Accountabalism
consequences as well. Developing young
people who grow up to be men and
women who take pride in their work
and believe in the intrinsic value of what
they do is not on the accountabalists’
agenda. Pride, after all, is difficult to
measure, as are commitment and many
other human sentiments that teachers
once felt duty-bound to nurture.
The Real Accountability Problem
Accountabalism also encourages bureaucratization and fragmentation. Indeed,
because of the ascendancy of accountabalism, state and federal mandates have
supplanted the authority of the local
community in shaping how to run its
schools. Consequently, local schools
that were once viewed as sources of
community pride are increasingly being
seen as extensions of the government,
judged more by nameless and faceless “experts” located in think tanks in
Washington, D.C., than by local community leaders.
No longer are the public schools
accountable to the public. Rather,
they’re accountable to government
officials—and this means to government
bureaucracies.
One of the problems with this
approach, of course, is the growing concern that the government is
not as accountable to the public as it
should be. As distrust of the government increases, so does distrust of the
schools. Community trust is an essential
ingredient in school success. Rather than
putting government officials between
the public and the schools, we should
find better ways to make local schools
accountable to the public and to ensure
that the standards that the local community upholds are of value to students
and society.
Historian David Tyack has observed
that there was a time when “locally
controlled school districts were almost
a fourth branch of government.”
2 I con-
tinue to view them this way. In the tra-
dition of Thomas Jefferson, I believe that
we should view education as a public
function and that schools should belong
to the public just as the other branches
of our government do.
No longer are the public
schools accountable
to the public.
practices run counter to those principles. However, schools should not be
accountable to either the legislative or
the executive branches of the federal
government, and state constitutions
should tread lightly on the right of citizens to run their schools. Governments
should encourage local communities to
establish great schools, but great schools
are more likely to exist when they’re run
by—and accountable to—the citizens
they’re intended to serve rather than
when they’re accountable to bureaucrats
in the state house.
Creating the Citizens We Need
An educated citizenry is the major check
against government tyranny. To turn
schools into government instruments
is to present a too-tempting target for
those who would use them to advance
their particular views and ideologies
rather than use them to develop the
critical skills students need to evaluate
those views and ideologies. Public edu-
cation in the United States is a bulwark
of democracy only as long as it serves
the interest of the public—and only as
long as the citizens who make up that
public have the skills, understandings,
and habits of mind that will ensure that
the other branches of government do
the same.
2 Tyack, D. (2003). Seeking common
ground: Public schools in a diverse society.
Boston: Harvard University Press. p. 2.
Phillip C. Schlechty is founder and
chief executive officer of the Schlechty
Center, Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of Leading for Learning: How
to Transform Schools into Learning
Organizations (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and
Engaging Students: The Next Level of
Working on Work (Jossey-Bass, 2011);
pschlechty@schlechtycenter.org.
