Do You See What I See? The Impact of School Accountability on Parent, Teacher, and Student Perceptions of the School Environment (original) (raw)

Accountability and School Performance: Implications from Restructuring Schools

Harvard Educational Review, 1997

Many politicians and policymakers today link school accountability and school performance. Drawing on evidence from the corporate world, they assume that strong external accountability will impel schools to improve student achievement. In this article, however, Fred Newmann, M. Bruce King, and Mark Rigdon argue that three issues keep this popular theory from working in practice: a) implementation controversies around standards, incentives, and constituencies; b) insufficient efforts to organize the human, technical, and social resources of a school into an effective collective enterprise — what the authors term "organizational capacity" — and c) failure to recognize the importance of internal school accountability. In a study of twenty-four restructuring schools, the authors found that strong accountability was rare; that organizational capacity was not related to accountability; that schools with strong external accountability tended to have low organizational capacity; a...

Accountability Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Superintendent, Principal, and Teacher Perceptions

2016

A key assumption of NCLB appears to be that assessment data in and of itself can foster or promote change. Specifically, the supposition is that by requiring assessment data to be reported yearly, schools will be motivated- and will have the ability-to address those areas where student achievement is lagging. This assumption rests on the notion that educator competence in understanding and utilizing such data will result in academic success. Testing this assumption with empirical evidence is an important component of researching the efficacy of current accountability policies and practices in general. Over the past three years we have been involved in a series of empirical examinations of accountability. Each of these studies has been aimed at gathering varied perspectives on and about accountability, ranging from superintendents to principals to teachers. Our research examines education accountability at three interconnected layers: district administrators, principals, and teach-er...

Accountability Ratings of Elementary Schools: Student Demographics Matter

Current Issues in Education, 2011

The researchers examined the most recent year of data (i.e., 2008-2009) from the Texas Academic Excellence Indicator System regarding accountability ratings and student characteristics (i.e., ethnicity, programmatic enrollment, mobility) in elementary schools (n = 4,110). Accountability ratings (i.e., Exemplary, Recognized, Academically Acceptable, and Academically Unacceptable) are assigned primarily based upon school performance on state-mandated tests by student subgroups. Exemplary elementary school campuses had statistically significantly lower percentages of Black students, Hispanic students, at-risk students, economically disadvantaged students, students with Limited English Proficient, and mobility percent (i.e., being at the school less than 83% of the school year) whereas Academically Unacceptable had the highest percentages in all these areas. As such, accountability ratings in Texas elementary schools were clearly related to student characteristics and not just test scor...