What Does the Public Say About Accountability?
Wherever education leaders gather these days, accountability is a hot topic of conversation. State and local reforms, along with the No Child Left Behind Act, are reshaping student, teacher, and administrator evaluation and dramatically recasting the consequences for below-par performance. But in hundreds of focus groups conducted by Public Agenda in recent years, the word “accountability” has rarely surfaced. People often talk about testing and grading, or good teachers and bad ones, or wonderful principals versus weak ones. People circle around the concept, but when focus group moderators ask questions about “accountability,” they get more quizzical stares than anything else.
