stakeholders of a profession but potential liabilities to the professionals and the key to staying employed. If a difficult case walks in the door it can be easily handicapped as being detrimental to the future employment of a lawyer. If a chronically ill patient walks in the door they can be easily handicapped as being detrimental to the future of a doctor. Stakeholders are now seen through the lens of contributing to a professional’s ability to keep their job or lose it. In effect, they are transitioned from being the stakeholders of the profession to being potential liabilities for the professionals. Should that happen the professions of medicine and the law would be profoundly diminished.

Finally, if no problem actually existed in the first place, but a well-intentioned policy maker simply hoped to prevent bad things from happening to people and ensure a quality of care for everyone, they will have invented the very problem they professed to want to avoid. If a real problem did exist, it will now be almost impossible to solve it within this environment in which the practical effect will be to reinvent the problem day in and day out.

Should that happen, both the medical and the legal professions would become difficult places in which to work, they would be subject to intense scrutiny and bureaucratization, government funding would be difficult to justify and even more difficult to secure, public perceptions would wane and trend towards the negative, and those of us who rely on the professions would be poorly served.

Solving that problem, should we be so foolish as to commit it, would be very tricky. It would require a recognition that effectiveness and compliance are not the same thing. In fact, in a Venn diagram compliance would need to be seen as a tiny dot and effectiveness as a massive circle with the two never meeting. Most people will be able to see that. But arguing that an accountability that purports to be about quality practices is unnecessary once it has been turned on will be a non-starter. The broad perception of failure (or the perception that failure avoidance should determine the effectiveness of the profession) was already accepted as the truth at the onset, so backing away from the idea of accountability would be perceived as a willingness to tolerate that failure. Anyone arguing for something different will appear as an apologist, especially if they find themselves in the non-compliant category. They can be accused as having low expectations, of not trying hard enough, etc.

In other words, once the compliance cat is out of the bag, putting it back in will be almost impossible.

Of course, what I just describe here is exactly where we find ourselves in public education. Just as in other professions, we have compliance checks in the form of certifications and licensure for teachers and educators based on compliance models designed to keep unqualified candidates out of the profession. But then someone felt compelled to extend that compliance thinking into educational practice. The result is that educators find it extraordinarily difficult to defend best practice or even to identify it to others, to innovate, or to shape schools for the future. Students enter a building and it is immediately understood whether they are likely to contribute positively or negatively to a school’s accountability rating. Even when it goes unsaid, which to the credit of educators it mostly does, the fact that such thinking is made possible by the accountability system needs to be seen as a gross error.

All of which leads to education being perceived by the world exactly as medicine or the legal professions would be under such a silly accountability environment: as not good at best, and as failing at worst. As a result, many educators are constantly thinking about leaving the profession. We have massive teacher shortages looming and only difficult times ahead to remedy that, given that little is being done to elevate the profession or support the professionals. Public education as a phrase is seen in the media and other places as a pejorative, as are public school teachers. Judging schools harshly and shaming them feels justified under the broad perception that teachers just aren’t trying hard enough.

Within such a toxic environment asking for similar treatment to other professions in allowing the profession to determine and gauge effectiveness independent of the state or federal government is a dead end. Those in public education are broadly perceived as the cause of the problem—no matter that the manner in which educational accountability was done would have driven any profession to its knees—and thus as not capable or worthy of acting as professionals. Not having a formal, government mandated educational accountability relative to effectiveness is no longer an option. That ship sailed the moment public education was subjected to an objectively bad system.

Which leads us to an unenviable position: how do we create a government mandated educational accountability based on ensuring that every school is as effective as possible? What makes answering that question so unenviable is that no other profession has had to answer it, and yet we must.

We have in professional compliance when it comes to certifications and admittance the germs of a model for how to proceed. Granted, that represents a compliance function and not an effectiveness function, but the model does have its positive effects. Not being a professional in medicine or the law and thus not having the technical ability to judge quality, I can at least trust that a team of upstanding professionals will keep my best interests at heart and not allow those who are not worthy of entering the profession in. The boards and vehicles for doing that are supported in a variety of government agencies and the result is a partnership between the professions and government that serves a reasonable purpose.

That's the model: have committed professionals create the solutions and then figure out how best to instill those intact solutions into a policy environment. The difference, of course, is that we aren’t talking about models based on compliance, but models designed to foment excellence. In schools. That serve an extraordinarily diverse population of students in as wide a variety of environments you can imagine. After having spent years being harmed by the current system.

Implementing that model will have a number of obvious challenges. To name just a few:

1. First, it means we'll have to live in the old harmful model while building and implementing the new. This is less than ideal but necessary in order for the new models to have any credibility.
2. Second, there does not now exist in government any accountability models that attempt to hold professions accountable for effective practice. As a result, we will need to build something that does not now exist and prove its efficacy.
3. And third, we will need to determine how best to place such a model that has never existed into a policy environment such that the model does not corrupt in the process. 

Through our research and work at bravEd, we have concluded that this is more doable than ever in spite of how impossible it may sound. And that now is the time. Here's why:

1. In our search for how accountability works in effective organizations we discovered what we now call benefits-based accountability operating as an almost universal framework. This accountability enables organizations to account for where they are effective and where they are not, and it exists to some degree in every organization. In other words, the choice in an organization is not whether this accountability exists, but whether to do it well or poorly. Even if no policy change occurs, doing this accountability well will have a profound impact on schools and their ability to effectively serve students.
2. Benefits-based accountabilities have as their audience the stakeholders of an organization. What all stakeholders of any complex profession or organization have in common is that they need information about what the organization does in language that makes sense to them. Public education is notorious for shoveling piles of technical data and information at stakeholders with the odd idea that somehow those stakeholders can interpret it properly. No other profession does this. Learning to speak accountably using stakeholder language is the mechanism effective organizations use to build trust and to create partnerships between the organization and those it serves. Again, even if no policy change occurs, learning this accountability lesson will have a significant impact on the effectiveness of our schools and those in them.
3. Finally, for the first time in twenty years policy makers are beginning to realize that the issue with accountability isn't going to be solved with a better test or a better set of metrics. Their rhetoric in this regard continues to escalate, signaling an opportunity, but an opportunity in need of a solution. Sometime in the next few years we are likely to be presented with an opportunity to engage deeply on what that solution should be. We believe it will be best to follow in the footsteps of our professional peers and have a ready solution so that the conversation is how to implement it without corrupting it, rather than the more common approach of committees attempting to create from whole cloth.

To summarize: the crossroads we find ourselves at is one that has policy makers asking the right questions, finally having the vocabulary and sense to describe where we went wrong with the old system, and a sense of what a new system should look like. If we start building now, we'll have a positive effect even without a policy change, and if enough schools follow suit a policy change will be inevitable. We need to take advantage of the opportunity while we can.