Will Standards and Accountability Enhance Innovation and Change?

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Posted Dec. 16, 2025, 11:34 PM

Dr Philip Smith, The Ohio State University

The push for standards and accountability has focused primarily on ensuring the academic competitiveness of students in the United States. Some reformers argue that the United States is simply losing its competitive edge in an array of activities ranging from business and industry to education because no common academic standards exist in this country. These reformers also argue that for far too long, officials in poorly performing schools and districts have not been held accountable for the weak academic performance of assigned students. Other reformers assert that the academic achievement gaps now evidenced in the United Sates between racial and ethnic groups is attributable, in part, to the inability of educational (and political) leaders in school systems to offer rigorous curricula to all students and to hold teachers responsible for delivering that curriculum.

Embedded within the policy debate is the whole notion of how to create schools that foster value-added learning environments for all students regardless of race, ethnicity, or the socioeconomic status of their families. The challenge of creating such school learning environments will require more than an embrace of the status quo. Succeeding in this challenge will necessitate having educational leaders focus on meaningful and thoughtful innovation in delivery systems. The question then arises: Will the push for rigorous standards and accountability enhance or mitigate efforts to innovate school structures and classroom practices?

In this chapter, the contributors examine this question from very different perspectives. Joel Vargas and Janet Santos (Jobs for the Future) are with an organization with a national reach that focuses on promoting education and workforce strategies that will help the United States to compete in a global economy. Philip Smith (The Ohio State University) is an academic who brings a more philosophically grounded view to his analysis of the relationship between more accountability and enhanced educational innovation. Taken together, the pieces offer a view of the inherent complexity associated with examining the connections between accountability and innovation.

Vargas and Santos describe with historical context how standards and accountability have been powerful forces in focusing attention on the inequities endemic to educational practices and outcomes in American public schools. These authors also cogently capture some of the emerging successes in terms of creating “schools that work,” that is, schools that reduce academic achievement gaps and enhance educational opportunities for students with the greatest needs. Vargas and Santos place particular attention on some of the recent program successes, such as early colleges, that have emerged in recent years as a result of frustrations with traditional urban schools that have failed to be accountable to the various publics they putatively serve.

Smith takes a very different and more philosophical view. For Smith, the standards and accountability movement is about control and power. Smith explains that schools at their best help young people think critically and problem solve effectively. Achieving this “end,” or outcome, Smith posits, is not something that will emerge from more top-down oversight, and to expect innovation in such an environment is even more fatuous to consider. The accountability movement will not, according to Smith, push educators toward innovation and excellence; rather, it will mitigate opportunities for enlightened action and foster professional behaviors that are more “rote” and less critically informed.

As you read these two essays, consider two key questions: First, would innovation be more likely to flourish in an environment where top-down accountability did not exist? Second, can school systems and educators be truly innovative if they are constantly being evaluated relative to a set of defined outcomes, particularly if they have no input in the process by which their performance is measured?

Thomas J. Lasley, II

University of Dayton

Point: Joel Vargas and Janet Santos, Jobs for the Future

For over 25 years, standards-based accountability—the idea that what students should learn ought to be consistently defined and that they and their schools should be evaluated based on measures of that learning—has been the nation’s core strategy for improving educational outcomes. Today, the consensus behind the concept is more widespread than ever: All but two states plan to adopt Common Core State Standards that are designed to ensure all high school graduates are prepared for college, careers, and citizenship.

Standards and accountability have been powerful forces for focusing attention on inequities in academic achievement between low income students and racial minorities. Yet the nation’s schools, especially our high schools, have by and large struggled to help these, namely, “all,” students meet common standards. There are states, schools, and systems that represent notable exceptions, in many cases spurred by private and public initiatives to encourage innovation in the redesign of the high school experience. As states adopt policies to implement higher and shared standards, they will need to promote the growth of innovative schools and programs that succeed in helping struggling students achieve these standards and spread proven practices from those schools to others.

