From Governance to Accountability: Building Relationships That Make Schools Work. Policy Report (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
This paper argues for creating the kind of accountability that will help New York City's lowest performing schools by developing mechanisms to improve the school system's transparency and by increasing parent and community access, representation, and power in schools and districts. Part 1, "Governance Reform Alone Won't Improve Our Schools," focuses on the fact that previous governance reforms have failed to connect schools and communities (community control and decentralization, the 1996 reform, and centralizing power in 2002); schools improve through local action, not top-down mandates; and the limitations of parent associations in low performing schools. Part 2, "Creating New Relationships between Our Schools and Our Communities," discusses four indicators of community accountability (transparency, representation, power, and oversight). Part 3, "Implementing Community Accountability in New York City's Schools," presents steps for impl...
Creating Accountability in Big City Schools Creating Accountability in Big City Schools
2007
Accountability has always been a basic concept in public educa6ion, although ideas about how to accomplish it have changed over the years. Problems in urban schools have given rise to the hope that carefully created systems of accountability might spur school improvement and school restructuring. Devising a system of genuine accountability in a large urban school is a zomplex task, involving careful sorting of responsibilities and a thoughtful set of measures for assessing school effectiveness and student progress. The following types of mecnanisms operate simultaneously within a system of accountability: (1) political accountability; (2) legal accountability; (3) bureaucratic accountability; (4) professional accountability; and (5) market accountability. Bureaucratic accountability, professional accountability, and market accountability are all currently proposed as strategies for school improvement. Accountability systems need multiple statistical indicatcrs to stimulate and measu...
International Conference on Urban Education, 2014
Volatile race relations and performance accountability dominate education politics in Chicago. Trends towards high-stakes testing and privatization have stripped democratic participation from low-income communities of color, further exacerbating racial tensions. This presentation examines two cases of community efforts to build and sustain meaningful partnerships with neighborhood schools. These communities staked a claim in public schooling through diverse grassroots strategies to achieve different goals. The history of both efforts sheds light on how people of color can establish community accountability to address racial tensions and advocate for the unique educational needs of students of color.
Responsibility and School Governance
Educational Policy, 2010
The concept of responsibility is highly relevant to the organization of public schooling. Through public schools, adult citizens allow for the formal nurture and training of children to become full citizens, able to participate in our shared social, economic, and political life. With growing awareness of the importance of effective schooling to individual and collective well-being,wide-scale attempts have recently been made to reform school governance in the United States and internationally. The authors show how use of a responsibility framework can generate important insights into such reform efforts and their effects. Scholars and practitioners have done well incorporating accountability into the language of policy and practice. Little has been said about responsibility. The authors address this omission and apply their framework to interpret two distinctive reform strategies: (a) efforts to strengthen mayoral control over urban schools and (b) the creation of charter schools.
Community-Based School Finance and Accountability: A New Era for Local Control in Education Policy?
Urban Education, 2014
Top-down accountability policies have arguably had very limited impact over the past 20 years. Education stakeholders are now contemplating new forms of bottom-up accountability. In 2013, policymakers in California enacted a community-based approach that creates the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) process for school finance to increase flexibility. The reform also seeks to involve stakeholders at the local level by creating a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP). We conducted a statutory analysis of the state’s new funding formula in comparison to its predecessor. We also analyze the state’s new system of district implementation, support, and intervention. We then discuss the implications of California’s reforms for future K-12 funding and accountability policy.