Merrill Vargo

Merrill Vargo

Many readers of EdSource know that a diverseness of factors have combined to put rethinking accountability on land leaders' to-exercise list. But most people don't understand what is actually at stake. Information technology's not just near whether we add together measures of "higher and career readiness" to the API. This is a worthy goal, just the issue of accountability is much bigger than that.  Accountability isn't just testing; information technology'south the whole construction of rules and regulations that govern schoolhouse districts. Here's why that matters.

Let's start with some history. School district primal offices were invented to manage the aspects of schooling that surrounded teaching and learning: budgeting, hiring, buildings, buses, books, etc. The assumption was that what happened in the classroom was the responsibility of the teachers. Later, commune offices were also charged with administering federal funds and ensuring that a growing set of requirements were met. Together, these roles ensured that districts would employ a hierarchical construction and standardized rules, processes and procedures and focus on managing the inputs to the education procedure. At the fourth dimension, no one worried that such standardized processes are not a very good way to foster creativity because teachers were still pretty much in accuse of teaching.

With the coming of the standards movement, this changed. School district central offices became responsible for managing the improvement of teaching and learning, and not surprisingly, they used the tools at paw: hierarchical structures, standardized processes, rules and regulations, and a compliance culture. Teachers complained that the inventiveness of didactics was being lost, just the argument that instruction needed to be managed won out.

Now all this is up for grabs. We've adopted the Common Core State Standards, merely districts no longer have the toolkit—aligned instructional materials, professional development and assessments—or the people to manage the improvement of education. There is no one left in most districts to enforce the rules, deport the walkthroughs, deliver the grooming or coach the teachers. This means that California will either have to recreate all this with dramatically constrained resources or think of a different arroyo. Force per unit area to exercise something different comes not but from teachers, simply likewise from parents and students. And so at present what? What is possible?

There is another manner, but districts tin't do it alone. Policymakers have to be willing to help. California tin can be on the cutting border of instruction reform past committing to build a organisation based on high levels of several things that accept been sadly lacking: trust, transparency, flexibility and innovation.

Let'southward starting time with trust. Parents trust their kids to local educators every day. Accountability measures are a tool to leverage alter and an early warning organisation to identify places where trust may exist misplaced. But accountability depends on trust—it does not supercede it.

Transparency: Local leaders are going to take to make some difficult decisions and call back through some budget tradeoffs every bit they retool their systems to implement the Common Core without significant new resources.

Without funding flexibility and upkeep transparency, it will exist hard or fifty-fifty incommunicable for local leaders to build the political back up they will need to make these difficult decisions.

Finally, innovation: Teachers need to exist supported to try new things. High-stakes accountability from the state prompts local leaders to ratchet up the force per unit area on teachers. Merely this can't piece of work: It'southward like asking an acrobat to effort some new moves without a safety net.

School districts tin change, and they should. We need a "version 2.0" of the school district that is more streamlined but also more responsive, innovative and school-focused than the districts of the by. Transforming commune offices is a loftier-leverage reform strategy with every bit as much potential to improve teaching and learning equally the many sexier-sounding reform strategies that make the news.

Just simply telling primal offices to "just exercise it" won't work. Policymakers must exist willing to shrink the rulebook for school districts to make space for a new role. To get a organisation that fosters, rather than constrains, creativity in the classroom, we need to introduce non but in the fashion that public pedagogy delivers services to students, but as well in the way that school districts support the improvement of teaching and learning. To succeed with the Common Core, we need improve accountability—but we also need less of information technology.

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Merrill Vargo is both an experienced academic and a applied expert in the field of schoolhouse reform. Earlier founding Pivot Learning Partners (so known as the Bay Area Schoolhouse Reform Collaborative, or BASRC) in 1995, Dr. Vargo spent 9 years educational activity English in a variety of settings, managed her own consulting firm, and served every bit executive managing director of the California Constitute for School Comeback, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that provides staff development and policy analysis for educators. She served every bit Director of Regional Programs and Special Projects for the California Department of Education. She is besides a fellow member of Full Circle Fund.

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