Standards: Common Expectations for All

In 1983, A Nation at Risk, a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, raised the urgency of the need for educational reform and made the quality of American high schools a central concern. The report noted the weakness of the nation’s public secondary school system as judged by the skills of its graduates. Subsequent examinations of high schools documented the various practices and policies contributing to the problems, including weak curricula, disparate standards and curricula for different students, and promotion based on age rather than level of learning. A push began to establish statewide academic standards to drive changes in local educational systems, and that strategy has been a key feature of educational reform ever since. The trend was encouraged in the 1990s by federal initiatives, such as Goals 2000.

As more states developed higher standards, they also turned their attention to the development of assessment and accountability systems. These were designed to evaluate student learning against standards, base promotion on that learning, and evaluate the quality of schools by how well their students performed. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, made federal funding for states dependent on the development of such systems and required those systems to evaluate schools based on how well subgroups of students—particularly those with traditionally low educational attainment (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities, low income, and special needs)—performed on state assessments. By 2010, all states had established mathematics and English standards or assessment-based accountability systems. The latest and boldest development in standards-based reform is the Common Core State Standards Initiative. In 2010, all but two states signed on to adopt common standards calibrated to the skills needed for college and career success. Alaska and Texas are states that have not adopted standards-based reform. There is evidence that in Texas—a state long considered a trailblazer in standards-based reform—standards are consistent with college-ready standards, as benchmarked against two previous national sets of college-ready standards in English language arts (Rolfhus, Cook, Brite, & Hartman, 2010).

With federal funding of over $300 million, a large group of states is collaborating on the development of assessments aligned to those standards. The Common Core represents a departure from the custom of states setting and implementing their own accountability systems, which had resulted in state standards and assessments that varied widely in content and level of expectations for students. In contrast, the Common Core standards assume that all students should possess a common set of knowledge and skills by the time they complete high school to ensure a successful transition to higher education; a postsecondary credential is a prerequisite for the economic well-being of individuals and society; and high school standards and state assessments must be aligned to and benchmarked against these goals.

The Problem of the High School

In many ways, the progress and prospects for education’s improvement and equity have never been greater. The assumptions and expectations of recent standards-based reforms represent a complete turnaround of the purposes of the American high school. Less than 30 years ago, in A Nation at Risk, the authors lamented the impact of a high school experience designed around different curricular tracks—reflecting the assumption that only a select group of students needed preparation for college. Another seminal analysis of the traditional high school criticized its evolution into a “shopping mall” of course and program options instituted to accommodate the diverse interests and abilities of a heterogeneous group of students (Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985). In expecting that all students should learn a common set of competencies and content, standards and accountability are disruptive forces for equity by declaring a more rigorous path for all students through high school. But setting all students successfully on that path is a very real challenge.

Standards and accountability systems have quantified gaps in achievement for low income students, students of color, and other underserved groups. Moreover, pressure has increased on schools to improve outcomes for each group or face consequences. Yet thus far, despite the increased attention, the educational attainment and achievement of these groups have remained stubbornly low—especially so at the high school level. Although the average reading and mathematics scores for black and Hispanic students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have improved significantly since the early 1970s, they still lag behind the average scores of white students. This pattern is prevalent across all grade levels and ages tested. And it is pronounced for high school students for whom NAEP performance has remained stagnant during the same time period (The Nation’s Report Card). This should come as no surprise; new reform policies are asking high schools to do things that they were not designed to do.

Continued accountability for getting all students to achieve at higher standards is essential, along with better strategies for helping schools to improve. At the same time, raising standards and accountability and attaching high stakes consequences for students and teachers—in the face of persistent evidence that high schools have little capacity for the dramatic change needed to meet new expectations—runs the risk of subverting or distorting reform goals. For example, some argue that the current high stakes environment created under NCLB has resulted in a number of unintended negative consequences: lowered standards to improve the chances of student success and graduation, incentives to “teach to the test” at the expense of engaging pedagogy and well-rounded curricula, and “gaming” in reporting to make student retention, promotion, and dropout rates look better (Ravitch, 2010). Further, a formerly staunch advocate of standards-based reform, educational historian Diane Ravitch has recently echoed and lamented these shortcomings.

