The push toward accountability seen throughout the P-12 educational settings is now evidenced within teacher preparation programs, ensuring that universities and colleges are adequately preparing future teachers for the task. Such pressures are even more rampant within the field of special education. Special education teachers are tasked with the responsibility of not only ensuring students, individual needs are being met with meaningful curriculum and instruction, but that they are making adequate progress toward their goals and objectives. Student learning rests at the core of accountability within educational systems (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). While internal accountability focuses on individuals’ and groups’ efforts at continuous improvement and success for all students, external accountability focuses on leaders’ responsibility to be transparent with the public about the system’s ability to meet expectations and requirements. Both internal and external accountability are integral to the Coherence Framework, strengthening the vision and collaboration of the organization, thus establishing deepening of learning goals. For this Discussion, you will analyze both internal and external accountability and their role in whole systems change. As the special education leader, how will you secure accountability?
To Prepare:
- Review Chapter 5, “Securing Accountability,” in the Fullan and Quinn text, focusing on the aspects of internal and external accountability. How would you distinguish between internal and external accountability?
- Reflect on the Norman and Sherwood (2015) article, considering how internal and external accountability measures have shaped teacher preparation programs.
- Reflect on the plans you have created for the case scenario viewed in Modules 2 and 3 so far and reflect on how you would secure accountability if you were a leader of the staff in this scenario.
An explanation of how you would build internal accountability based on the case scenario. What steps would you recommend to ensure effective implementation of external accountability? Include an analysis of each concept and evidence from the case scenario, as well as other learning resources to support your rationale.
Learning Resources
Required Readings
Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
- Chapter 4, “Deepening Learning” (pp. 77–108)
- Chapter 5, “Securing Accountability” (pp. 109–126)
Fullan, M. (2015a). Leadership from the middle: A system strategy. Education Canada. 55(4), 22–26. Retrieved from http://www.cea-ace.ca/education-canada/article/leadership-middle
Leadership from the Middle: A System Strategy by Fullan, M., in Education Canada, Winter 2015. Copyright 2015 by Canadian Education Association. Reprinted by permission of Canadian Education Association via the Copyright Clearance Center.
Norman, P. J. & Sherwood, S. A. S. (2015). Using internal and external evaluation to shape teacher preparation curriculum: A model for continuous program improvement. New Educator, 11(1), 4-23. Doi: 10.1080/1547688X.2015.1001263
Leko, M.M., Brownell, M.T., Sindelar, P.T., & Kiely, M.T. (2015). Envisioning the future of special education personnel preparation in a standards-based era. Exceptional Children, 82(1), 25-43. doi: 10.1177/0014402915598782
Liu, P. (2015). Motivating teachers’ commitment to change through transformational school leadership in Chinese urban upper secondary schools. Journal of Educational Administration, 53(6), 735–754. doi: 10.1108/JEA-02-2014-002
Rock, M.L., et al (2016). 21st century change drivers: Considerations for constructive transformative models of special education teacher development. The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, 39(2), 98-120. doi: 10.1177/0888406416640634
Required Media
Grand City Community
Laureate Education (Producer) (2016c). Tracking data [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Go to the Grand City Community and click into Grand City School District Administration Offices. Review the following scenario: Tracking Data.
Required Media
Grand City Community
- Laureate Education (Producer) (2016b). Mandate meeting [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Go to the Grand City Community and click into Grand City High School. Review the following scenario: Mandate Meeting.
Chapter 5
Securing Accountability
Earlier we called accountability the big bugbear, and it is. And when you think of it, sorting out accountability is as basic as humankind (think of raising your children, relationships between spouses, your own personal sense of responsibility). People in charge have tried to solve the accountability problem directly (put out the garbage or you will be grounded Saturday night). As we saw from Daniel Pink, the “carrots and sticks” approach does not work for anything that requires initiative, judgment, and ongoing commitment.
We have been working for years on how to position accountability to be an effective component of school and system change. Recently, we brought these ideas together in an article on collective accountability (Fullan, Rincón-Gallardo, & Hargreaves, 2015) and for individual accountability (Fullan, 2015). We draw heavily on these accounts in this chapter.
