WHAT IS THE VALUE OF PUBLIC SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY?

In this review essay, Michael Gunzenhauser and Andrea Hyde consider three recent edited collections that address the potential value of public school accountability policy: Kenneth Sirotnik's Holding Accountability Accountable: What Ought to Matter in Public Education; Martin Carnoy, Richard Elmore, and Leslie Santee Siskin's The New Accountability: High Schools and High-Stakes Testing; and Linda Skrla and James Scheurich's Educational Equity and Accountability: Paradigms, Policies, and Politics. Taken together, the texts provide a snapshot of current scholarly discourse about the phenomenon of accountability policy and provide educators with conceptual tools for analyzing and responding to accountability pressures. While these conceptual distinctions help advance scholarly discourse on accountability, ultimately the texts demonstrate the conceptual poverty of accountability policy for guiding educational improvement. Gunzenhauser and Hyde argue that current state accountability systems are not likely to encourage the broad, systemic capacity building that these three volumes describe as fundamental to achieving the requirements of federal policies.