A Complementary Strategy: Innovation

Concurrent with the rise of standards-based reform, many new and redesigned high schools have been created that are demonstrating success in supporting underserved students to succeed in high school and get ready for college. Some have started at the initiative of school districts themselves, such as the University Park Campus School, a partnership between Worcester Public Schools and Clark University. And others have been initiated and supported by special-purpose school development organizations—some as charter schools, others in partnership with states and local districts. The Coalition of Essential Schools, founded in 1984, focused on reenvisioning the structure of high schools. More recently, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the North Carolina New Schools Project, the Texas High School Project, New Visions in Public Schools, and the organizations composing the Early College High School Initiative (ECHSI) have helped to start hundreds of innovative high schools—designed to help more struggling students meet high standards and graduate prepared for college entry and success.

In general, the successful innovations share common ideals. These include, to name a few, support for strong, differentiated instruction focused on meeting common standards in a college-ready course of study; a commitment to personalization where every student is known by adults; and a college-going-for-all ethos that permeates the school culture, including the curriculum, instruction, and guidance counseling. These features appear to be essential to a supportive school environment fostering student engagement and achievement.

Indicative of the progress that is possible when strong standards gain traction on the ground is the North Carolina New Schools Project, an innovative high school design effort that has helped districts to start over 100 new or redesigned high schools since 2004. Twenty-seven of these are redesigned comprehensive high schools, with high student poverty rates, converted into small schools with a focus on college readiness and often with a special thematic focus such as health and life sciences or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). In 2009–2010, these schools on average outpaced statewide results on the one-year improvement on tests passed by students under the state’s ABC accountability system: 13.5% improvement for students in redesigned schools versus 9.5% statewide. Graduation rates for the first wave of all new and redesigned high schools supported by the New Schools Project are 84% compared to statewide rates of 74% (North Carolina New Schools Project, 2010).

The North Carolina New Schools Project has also initiated over 70 early college high schools, part of a national network of over 200 early college schools nationally. These are schools designed so that underserved youth graduate high school with one to 2 years of transferable college credit or an associate’s degree within 5 years. Preliminary findings from a federally funded random assignment study of North Carolina’s early college schools indicate that their students take and pass college preparatory courses in mathematics at significantly higher rates than do students who attended other high schools. The schools are also closing racial gaps in enrollment and success in college prep curricula, according to Julie Edmunds and colleagues (2010). These successes are echoed in data about early college schools nationally: Students are graduating high school at higher rates and with an average of over 20 college credits, a strong indication of their readiness for college, according to Clifford Adelman (2004). Data are from a national annual survey of schools in the Early College High School Initiative program administered by the evaluation firm AIR/SRI[AU: Please spell out.] and stored in a Student Information System maintained by the organization Jobs for the Future.

The results from innovative schools are not always consistent; we should not expect all innovations to succeed. Many charter schools and other schools of choice have started under a banner of innovation, but their success in improving student outcomes is mixed (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2009; Hassel, Bryan, & Terrell, 2006). However, a critical mass of innovations has succeeded, particularly those with well-defined design principles and those that have paid attention to supporting improved classroom instruction. They provide examples of practices and design that can potentially be refined and replicated to reach many more young people and help them meet college-ready standards.

Standards and Innovation: Future Directions

If the promise of better and more consistent standards and accountability systems is to be realized for all students, scaling up successful innovation will have an important role to play in helping high schools make the massive shifts in organization and practice that will be demanded of them. Although many efforts at innovation have been successful, they have had limited systemic influence and certainly not at a level needed in this critical moment in standards-based reform as Common Core standards are implemented (Mead & Rotherham, 2008). The success of many innovations in modeling what high schools can do differently to help all students—including those who have traditionally struggled most—to reach college-ready standards is too notable to be left untapped. It is important, if not imperative, for policymakers to develop better ways for successful innovation to become more systemic.