The argument is this: If you want effective accountability, you need to develop conditions that maximize internal accountability—conditions that increase the likelihood that people will be accountable to themselves and to the group. Second, you need to frame and reinforce internal account- ability with external accountability—standards, expectations, transparent data, and selective interventions. This chapter describes how this internal- external dynamic works and the evidence that this is the best approach for the fourth component of the Coherence Framework: securing accountability (see Figure 5.1).
Internal Accountability
Simply stated, accountability is taking responsibility for one’s actions. At the core of accountability in educational systems is student learning. As City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel (2009) argue, “the real accountability system is in the tasks that students are asked to do” (p. 23). Constantly improving and refining instructional practice so that students can engage in deep learning tasks is perhaps the single most important responsibility of the teaching profession and educational systems as a whole. In this sense, accountability as defined here is not limited to mere gains in test scores but on deeper and more meaningful learning for all students.
Internal accountability occurs when individuals and groups willingly take on personal, professional, and collective responsibility for continuous improvement and success for all students (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009).
External accountability is when system leaders reassure the public through transparency, monitoring, and selective intervention that their system is performing in line with societal expectations and requirements. The priority for policy makers, we argue, should be to lead with creating the conditions for internal accountability, because they are more effective in achieving greater overall accountability, including external accountability. Policy makers also have direct responsibilities to address external account- ability, but this latter function will be far more effective if they get the internal part right.
Existing research on school and system effectiveness and improvement (DuFour & Eaker, 1998; Marzano, 2003; Pil & Leana, 2006; Zavadsky, 2009) and our own work with educational systems in the United States and internationally (Fullan, 2010; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009) suggests that internal accountability must precede external accountability if lasting improvement in student achievement is the goal.
Richard Elmore (2004) conducted a series of intensive case studies of individual schools—some that failed to improve and some that improved their performance. Relative to the former, schools that failed to improve were not able to achieve instructional coherence, despite being in systems with strong external accountability. A minority of schools did develop internal coherence together and showed progress on student achievement. The main feature of successful schools was that they built a collaborative culture that combined individual responsibility, collective expectations, and corrective action—that is, internal accountability. Transparent data on instructional practices and student achievement were a feature of these cultures. As these cultures developed, they were also able to more effectively engage the external assessment system. Highlighting the fundamental role of internal accountability on school improvement, Elmore (2004) pointed out the following:
It seems unlikely to us that schools operating in the default mode—where all questions of accountability related to student learning are essentially questions of individual teacher respon- sibility—will be capable of responding to strong obtrusive accountability systems in ways that lead to systematic deliberate improvement of instruction and student learning. The idea that a school will improve, and therefore, the overall performance of its students, implies a capacity for collective deliberation and action that schools in our sample did not exhibit. Where virtually all decisions about accountability are made by individual teachers, based on their individual conceptions of what they and their students can do, it seems unlikely that these decisions will somehow aggregate into overall improvement for the school. (p. 197)
Internal accountability is based on the notion that individuals and the group in which they work can transparently hold themselves responsible for their performance. We already know that current external accountability schemes do not work because, at best, they tell us that the system is not performing but do not give a clue about how to fix the situation. As Elmore (2004) observes, if people do not know how to fix the problem and so cannot do so, then the following will occur:
Schools will implement the requirements of the external account- ability system in pro forma ways without ever internalizing the values of responsibility and efficacy that are the nominal objectives of those systems. (p. 134)
Elmore (2004) then concludes this:
“Logically precede,” yes, but more to the point of our framework, internal accountability must strategically precede engagement with external accountability. This is why focusing direction, cultivating collaborative cultures, and deepening learning precede accountability in our Coherence Framework.
There are two messages here: One is that policy makers and other leaders are well advised to establish conditions for developing cultures of internal accountability. The second is that there are things other people can do when the hierarchy is not inclined to move. The answer is to “help make it happen in your own situation”—that is, develop collaborative work with your peers and push upward for this work to be supported.
The history of the teaching profession is laced with assumptions of and conditions for isolated, individual responsibility. But atomistic responsibility, detached from any group, can never work. In a nutshell, the cultural shift needed is to shift to collaborative cultures that honor and align individual responsibility with collective expectations and actions.
