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Complexity, Accountability, and School Improvement1
In this article, Jennifer O'Day builds on her earlier work defining and examining the standards-based reform movement in the United States. Here, 0 Day explores accountability mechanisms currently associated with standards-based reform efforts that "take the school as the unit of accountability and seek to improve student learning by improving the functioning of the school organization. "She examines such accountability mechanisms using the theoretical framework of complexity theory and focuses on how information travels through complex systems, with the understanding that information, its existence and usage, is key to improving schools. Drawing on work conducted with researchers at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), she contrasts the Chicago Public Schools' outcomes-based bureaucratic accountability approach with the combination of administrative and professional accountability found in the Baltimore City Schools. She argues that the combination of administrative and professional accountability presents a much more promising approach for implementing lasting and meaningful school reform.
This article, like much of the conversation among reformers and policymakers today, is about accountability. Everywhere you turn - from Congress to the statehouse to local communities and parent groups - some people are trying to make other people more accountable for some thing in education. However deafening at times, these cries for accountability should not surprise us. Public education consumes over $400 billion in public revenues. It is reasonable that the public and its representatives want to know where the money is going and what it is producing. Are educators doing what they are being paid to do? Are administrators responsible in how they are spending money? Are children engaged and learning what they need to know?
Such questions are hardly new. In the early days of the common school, for example, teachers were closely scrutinized and called to task even for such personal habits as demeanor and dress, as well as for their duties in the classroom. Meanwhile, student accountability - in the form of grades and report cards - has been around for even longer, while fiscal accountability for districts came to the fore with the rise of federal programs such as Title I in the 1960s. Yet, as many observers have noted, the current emphasis on and efforts toward educational accountability...