Although proinnovative, we[AU: Edit OK? Or would you prefer another identifying substitute for “we.”] do not pretend to have answers for how to do this, but we close with three observations that suggest directions to take and avoid.

1. Scaling up promising innovation beyond islands of excellence is a challenge, but there are examples of promising approaches.

Building on the success of their early college high schools, some districts and states have developed strategies to test replicable practices for adoption and adaptation in other high schools and in entire districts. If successful, these school- and districtwide approaches would enable many more students to benefit from schools with an early college design even if they do not attend a small, stand-alone early college high school. We suggest that innovation policies and initiatives be built on a strategy that consciously plans for using schools that show success to positively affect others. By the same token, an ongoing problem is that unsuccessful innovations are sometimes not abandoned. For example, many charter laws were passed with the premise that new schools would be sanctioned only as long as their results justified their autonomy. Yet not all charter laws were written this way, and those that were have not always been followed when new schools underperform.

2. States that have implemented innovations with a consistent level of quality have created entities to own and manage the innovation process.

This process involves such functions as managing the financial and other resources for planning and start-up, ensuring the consistency of school design and implementation, and educating key stakeholders about the role of innovation in statewide education reform. It requires nimbleness and flexibility to secure staff with appropriate expertise, attract private resources leveraged by public support, and broker local partnerships to support innovation efforts.

The Texas High School Project and the North Carolina New Schools Project are two examples. Both are partnerships and alliances between the state and private funders. The organizational structure that these partnerships take is not as important as the functions they carry out. Also important is the recognition that government acting alone will probably be unable to execute all of the aforementioned necessary tasks; these partnerships will need an external spur and guidance about innovative practices.

3. Policies that create space for spurring innovation with accountability can be a strategy that complements efforts to raise standards.

In one noteworthy example, North Carolina’s Innovative Education Initiatives Act of 2003 established cooperative education programs between local school boards and community colleges for students who would benefit from accelerated instruction or were at risk of dropping out. The legislation facilitated a fast-tracked process for such schools to seek and receive waivers from policies—such as restrictions tied to high school seat time rules—that would have stood in the way of early colleges and other innovations seeking to accelerate the movement of prepared students into college courses. The North Carolina Board of Education annually reviews the progress of innovative schools and regularly reviews waivers for continuation. The technical issues that the waivers solve for innovators are important, but just as important in this kind of policy is the strong signal sent to local school leaders about the state’s support for specific types of innovation.

Short of instituting bold new policies and initiatives to stimulate innovation, states should take care that policies to implement higher standards—including assessment, graduation requirements, and accountability—do not inadvertently quash school innovations that are succeeding. Policymakers should engage with leaders of innovative schools to understand the flexibility they and other innovators need to continue practices that do, in fact, prepare all students for college and careers.

Counterpoint: Philip Smith, The Ohio State University

Imagine that we all lived in a nation of several hundred million people where there were huge variations of individual talents, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Imagine, too, that we professed to value these differences, not to merely tolerate them but to actually encourage and celebrate them to a large and generous extent. Moreover, our reason for this stance was not simply because it showed a healthy respect for individuals, who might otherwise be constrained to their detriment or who might become targets of unwarranted ridicule, exclusion, exploitation, or even persecution, but because we were convinced that encouraging and celebrating individual differences would also benefit us and our society as a whole. We figured there would be less waste of human resources, fewer unrepairable conflicts, and fewer social pathologies. As far as we were concerned, human differences strengthen and enrich our national culture similar to the way biological diversity engineers a dynamic robust ecology.