Elmore discusses several schools that he and his team studied. Most of them exemplify the individualistic model. Teachers work away on their own and periodically grapple or clash with external accountability requirements. But Elmore also discusses two cases where the schools have developed more or less “collaborative” cultures. The first case is St. Aloysius Elementary School:
Without exception, teachers described an atmosphere of high expectations. Some stressed a high priority on “reaching every child” and “making sure that no one is left behind” while others referred to a serious and supportive environment where everyone is expected to put forth excellent work. (Elmore, 2004, p. 164)
It sounds ideal, but what happens when things don’t go as expected? At another school, Turtle Haven, Elmore (2004) asked teachers, “What happens when teachers do not meet the collective expectations?” He reports that “most teachers believed that a person who did not meet . . . expectations, or conform to a culture created by those expectations would first receive a great deal of support from the principal and other colleagues” (p. 183).
If this approach failed to produce results, most Turtle Haven teachers said that the teacher in question would not be happy at the school and eventually would either “weed themselves out [or] eventually . . . if there was a sense in the community that a certain number of children were not able to get the kind of education that we say we’re committed to providing . . . we would have to think whether the somebody belongs here or not” (Elmore, 2004, p. 183).
This kind of culture is not foolproof, but we would say it stacks up well against the external accountability thinking that creates demands that go unheeded or can’t be acted on. In the collaborative cultures, the internal accountability system is based on visible expectations combined with consequences for failure to meet set expectations.
Such cultures, says Elmore (2004), are much better equipped to deal with external accountability requirements, adding that a school with a strong internal accountability culture might respond to external assessments in a number of ways, “including accepting and internalizing it; rejecting it and developing defenses against it, or incorporating just those elements of the system that the school or the individuals deem relevant” (p. 145).
What is coming through in this discussion is that collaborative cultures with an eye to continuous improvement establish internal processes that allow them to sort out differences and to make effective decisions. At the level of the microdynamics of school improvement, Elmore (2004) draws the same conclusion we do at the system level: investing in the conditions that develop internal accountability is more important than beefing up external accountability.
The Ontario Reform Strategy, which we discussed in previous chapters, offers an illustrative example of the importance of internal account- ability preceding external accountability systemwide. The Canadian province of Ontario, with 4,900 schools in 72 districts serving some two million students, started in 2004 to invest in building capacity and internal accountability at the school and district levels. The initial impulse for the reform came from leadership at the top of the education system—Dalton McGuinty, the premier of the province at the time—through the establishment of a small number of ambitious goals related to improvements in literacy, numeracy, and high school retention. However, the major investments focused on strengthening the collective capacity of teachers, school principals, and district leaders to create the conditions for improved instructional practice and student achievement (Glaze, Mattingley, & Andrews, 2013).
There was little overt external accountability in the early stages of the Ontario Reform Strategy. External accountability measures were gradually introduced in the form of assessment results in grades 3 and 6 in literacy and numeracy, and in high school, retention numbers, transparency of data, and a school turnaround support-focused policy called Ontario Focused Intervention Program (OFIP) for schools that were underperforming. This system has yielded positive and measurable results in literacy that has improved dramatically across the 4,000 elementary schools and in high school graduation rates that have climbed from 68 percent to 84 percent across the 900 high schools. The number of OFIP schools, originally at over 800, has been reduced to 69 schools even after the criteria to identify a school as in need of intervention had widened to include many more schools (Glaze et al., 2013; Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010).
An evaluation of the reform strategy in 10 of Ontario’s 72 school districts that concentrated particularly on the special education aspects of the reform pointed to significant narrowing of the achievement gap in writing scores for students with learning disabilities (Hargreaves & Braun, 2012).
Concerns were expressed among teachers who were surveyed about some of the deleterious consequences of standardized testing in grades 3 and 6— that the tests came at the end of the year at a point that was too late to serve a diagnostic function, that they were not sufficiently differentiated in order to match differentiated instructional strategies, and that principals in some schools placed undue emphasis on “bubble kids” near the baseline for proficiency rather than on students who struggled the most with literacy. Perhaps predictably, administrators who were surveyed at the school and system levels were more supportive of the standardized assessments.
