This piece offers a good example of countering disinformation in thinking about education. Some highlights include:

“Accountability,” a term that has been with us, late and soon. Its six syllables trip by as the background white noise in the liturgy of higher education…You know what happens with liturgies: after so many repetitions, there is no recompense. We don’t really know what we are saying. In this case, the six-syllable perfect scan, “accountability,” simply floats by as what we assume to be a self-evident reality. Even definitions wind up in circles, e.g., “In education, accountability usually means holding colleges accountable for the learning outcomes produced.” One hopes Burck Smith, whose paper containing this sentence was delivered at an American Enterprise Institute conference last November, held a firm tongue-in-cheek with the core phrase.

The 2005 report of the National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education puts “accountability” in a pinball machine where “goals” become “objectives” become “priorities” become “goals” again. One wins points along the way, but has no idea of what they represent.

In fact, all levels of education are subjected to this confusion: standards are confused with goals such that the desired outcome is confused with the indicators of the outcome, leading to the dehumanizing act of teaching to the test. Instead of teaching being driven by goals — by philosophy and a broad sense of purpose — the indicators become the goals.  This process has now morphed into the mindless repeating of pet phrases of granting agencies and other “decision makers” to show “buy in”.  I suppose it is evidence of the irrationality of marketing “group think” in addition to the decline in rationale public discourse.

Adelman continues:

So what kind of creature is this species called “accountability”? Readers who recall Joseph Burke’s introductory chapter to his Achieving Accountability in Higher Education (Wiley, 2004) will agree that I am hardly the first nearsighted crazy person to ask the question. This essay will come at the word in a different way and from a different tradition than Burke’s political theory.

I am inviting readers to join in thinking about accountability together, with the guidance of some questions that are both metaphysical and practical. Our adventure through these questions is designed as a prodding to all who use the term to tell us what they are talking about before they otherwise simply echo the white noise.

And I hope people join in; as one last excerpt:

If accountability in higher education is a contractual relationship, we’ve got problems. The “goods” or “services” to be rendered by the offeror are usually indeterminate; there is no formal statement of obligations. The institution does not pledge to students that its efforts will produce specified learning, persistence and graduation, productive labor market entry, or a good life. We don’t put low persistence or graduation rates in a folder subject to educational malpractice suits. Nor does the institution pledge to public funding authorities that it will produce X number of graduates, Y dollars of economic benefits, or Z volume of specified community services, or be subject to litigation if it fails to reach these benchmarks.

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“We have a performance funding scheme now — it’s called ‘pay to enroll,’ ” he said. “One of the simplest things we can do is to reimburse for courses completed rather than courses attempted” by their students, he said. Added Stan Jones, former commissioner of higher education in Indiana and now president of the National Consortium on College Completion: “If we could make that change, counting courses at the end of the semester rather than the beginning, that would have powerful implications. Everybody would drag out their [list of] courses and say, ‘Where are we having problems?’ ” (It was acknowledged that such an approach could create perverse incentives of its own, by discouraging institutions from enrolling academically underprepared students who might be unlikely to succeed — a potential risk of the entire emphasis on “completion” that is increasingly in vogue.)

Of course, it could also encourage institutions to pressure faculty to ”ensure“ students complete courses: passing students who have in fact not met course requirements will become more common.

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In reviewing a front page item from Education Week (“Unions Set Sights on High-Profile Charter-Network Schools”), I’m reminded of how frustrated I have become the by vague and self-serving language of “accountability” that appears in news reports and speeches. Witness the law of diminishing accountability as one climbs the social hierarchy.

In discussing the “culture clash” of unions with philanthropy-backed academic sweatshops, Stephen Sawchuk writes: “Charter school advocates say unionization has historically carried a set of policies—such as seniority provisions and lengthy appeals processes for dismissed teachers—that discourage accountability and the recognition of differences in performance.”

But as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, points out: “Collaboration [the buzzword of corporate charters used in the article] without having some balance of power is not collaboration, if a teacher knows that he or she can be fired for any reason at all.”

So what is the actual problem? The problem is not “accountability” but different standards of accountability for different people holding different offices. When administrators fire teachers for “no reason at all” they are rendered as masters of innovation, serving the public good as “no excuses” educators who have, finally, rescued poor, minority children from the grips of uncaring, lazy teachers.

How can setting up an arrangement where management cannot be challenged be described as somehow more accountable than collectively agreed upon contractual arrangements that stipulate rights and responsibilities of both parties? While much in the media aims to discredit collective bargaining, especially seniority and the right to challenge management, as the root of all that is wrong with public schools, I caution pause. The problem is not peoples right to collectively organize themselves in their own interests.

The notion of accountability is fundamentally relational, and refers both to the party who must give account, and to whom they must account. But also implicit in this notion is the idea of checks and balances. The present landscape of discussion about education is littered with conceptions of accountability rendered as a one way street, with those screaming the loudest about accountability simultaneously the most unaccountable. Has KIPP been held to account for its infractions against students, and the public? Has the growing list of corporate charter school fraud caused pause for those pushing expansion of the very charter school models that are associated with the fraud?

While democratic renewal is required in unions as in other spheres, attacking the right to collectively bargain the conditions of work and procedures for challenging decisions will not contribute to improving education.

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