For most Americans, and those sympathetic with America’s self-image, grasping this idea is hardly a stretch. However much everyday life diverts from this ideal, it pretty much represents what the culture embraces and encourages. From its beginning, the rallying cry has been e pluribus unum (“one out of many”). The founders of our nation saw themselves working to create a “new race,” one that defined itself by its commitment to the values of a modern enlightened democracy, not by blood or tradition. They were convinced that diversity, along with the right kind of socialization, would produce a national culture that lived out its respect for all persons regardless of their origins (Schlesinger, 1998, p.17). Our social nature as human beings requires that we live together not merely out of practical necessity but to find personal fulfillment. Rather than imply a loss of personal freedom, however, our social relationships provide the grounds for our autonomy. When they fail in this regard, they must be rethought and reformed. Here is the point where education begins to show its mettle.

This sounds nice in theory. But how are things working out? What are the risks and costs of living this way (i.e., as if our social relationships were liberating as well as bonding, as paradoxical as that sounds)? What happens when our efforts fall short of our expectations, where our differences appear to divide us rather than bring us together? Smart people, such as John Winthrop, William James, and John Dewey, were convinced we could do this in the United States. But how should we respond when the very thing that is supposed to be our strength begins to look more like a threat?

Constructive replies to this question are hard to find. Many people prefer simply to ignore it, insisting the problem is exaggerated or overblown. Others regard it as ill conceived or impossible to deal with, except competitively where there are clear winners and losers. The first attitude ignores reality. The second is a repudiation of the American sense of a new race. For anyone who believes that the American promise of a modern enlightened democracy is not a delusion, it is preposterous to suggest that success for some can come only at the expense of others. If our world is not exactly “one for all and all for one,” then the life they seek[AU: the life Americans seek?] still requires the melding of human variations within a meaningful framework of fraternity and solidarity.

Be this as it may, we cannot rely solely on the authority of our culture to direct us. First of all, we want to keep our culture as open-ended and flexible as possible. In addition, we want a culture we can control rather than one that controls us. So the idea of looking for precise guidance from on high, from the culture itself, is pretty much out of the question. Our only choice is to work out the details ourselves, “on the fly,” so to speak, without being told exactly what to do by some higher authority. We need to be good fabricators, good pragmatists who can figure things out as we go along. If we cannot know a priori what a modern democratic culture should look like and cannot specify in advance what behavior is called for in public and private life, except in the most vague and general fashion, then we have no choice but to trust our wits. Our fate is in our hands. Our official position is that there is no aspect of life, no field of endeavor—from law to business to politics to religion to education—where this is not true. On what grounds then should we operate?

However seriously we ask this question about ourselves, we usually ask it with greater urgency about others, perhaps for good reason. We want to know what others know, and we want to know if they know what they are supposed to know. We expect them to be able to communicate with us, to talk things over and to work cooperatively with us when necessary. We get upset if we think other people cannot, or will not, do what we think they should. When this happens, one option is to seek a legal remedy, to go to civil court, for instance, and sue the offending parties for damages, for misfeasance (incompetence) or malfeasance (bad intentions). Our legal system sets relatively clear standards for holding people accountable. But notice, legal remedies are always “after-the-fact” actions. Even if justice is served, the damage has already been done. The promise of preventing problems from occurring in the first place is a huge factor in explaining our interest in education. But what should we do when we believe that education has failed to deliver on its promise?

To begin with, there are probably as many motives behind complaints about American education as there are people who gripe about it. Should we really be surprised? We have deliberately dimmed the lights of our culture and given as much discretion as possible to individuals. Then we say to people, qua individuals or as members of functional groups, “OK, now take care of these problems.” And so they do, more or less, as best they can, or as well as they want, with whatever motives they possess, good or bad. Is it any wonder that things do not always turn out as well as we hope or as we expect? It is a great deal to ask of people; and it requires considerable faith in their abilities, talents, and good will.