The most intriguing finding though was that special education resource teachers, whose role was moving increasingly to providing in-class support, welcomed the presence of transparent objective data. They saw it as a way of drawing the attention of regular classroom teachers to the fact and the finding that students with learning disabilities could, with the right support, register valid and viable gains in measurable student achievement. Together, these findings point to the need to review the nature and form of high-stakes assessments—more differentiated, more just-in-time, and more directed at the needs of all students, perhaps—but also to the value of having transparent data that concentrate everyone’s attention on supporting all students’ success along with diagnostic data and collaborative professional responsibility for all students’ learning, development, and success.
A similar approach to whole system improvement can be found in U.S. districts that have been awarded the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education, granted to urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement while reducing achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, and income. In her in-depth study of five such districts, Zavadsky (2009) finds that, while diverse in context and strategies, these districts have addressed the challenge of improving student performance systemwide following remarkably similar approaches: investing in, growing, and circulating the professional capital of schools (what they term building capacity) to improve instructional practice by fostering teacher collaboration and collective accountability. These successful schools set high instructional targets, attracting and developing talent, aligning resources to key improvement priorities, constantly monitoring progress, and providing timely targeted supports when needed.
The solid and mounting evidence on the fundamental impact of internal accountability on the effectiveness and improvement of schools and school systems contrasts sharply with the scarce or null evidence that external accountability, by itself or as the prime driver, can bring about lasting and sustained improvements in student and school performance. There is, indeed, a growing realization that external accountability is not an effective driver of school and system effectiveness. At best, external accountability does not get its intended results. At worst, it produces undesirable and sometimes unconscionable consequences, such as the cheating scandal in Atlanta (Hill, 2015).
We frequently ask successful practitioners that we work with how they themselves handle the “accountability dilemma” (direct account- ability doesn’t work; indirect may be too soft). What follows are a few responses that we have personally received to this question: What is effective accountability? Not surprisingly, these views are entirely consistent with Elmore (2004):
Accountability is now primarily described as an accountability for student learning. It is less about some test result and more about accepting ownership of the moral imperative of having every student learn. Teachers talk about “monitoring” differently. As they engage in greater sharing of the work, they talk about being accountable as people in the school community know what they are doing and looking to see what is changing for students as a result. And as they continue to deprivatize teaching, they talk about their principal and peers coming into their classrooms and expecting to see the work [of agreed-upon practices] reflected in their teaching, their classroom walls, and student work. (Anonymous, personal communication, November 2014)
Teachers and administrators talk about accountability by deprivatizing their practice. If everyone knows what the other teacher or administrator is working on and how they are working on it with students, it becomes a lot easier to talk about accountability. When everyone has an understanding of accountability, creating clear goals and steps to reach those goals, it makes it easier for every- one to talk and work in accountable environments. (Elementary principal, personal communication, November 2014)
I spoke with my staff about accountability versus responsibility in brainstorming, about what is our purpose and who is responsible for what . . . being explicit and letting teachers collectively deter- mine what our responsibilities are. (Secondary school principal, personal communication, November 2014)
We are moving to define accountability as responsibility. My district has been engaged in some important work that speaks to intrinsic motivation, efficacy, perseverance, etc., and accountability is seen as doing what is best for students . . . working together to tackle any challenge and being motivated by our commitment as opposed to some external direction. (Superintendent, personal communication, November 2014)
When you blow down the doors and walls, you can’t help but be evermore accountable. (Superintendent, personal communication, November 2014)
I do believe that a lot of work remains to be done on building common understanding on the notion of accountability. Many people still believe that someone above them in the hierarchy is accountable. Very few take personal accountability for student learning and achievement. There are still those who blame parents and students’ background for achievement. (Consultant, personal communication, November 2014)
In one school, the talk about accountability was pervasive as the school became designated as underperforming. The morale of the school went down significantly, and the tension was omnipresent at every meeting. The team switched the conversation to motivation, innovation, and teamwork and the culture changed. The school is energized and the test scores went up in one year. The team is now committed to results and continuous improvement. (Consultant, personal communication, November 2014)
In short, internal accountability is far more effective than external accountability. The bottom line is that it produces forceful accountability in a way that no hierarchy can possibly match. We have shown this to be the case for teachers, and we can make the parallel argument for students. If we want students to be more accountable, we need to change instruction toward methods that increase individual students’ responsibility for assessing their own learning and for students to work in peer groups to assess and provide feedback to each other under the guidance of the teacher. We still need external accountability, and we can now position it more effectively.
