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Summary. Since the passage of the No Child LeftBehind Act (NCLB) in 2002, American policymakers have relied primarily on outcome-based accountability in the form of high-stakes testing to improve public school performance. With NCLB supplanted in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act-which gives states far greater discretion in the design of accountability systems-the time is ripe for policymakers to consider extensive behavioral science literature that shows outcome-based accountability is only one of multiple forms of accountability, each invoking distinct motivational mechanisms. We review rule-based, market-based, and professional accountability alongside outcome-based accountability, using evidence from the laboratory and the field to describe how each can produce favorable or unfavorable effects. We conclude that policymakers should (a) make greater use of professional accountability, which has historically been underutilized in education; (b) use transparency to promote professional accountability; and (c) use multiple, complementary forms of accountability, creating a complete system that encourages and supports the continuous improvement of educational practice.
The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School is a public middle school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, where, since opening in 2009, it has served a student population that is almost exclusively low income and Hispanic or African American. TEP Charter School's founding principal, Zeke Vanderhoek a former teacher and entrepreneur who had read the growing body of research indicating that teachers are the most important school-based influence on students, decided to design a school that would focus virtually all of its resources on hiring and developing the best possible teachers. Vanderhoek ran the numbers and concluded that the standard per-pupil public funding available to New York City charter schools could be reallocated (for example, by eliminating administrative positions and increasing the size of a typical class from 27 students to 31) in a way that would allow him to pay each of his teachers $125,000 per year, plus bonuses based on school-wide student achievement. The plan worked. In its first 4 years of operation, TEP Charter School produced substantial positive effects on student achievement: By the time they finished eighth grade, TEP Charter School's initial cohort of fifth graders had test scores showing an advantage equivalent to several months of additional instruction in English and science and more than a year...