The risks of operating this way can seem too great, the costs too high, to move ahead with this American experiment. Yet what choice do we have? It is naive to believe we could ever find a single source of meaning and value that we would agree on, even if we tried, or thought we should. We are left to figure out how to live and work together without much help from a centralized authority. Clearly, this is easier said than done. It is especially obvious in professional fields, where certain individuals possess, or lay claim to, expertise that others must depend on. The rest of us can only hope that those who assert this expertise will behave responsibly. Yet even the most casual observer would have to admit that “unprofessional” conduct is everywhere these days and that the problem is getting worse. In part, this stems from uncertainty within the professions themselves as to what responsibility consists in. Now, more than ever, questions about one’s professional duty are answered with minimal assurance and even less consensus.

There are two ways to approach this problem. The first is to look at the context and figure out in sufficient detail how professionals should behave and what nonprofessionals can rightfully expect. Judgments are involved here on all fronts. In the end, professionals are held responsible for the consequences of what happens on their watch. The second approach is modeled on the legal liability example cited above. It grows out of dissatisfaction with the discretion given to professionals to establish their own goals and standards; and it limits the extent to which their specialized knowledge can be used to privilege their judgments. It also looks for ways to drop the moralizing language of responsibility in favor of a more straightforward matter of fact vocabulary of the sort found in law and business. In this view, the moralizing language of responsibility was adopted out of a naive belief that it would prevent problems from happening in the first place rather than merely redress them ex post facto. But in the modern secular world this approach will not work. Remedies for failure in law and business may come too late for many, but they look to be our best and only option. To the surprise of many, they have proven to be remarkably effective.

This latter approach to achieving goals and objectives and solving problems along the way has come to be known as accountability. This raises a number of significant questions. Is it really different from the first approach that features responsibility? Does the vocabulary of accountability fundamentally change the nature of our concerns? What are the risks and costs of each approach, assuming they are different? Do we lose anything important when moral sensitivity disappears as a motive force behind professional conduct? Or would we gain more than we lose? Why have so many people, inside and outside of professional life, come to prefer accountability to responsibility as a mode of professional assessment?

Accountability in the arena of public education grew markedly in importance over the last 30 years as a way out of a long-term dilemma. As seen by one critic, it began in the 1980s at the urging of leaders of business and industry and was quickly picked up by politicians and a large segment of the voting, tax-payer public. The reform message preached by Democrats, Republicans, and the mainstream media is simple: One: America’s schools are, at best, mediocre. Two: Teachers deserve most of the blame. Three: As a corrective, rigorous subject-matter standards and tests are essential. Four: Bringing market force to bear will pressure teachers to meet the standards or choose some other line of work. Competition—students against student, teacher against teacher, school against school, state against state, nation against nation—will yield the improvement necessary for the United States to finish in first place internationally. (Brady, 20)[AU: Please verify 2008 not 2009 as shown in references.] (PS to AU: My mistake. Both dates are wrong. I checked, it should be 2010.)

If some of those who support this type of reform have smaller ambitions, they nevertheless embrace this approach and accept its basic assumptions.

While most people would see accountability as synonymous with responsibility, (PS to AU: The convention in Academic Philosophy is to use single marks , i.e., ‘…’, when referring to a word. But if you think it’s better here to use quotation marks, i.e., “…”, that fine with me.) as meaning more or less the same thing, or at least as not in conflict with it, the logic and attitudes of ordinary language show this not to be the case (Craig, 1982, pp. 133–140). ‘Accountability’ (PS to AU: Again, it’s the convention in philosophy to use single marks. If you don’t think it helps, it’s OK.) implies having a duty or expectation to act in a manner that has been specified in advance. The idea embodies the logic of contracts, wherein nothing important is left to the discretion of those who carry them out. The terms and conditions are settled prior to their execution. By contrast, if one is responsible, it means that one is morally answerable as a cause of what occurs. It implies an agent who can initiate behavior and reflect on the “why” of the “what,” and the “what” of the “how.”