External Accountability
External accountability concerns any entity that has authority over you. Its presence is still essential, but we need to reposition external accountability so that it becomes more influential in the performance of individuals, groups, and the system as a whole. We first take the perspective of external authorities and then flip back to local entities.
External Authorities
The first thing to note is that if the external body invests in building widespread internal accountability they will be furthering their own goals of greater organization or system accountability. The more that internal accountability thrives, the greater the responsiveness to external requirements and the less the externals have to do. When this happens, the center has less need to resort to carrots and sticks to incite the system to act responsibly.
Dislodging top-down accountability from its increasingly miscast role has turned out to be exceedingly difficult. People at the top do not like to give up control. They cling to it despite obvious evidence that it does not work. And attacks on the inadequacy of top-down account- ability have failed because they have only focused on the “from” side of freedom. Critics seem to be saying that accountability requirements do not work, so remove them. That is not the complete solution because it takes us back to nothing. The answer is found in our argument in this chapter—rely on developing the conditions for internal accountability and reinforce them with certain aspects of external accountability. In particular, central authorities should focus their efforts on two inter- related activities:
1. Investing in internal accountability
2. Projecting and protecting the system
By the first I mean investing in the conditions that cause internal accountability to get stronger. The beauty of this approach, as we have seen, is that people throughout the system start doing the work of accountability. Though indirect, this form of accountability is really more explicit, more present, and, of course, more effective. We have already suggested its components:
• A small number of ambitious goals, processes that foster shared goals (and even targets if
jointly shaped)
• Good data that are used primarily for developmental purposes
• Implementation strategies that are transparent, whereby people and organizations are
grouped to learn from each other (using the group to change the group)
• Examination of progress in order to problem solve for greater performance
The center needs to invest in these very conditions that result in greater focus, capacity, and commitment at the level of day-to-day practice. They invest, in other words, in establishing conditions for greater local responsibility. In this process, the center will still want goals, standards, assessment, proof of implementation, and evidence of progress. This means investment in resources and mechanisms of internal accountability that people can use to collaborate within their units and across them.
With strong internal accountability as the context, the external accountability role of the system includes the following:
1. Establishing and promoting professional standards and practices, including performance appraisal, undertaken by professionally respected peers and leaders in teams wherever possible and developing the expertise of teachers and teacher-leaders so that they can undertake these responsibilities. With the robust judgments of respected leaders and peers, then getting rid of teachers and administrators who should not be in the profession will become a trans- parent collective responsibility.
2. Ongoing monitoring of the performance of the system, including direct intervention with schools and districts in cases of persistent underperformance.
3. Insisting on reciprocal accountability that manages “up” as well as down so that systems are held accountable for providing the resources and supports that are essential in enabling schools and teachers to fulfill expectations (e.g., “failing” schools should not be closed when they have been insufficiently resourced, or individual teachers should be evaluated in the context of whether they have been forced into different grade assignments every year or have experienced constant leadership instability).
4. Adopting and applying indicators of organizational health as a context for individual teacher and leader performance, such as staff retention rates, leadership turnover rates, teacher absenteeism levels, numbers of crisis related incidents, and so on, in addition to outcome indica- tors of student performance and well-being. These would include measures of social capital in the teaching profession such as extent of collaboration and levels of collegial trust. Outcome measures for students should also, as previously stated, include multiple measures including well-being, students’ sense of control over their own destiny (locus of control), levels of engagement in learning, and so forth.
