The relationship between trust and accounting for what matters

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Here’s a thought: no one can trust an organization that only accounts for a fraction of what it does. You wouldn’t entrust the design of a new school to a firm that was only willing to account for the fact that they are good at bringing projects under budget. What about student centered design? Energy efficiency? Aesthetics? Environmental impact? Etc. To trust an organization requires that the organization account for all the things that matter.

Parents and communities regularly tell us that there are about thirty things that matter to them that have the capacity to build stakeholder trust. Keep them safe. Make sure students have friends and feel connected to others. Teach them empathy. Support creativity. Etc. Somewhere around 18 or 19 they get to basic academics, not because basic academics are unimportant, but because there are a great many things that are just as important.

And yet what is the accountability landscape in most schools? An accountability that accounts at best for only a fraction of what matters.

If public schools need to be trusted by society—and they do—then this is not the formula by which to make that happen. This is a formula that is, in fact, guaranteed to see that it doesn’t. It wouldn’t matter if the accounting offered the most perfect and accurate accounting for that fraction of what happens in a school—it would still violate the formula by which trust is created, which is a dangerous place to be.

This is why we are so passionate about making sure every school leader has the capacity to account for what matters. Schools need to be the most trusted of our public instutions, but that can’t happen until accounting for what matters becomes the norm.

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