Accountability involves external sanctions and controls. With responsibility, sanctions and controls are internal. A person could behave mindlessly and still be accountable, so long as the presumed standards were met. Responsibility makes this impossible as a matter of logic. It is silly to say that a person is responsible for prespecified behavior, unless that individual has the authority to do otherwise. To be held responsible for behaving as directed, in any coherent sense of the term, one would need to qualify as an agent who consciously endorsed the intent of what was done. In contrast, a person who worked to implement prespecified behavior, or carry out orders, could be held accountable, even without qualifying as an agent who acted approvingly.

As seen by its advocates, accountability filters out bias, avoids the fog of human perception, and renders judgment unnecessary. This is accomplished by limiting the focus of evaluation to what is quantifiable or countable. But precisely for this reason, it works better in (PS to AU: The works should be ‘in’.) some areas than others. There is an old saying in statistics: “to be is to be the value of a variable, that whatever exists exists in some amount, and whatever exists in some amount can be quantified.” In some worlds, this may be true; in others just as real, it most decidedly is not, or it is true only in certain aspects. The point here is to ask about the motivation for this attitude. Why would anyone believe it? “Because it is true” is one possible response. “Because it is useful to assume” is another Under given conditions, either response could have considerable merit. But if we are asking about the motivation for this attitude, apart from its justification, there is something else we might say: “because it is comforting to know things for sure.” How much merit does this response have?

Removing any doubt about what is purportedly known eliminates any responsibility for the consequence of believing it. After all, it is “the truth,” and the truth speaks for itself. Telling other people what to do based on purportedly certain knowledge may not eliminate altogether our responsibility for imposing it on others in the form of expectations, but it surely lessens it. Similarly, when people are told exactly what is expected of them, that, too, pretty much relieves them of any responsibility for what they do. The loss of authority that is associated with being held accountable is seen by many as an easy trade-off. They regard it as a license to do only what is required, especially when doing more might actually get them into trouble. Responsibility always adds to our burdens, sometimes excessively so. Second-guessing ourselves can feel like a curse. But avoiding responsibility oftentimes comes at a cost. It lowers our expectations and moves us in the direction of being merely functional operators, who eventually will be replaced by other more functional units.

Accountability applied to education cannot avoid fossilizing the already formalized structures of schooling. Schooling picks out specific aspects of education and standardizes them for general inculcation. The full richness of educational experience is rarely, if ever, captured. This is not automatically a bad thing. But even this can be done badly. Mark Twain apparently knew it and is purported to have responded accordingly: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Whether or not Twain actually uttered these words, this sentiment was expressed by his alter ego, Huckleberry Finn, who just prior to his big adventure down the Mississippi River could hardly wait to finish his schooling, so he could commence what he believed would be his real education. While schools can do certain things extremely well and while they play a critical role in education for modern life, they cannot do everything; and they can easily make matters worse, as Huck’s case illustrates. Everyone would agree that schools should not be allowed to flounder. Yet it is easily forgotten in the hustle and bustle of everyday life that their primary mission in a society like ours is to cultivate independent-minded, responsible democratic citizens. Other things matter, too, of course. Yet if they do not hook up with this prime directive, they will fail in their most important charge. If accountability makes it harder for the schools to succeed in their primary mission by downplaying the importance of responsibility, especially in regard to the teachers themselves, it will be worse than wasted effort. It will cause school experience to be more dreadful and demeaning than it is already.

Accountability makes more sense for some professions than others. Where the best practices of a profession are generalizable and not in dispute, accountability makes a lot of sense. Still, where professional decisions about what to do, how, when, where, and why are not generalizable or obvious, where they require agents who are well prepared and trustable, who always keep in mind their highest professional aspirations, then, in that case, accountability is likely to be an impediment to good practice. Soldiers, surgeons, factory managers, accountants, engineers, police officers, and professional athletes are examples of professionals who probably could be assessed largely on accountability standards—with politicians, lawyers, family physicians, and scientists perhaps less so and preachers, counselors, and therapists maybe less yet. What about teachers? Where do they fit? To what extent would they be helped or hindered by working under the specter of prespecified expectations? Granted that teachers, like all professionals, need a certain level of freedom, the question is, how much? This is where the rubber hits the road as far as accountability is concerned.