The Perspective of Locals
We have drawn on numerous relatively successful examples in this book. They all established strong degrees of internal accountability (people being self and group responsible) that served them well in the external account- ability arena. Such systems strengthened accountability by increasing focus, connecting dots and otherwise working on coherence, building capacity (so people could perform more efficaciously), being transparent about progress and practices, and engaging the external accountability system.
As districts increase their capacity, they become stronger in the face of ill-advised external accountability demands as the following two extended examples reveal from Laura Schwalm, former superintendent of Garden Grove.
Example One: garden grove Handles External Pressure
In the words of Laura Schwalm: Shortly after we completed our audit and instituted a districtwide mandate and system to place students in college prep (a–g) courses, Ed Trust and several other advocacy groups, with sup- port from the California Department of Education (CDE), began “calling out” the low college readiness statistics in large urban districts in California. Every large urban district, including Garden Grove, was called out (rightfully so) with one exception of a district in the north, which was held as a model solution due to the fact that they had made the a–g requirement mandatory for every student and claiming they had eliminated all other courses with absolutely no effect on their graduation rate. Based on this example, the advocacy groups started a very public campaign and got a majority of school boards, including LAUSD, to adopt the policies of this northern district with the pledge that they would achieve 100 percent a–g achievement with no increase in dropout rate within four to five years. When Garden Grove refused to comply (Long Beach did as well), we were more strongly targeted and pressured (the approach we had adopted was to not eliminate all support courses that were not college prep but rather to eliminate a few and to align the rest in a way to provide an “on ramp” to college prep courses while at the same time using individual student-by-student achievement data, rather than the former practice of “teacher recommendation” for placement in college prep courses) (one of the shameful things our audit revealed, which did not surprise me, was that if you were an Asian student with mean achievement on the California Standards Tests, you had about a 95 percent chance of being “recommended for placement in a-g courses”—conversely, if you were a Latino male with the exact same scores, you had less than 30 percent chance of being recommended for placement in these courses).
As the pressure continued to adopt a policy of mandating an exclusive a–g curriculum, I met with a few of the key advocates and explained that while we shared the same goal of increasing our unacceptably low a–g completion rate, we strongly felt the approach they were suggesting was ill advised. Putting students in a course for which they were absolutely not prepared, based on very objective data, and then expecting them to pass the course with a grade of C or better was unfair to both students and teachers. They kept focusing on the district up north, which led me to point out to them that the data from that district did not support what they were claiming. If their approach was truly working, then their achievement scores, as measured by the state, should be outperforming ours, and in fact, they fell far short of ours, for all subgroups. Additionally, a neigh- boring district that had adopted the same policy now claimed a 90 percent a–g completion rate, yet 65 percent of their high school students scored below the mean on the state standards test. It clearly pointed out that all was not as it looked on the surface, and while I had no desire to criticize another district’s approach, I was not about to follow it. That caused the advocates to pause and finally to leave us alone. Our rate, both in terms of a–g completion and student achievement data by subgroup, continued to climb. Within a few years, we surpassed all the others, and over time, the policy the CDE and advocates had pushed into districts quietly vanished. Unfortunately, in many places where it vanished, a robust and fair system did not replace it, and those districts continue to struggle with this problem (L. Schwalm, personal communication, 2014).
