What is accountability really?
I ask that question a great deal in my work. Specifically, when I ask educators about how it is done formally, what I hear suggests it is both everything and nothing, the end and the means, hated but grudgingly tolerated, and a fete accompli. It often sounds to me like educators are describing an amorphous multi-tentacled entity that appears annually to render its negative judgments on schools, but then slinks back into some dark, inaccessible hiding place that allows it to avoid scrutiny or even identification. Being amorphous doesn't mean it doesn’t have weight because of course it does. Each state has a formula for compliance (at the behest of the Feds) into which it dumps standardized test data and perhaps graduation rates or attendance. The formula arranges schools, from the school deemed to be the greatest of them all down to the worst, and then parses that scale into labels or grades. The schools at the top usually get a plaque of some sorts confirming their greatness, and t...