Arne Duncan on Accountability

On April 22, an op-ed piece by Arne Duncan was printed in the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Alonso felt it to be so a propos that he e-mailed the piece to Baltimore City teachers this morning. The essence of Secretary Duncan’s message was that parents, teachers, administrators, and legislators need, essentially, to make themselves honest. All of these groups have a huge stake in reforming schools, but each has its own set of ideas about the source of the need for this reform. We spend so much time blaming each other for the problems that we miss what is really important: collecting valid data on what works and what does not work so that we can solve the problems.

According to Duncan, there needs to be a “culture of accountability” in education, and this is a culture that could greatly benefit Baltimore City. We say we hold schools and teachers accountable through testing, but, when I administer a city Benchmark exam, I scan the answer sheets into the system and never hear a word about the data they provide. We say we hold teachers accountable through evaluation, but I see teachers who are not technologically literate, or who consistently use nothing but the “pedagogy of poverty” in their instruction. In his article, Duncan addresses strategies for making schools and school systems accountable at a macro level, and he illustrates the possible consequences for those who demonstrate a lack of effort to improve. I am curious if Duncan has any strategies for ensuring accountability at the micro level in order to improve accountability within individual schools.