Example Two: Garden Grove Deals With the Bureaucracy
Again in Schwalm’s words: Another example occurred during one of the CDE’s three-year systemwide compliance reviews. While I accepted the state’s responsibility to oversee that we were not using specially designated funding for inappropriate uses, as well as to assure we were following laws around equity and access for all students, the process they had was unnecessarily burdensome, requiring us to dedicate significant staff to collecting, cataloging, and preparing documentation that filled dozens and dozens of boxes. When the state team came—usually about 10 to 12 people, each looking at different programs with one person loosely designated as team lead—the expectation was that you treat them like royalty and that they had enormous authority. My view was somewhat different. I respected that they had a job to do, but just because they did not like the way we displayed something did not mean we needed to do it differently or because they would have used another approach—our approach, if appropriately supported with data—was not out of bounds. At one of the first reviews early on in my superintendency, we drew a particularly weak but officious team with a very weak lead. They came up with some particularly lame findings (i.e., one team member commended us on how we used data to identify areas of focus for targeted groups of students, while another team member marked us as noncompliant in this area because we did not put it on a form that she had developed—and other equally ludicrous examples). At the end of the process, the superintendent was required to sign an agreement validating the team’s findings as well as a plan and timeline to bring things into “compliance.” I very professionally told them that I did not agree with their findings and thus could not sign either document—I was not going to pretend to fix something that I had no intention of doing because there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. What I did do was sign a document, which we drafted, acknowledging that the team had, in fact, been there and that we agreed to a couple of specific areas where we needed to and would make some changes, but I did not agree with the majority of the report and would not agree to take any action other than what was previously specified. This seemed pretty fair to me, but apparently it shocked them and the system, which was the beginning of my unpopularity with many in CDE. Probably this was made worse when the story got out (not by my telling), and other super- intendents realized that they could do the same thing (although I advised those who contacted me—and a number did—that their life would not be particularly easy for awhile and also that they should have the data and results to back their stand) (L. Schwalm, personal communication, 2014).
You can see why in another book (where I cited an even more egregious example of defiance) I referred to Laura as a “rebel with a cause” (Fullan, 2015). There are two lessons here with what I have called both the freedom-from problem and the freedom-to problem. You need to attend to both. The freedom-from problem is what Laura did—refusing to comply with ridiculous demands. But she was backed up by her freedom- to actions in which she built a culture of coherence, capacity, and internal accountability. If you do the latter, you are in good shape to contend with the external accountability system, including acting on external performance data that do show that you need to improve.
In California as a whole, they currently face the freedom-to problem. The wrong drivers are on the way out the door. Jerry Brown, the governor, has suspended all statewide student tests for at least two years on the grounds that it is better to have no tests than to have the wrong test. So far so good, but getting rid of bad tests is not enough for securing account- ability. New tests—Smarter Balanced Assessment Curriculum (SBAC)— are being piloted relative to CCSS. Districts would be well advised to use our Coherence Framework to build their focused accountability. They will then perform better and be in a better position to secure their own accountability as they relate to the ups and downs of external accountability. External accountability as wrong as it can get sometimes is a phenomenon that keeps you honest. Leaders need to be skilled at both internal and external accountability and their interrelationship.
Final Thoughts
In sum, local leaders have to play their part in establishing internal accountability and in relating to the external accountability system. The most direct way of understanding what is needed for internal accountability is to work diligently on the first three components of the Coherence Framework: focusing direction, cultivating collaborative cultures, and deepening learning. In many ways, this is tantamount to establishing the conditions for individuals and the group to be accountable to themselves. Part and parcel of internal accountability involves discussing it among staff: what are we trying to do, how well are we progressing, how we define accountability among ourselves, and so on.
In addition, it is essential to engage the external policy and accountability system. This does not mean you follow orders; we mentioned earlier about the need to “move unproductive compliance to the side of the plate,” and, certainly, Laura exemplifies this quality. But it does mean that you take the state vision seriously; you track your progress relative to state goals and to other schools and districts. A good, basic way to address the outside is to participate in it. This means being part of networks, presenting at regional and state conferences, and contributing to the betterment of the overall system through helping others. It means being plugged into what is happening on the outside.
Securing accountability is not about pleasing the system (although there is nothing wrong with that) but about acting in ways that are in your own interest. In other words, if you address the sequence of internal and external accountability as we have discussed it in this chapter, you will be furthering your own ends. Think of accountability as integral to the Coherence Framework. It is not something you do as an after- thought. If you address accountability explicitly as we have set out in this chapter, you will be strengthening focused vision (to be accountable is to be precise about what you are doing), building better collaboration (because it is for a measurable cause), and deepening learning (because the agenda these days has shifted to 21st century learning goals that have been hitherto neglected).
Throughout the chapters, we have talked about leadership. It is now time to step back and to address it in its own right. What do you need to know and do to lead for coherence? More importantly, how can you cultivate such leadership in others? Effective leaders must help the entire organization cultivate the Coherence Framework in its daily culture.
Review Infographic 5 to consolidate your knowledge about Securing Accountability.