A system of external sanctions and controls is never limited to the specification of outcomes. One way or another, it prescribes the procedures to be used for securing these results. It is interesting to note that modern life has elevated procedure to a place once held by morality. The reason is not hard to find. The modern mind views morality with suspicion. Concerned as it is with personal freedom, dignity, and practical results, it perceives morality as having done considerable harm in the world when imposed unintelligently without mercy. Determined to do better, modern people like to separate the content of morality from its mode of implementation. If moral content does not calibrate with the methods used for putting it into practice, then it is reformulated to fit those methods rather than the other way around. This would be nothing to complain about if the influence went both ways. But the process is not transactional. Moral content becomes something different without consideration of its integrity, or else it disappears altogether, as utility trumps substance and thought.

In the final analysis, the appeal of accountability has little to do with faith in human potential. It comes more from the promise to control the educational process from top to bottom. There is a widespread belief among Americans today that their schools need to be better managed. Americans feel these institutions have fallen below acceptable performance levels. This applies especially to the public schools. There is a lot at stake, nothing less than (PS to AU: Yes, the word should be ‘than’.) our future as an experiment in democratic living. We have little time to waste. Improvements have to be qualitative as well as quantitative. But lest we forget, there is a reason why responsibility has played such a prominent role in education for so long in our educational institutions. It treats individuals as ends-in-themselves, as persons, never solely as means. It assumes they have a disposition to think, and when this inclination is properly developed, it becomes both a cause and effect of our success. No one should be misled about accountability in this regard. Thinking well is not its top priority. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, in The ABC of Relativity (1925), reminded us why it should be: “Most people would sooner die than think. In fact they do so.”

The appeal of responsibility in education, such as it is, remains the same as always. It promises to help us think and act better than we would otherwise. This benefits everyone and our society as a whole. If our educational institutions are not paying enough attention these days to the cultivation and exercise of good thinking, or if we fear that our schools might actually be hindering its development, then the remedy is not to adopt a reform technology that skirts any need for deliberation, judgment, and choice. If, for any reason, we believe it is important to hold professional educators more accountable than we do already, we need to recognize the cost. People will do what they are told, or they will not. Accountability assumes there are no other options. Responsibility challenges us to see the world in a more rich and nuanced way, to envision other possibilities, better and worse, that require insight and reflection to appreciate.

Do computers think? Most philosophers today would say no. Their reason is that computers are not conscious, and without consciousness, thinking is impossible. This presumes, of course, the kind of thinking that human beings engage in. But this is what gives the question its force. Processing huge amounts of data with lightning speed is not thinking of the relevant kind. Imagine a person, alone in a room, who has been given a stack of cards on which are printed single Chinese characters. Imagine, too, that the person has been given a sheet of instructions about how to arrange these cards, some to the left, others to the right, of a midline, with each card having a prescribed position. When the cards have been arranged as instructed, that person will still have no idea what they mean without understanding Chinese (Searle, 2002, pp. 51–69).

A computer is like that person, performing flawlessly as instructed but without getting the gist of anything. How could it, not being conscious? No matter how much the computer’s performance improves, how good it gets at playing chess, for example, it will never be enlightened. A computer does not reflect on anything, has no feelings or emotions of any kind, never gets depressed or angry, and cannot experience euphoria or amazement. All that a computer does is function, albeit impressively, like the machine that it is. Since a computer could never be a good citizen or a fabulous lover, it makes no sense to hold it responsible for anything—or accountable, for that matter. Accountability pushes people in the direction of a computer by treating them too much like mindless automatons. (PS to AU: Yes, ‘s’, not ‘a’.) It retards their development as thoughtful human beings. For that, someone will be responsible.