Accountability

The Lifeworld of Leadership
Creating Culture, Community, and Personal Meaning in Our
Schools
Thomas J. Sergiovanni


Chapter 5: Layered Standards and Shared Accountability

Building diverse and effective school communities that focus on both caring and competence is a good idea. But we have a problem. We can't have this kind of community and a standards movement that imposes on all schools the same expectations and the same outcomes for learning. The present standards movement needs to be realigned. If we continue with standardized standards and assessment then we place community building at risk and compromise the lifeworlds of parents, teachers, students, and local communities. We can avoid this problem by switching to layered standards and shared accountability. Both can accelerate the building of effective school communities. By switching we can have our cake and eat it, too.

Changing Our Course

Switching our approach to standards is not the same as doing away with standards. Setting standards for what students need to know, for what levels of civility should characterize student behavior, for what schools need to do, and for how parents, teachers, and even governors and legislators define their roles with respect to educational issues is good for students, schools, and the country. Standards are most useful when they are accompanied by assessments that can be used to determine where we are with respect to our goals and to help us get better. Personally, I like standards and assessments, if we have the right kind. Both can help us to define the common good and to come together in a quest to pursue that good. Standards and assessments can play an important role in building the kinds of focused and caring school communities most Americans want. As now construed, however, standards colonize rather than enhance the lifeworld of
schools, place schools' organizational character at risk, compromise their responsiveness to local needs and aspirations, hamper effective teaching and learning, and frustrate attempts to instill learning and caring virtues in students. Changing our present approach, however, will not be easy. We seem to be in the middle of another fad stampede, and stampedes have a way of spoiling good ideas.

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....Consequently, America's teachers are doing exactly what is "rational"if they want to keep their jobs: focusing exclusively and obsessively on the things that will probably be on the test, and drilling students over and over on that narrow range of things until they memorize it [p. 38].

Spady proposes twelve questions that teachers and principals can use to quiz policymakers, corporate executives, fellow educators, and others who are caught up in the stampede (see Spady, 1998, p. 38). Among them are:

• What does this test actually measure?

• What does this test not measure?

• What does this test not measure that is important to students' success in the
information age?

• Why don't we measure and report that instead?

• What does a particular student test score mean?

• Does this one test score represent the student's total learning and achievement?

• Which score on this test indicates a student is competent?

• Does one point less indicate that the student is incompetent?

Standards have the potential to provide needed focus and to rally our resources in a
common direction. Testing is a powerful tool that can help us assess how well standards
are being achieved. Both can provide clues as to how we can get better.

http://scholar.google.com/


Copyright 2005, test scores, jean and bill bruce. Recommended books of Professor W.C. Bruce

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