This is the second blog post in a series by Alex Cortez on education reformers using “bad language.” Read the first post of the series here.
In K-12 education reform, we have a bad habit of using jargon that creates more confusion than clarity. In the first essay in this series, I focused on “school choice” as one offender because making a choice is an act of power — one so often denied to people from systemically marginalized communities. Now, I want to turn my attention to another offender: “accountability.”
I don’t think using the word “accountability” in the context of education is bad; I think it’s a requirement. But much like “school choice,” the term “accountability” has a multitude of meanings.
Before delving into what accountability means, I want to address the question of whether there should be accountability in education. In the 2020-21 school year, the U.S. spent $814 billion in unadjusted dollars on public K-12 education through federal, state, and local sources (this doesn’t include private spending). Given the amount of money involved, and the role of education in building a strong society and economy, we should be able to measure and report the value of education investments so we can allocate our scarce public resources to create the most impact. The recipients of $814 billion in public funding — and public expectations — should be held responsible for how well that money is spent.
The most prominent argument I hear about why we should not dwell on formal measures of accountability in education comes from those who are advocating for a transformed marketplace of school choice. They envision a multitude of options that families can choose from based on each family’s definition of a good school (which I generally support). They believe that through a radical choice marketplace, families will naturally gravitate to those school choices that best meet their needs. The market will simply sort itself out.
However, this argument has a fatal flaw: A market cannot function without clear, credible, and timely information accessible to all. Without measures of accountability, there cannot be a market. Proponents of no accountability may be well-intentioned in avoiding the battle of what schools should be accountable for, but ultimately this abdication of accountability feels both self-serving and — from the standpoint of creating a well-functioning school choice market — self-defeating.
If Pre-K to postsecondary education systems should be accountable for outcomes, what exactly are those outcomes? This is a legitimate debate, and one where people of good conscience can and do disagree. It also exposes an interesting aspect of education and education reform: Very few people (including those in education) actually agree on the purpose of education!
Any discussion of accountability requires a clear articulation of what each of us believes education is accountable for.
A large group of people in the sector are pushing for education to be most focused on enabling career success and better economic outcomes. Others vehemently disagree, arguing that education should really be about enabling people to achieve their full human potential as thinkers and members of their community.
As with many things, the answer is “both/and,” not “either/or.” In 2023, reflecting on how to build a more equitable and effective system of postsecondary pathways, Bellwether’s Admission initiative proposed that ultimately the purpose of education (and therefore what it should ultimately be accountable for) is to enable each individual to:
- Achieve economic independence: In a 2019 survey of college freshmen, 84% said “to be able to get a better job” was a very important reason for deciding to go to college. Money isn’t everything, but it’s a big thing if you don’t have it, and it’s a core reason that people choose to pursue an education, even as each individual will have different monetary goals.
- Fully participate in democracy: Democracy is not a spectator sport, but being able to play first requires knowing the rules of the game. It also requires that citizens have the agency to play; for people from underserved communities, that often requires overcoming undemocratic barriers to the actual practice of democracy. As John Dewey wrote, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
- Pursue happiness as they define it: In the same 2019 survey as above, 83% of college freshmen also reported that a very important reason to pursue a bachelor’s degree was “to learn more about the things that interest me.” Allowing individuals to decide for themselves what their definition of happiness is (as opposed to my definition or yours) — be it modest or megalomaniacal — requires supporting individuals in building their knowledge and agency to understand the world, what their definition of a “good” society is, and what place they want in that good society. In “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin wrote: “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.”
What about accountability for teaching the fundamentals of literacy, math, history, and science? The above definition of the purpose of education underscores the importance of successfully teaching these subjects (and holding systems accountable for doing so); the odds are long that a person can achieve economic self-sufficiency, participate in democracy, and pursue happiness if they can’t read or do math. I would also add philosophy and ethics, computer science, personal finance, and a constellation of durable skills to this list of necessary fundamentals we should be teaching our students, along with civics. A 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that more than 70% of Americans failed a basic civics literacy quiz.
What if different people and communities feel education should be accountable for different things? As with school choice, people have different views on the purpose of education and the means by which schools should achieve that purpose. Some are short-term measures of success (like third-grade literacy) and others are long-term measures (like lifetime earnings). We need to measure and hold education systems accountable for both types of measures because the long-term measures depend on success in the short-term ones.
So, should we measure everything? No. Not everything can be measured, but a lot can. Just as there are ways to measure economic mobility, there are also ways to measure participation in democracy. When it comes to happiness, we can measure things like access to health care or housing, which underpin happiness for most. We can also ask people if they’re happy, leveraging research indicating that when people say they’re happy, we should believe them.
Nonetheless, accountability requires a lot of counting. I don’t want to discount the challenges to measurement as a key part of accountability. People can disagree about what to measure. They can disagree about how to measure. Measurement isn’t costless, and attribution can be challenging. Measurement can win friends and make enemies. It can feel high stakes because it can have consequences around performance, employment, and access to resources (like $814 billion). Measurement is also an act of power. The Mexican author and political leader, Laura Esquivel, observed that “Whoever controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power.” We measure what we care about, so the ability to decide what is and is not measured is power over the things we as a society value. Last, behind every measure there are people — students who want the full opportunity to realize their best destinies, and their fears about that opportunity being granted or denied.
Operationalizing this expansive, more long-term definition of accountability will require capturing new measures and connecting existing measures longitudinally across education and employment systems, and then making these measures accessible to individuals, institutions, policymakers, and researchers so they can use it to shape their decisions and actions. While not effortless, accountability isn’t rocket science — we’re not trying to send people to the moon. It’s not even necessarily data science — much of the measures exist or can be captured. Accountability is political science: Do we have the will to capture and share both short- and long-term outcomes in order to hold institutions, systems, and ultimately ourselves accountable for achieving the educational outcomes we care about?
