Teachers and educational leaders are extraordinarily busy, inundated with demands for more work and better results with fewer resources—and less time. You will decide within the next few paragraphs whether this book is worth your time. Let me come straight to the point. Accountability for Learning equips teachers and leaders with the ability to transform educational accountability policies from destructive and demoralizing accounting drills into meaningful and constructive decision making in the classroom, school, and district. You do not need to wait for new changes in federal or state legislation. This book is about what you can do right now to improve learning, teaching, and leadership. Although I respect the role that senior leaders, board members, and policymakers play in education (see Chapter 6), the plain fact is that accountability for learning happens in the classroom.

The traditional failures in educational accountability are not born of a lack of knowledge or will. We know what to do, yet decades of research and reform have failed to connect leadership intentions to classroom reality. This “knowing-doing gap” (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000) is hardly unique to education. Businesses, nonprofit organizations, health care agencies, and religious institutions all suffer from the breach between intention and reality. The cause is neither indifference nor indolence, yet many initiatives begin with those assumptions. If only the presentation is persuasive enough, if only the rewards are great enough, if only the sanctions are tough enough, the reasoning goes, then the staff will see the light and they will at last comply with the wishes of those giving instructions. If sincere intentions were sufficient for success, then the landscape of educational reform would not be littered with frustrated leaders and policymakers who noticed that, after rendering a decision about something that seemed momentous, absolutely nothing happened in the classroom. The board adopted academic standards and solemnly vowed that all children would meet them. Nothing happened in the classroom. The superintendent announced a new vision statement, along with core values and an organizational mission that the entire staff would enthusiastically chant. Nothing happened in the classroom. Millions were spent on new technology. Nothing happened in the classroom. Staff development programs were adopted so that teachers, like circus animals, would be “trained” to perform new feats. Although seats were dutifully warmed during countless trainings, nothing happened in the classroom. Frustrated by these organizational failures, policymakers finally got tough and decided that accountability was the answer. School systems and individual buildings were rated, ranked, sorted, and humiliated. Sanctions, including job loss or reassignment, and rewards, including thousands of dollars in bonuses, were offered as alternating sticks and carrots, as accountability policies were reduced to artlessly wielded blunt instruments. Yet despite the rhetoric, threats, and promises, nothing happened in the classroom.

This book is not about achieving compliance through a combination of threat and guile. Rather, this book begins with the fundamental premise that educators and school leaders want to be successful. Moreover, these professionals are more than a little weary at the prospect of implementing one more program, particularly when it is placed on top of other “proven” programs within the same time constraints. What this book provides is not an external prescription for success, but rather a method for creating your own prescriptions based on your own data, your own observations, and your own documentation of your most effective practices. Oscar Wilde exaggerated only slightly when he said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” This does not mean that I reject external research and formal study. On the contrary, I rely heavily on the foundational work of such leading scholars as Robert Marzano (2003) and his groundbreaking synthesis of 35 years of educational research. My colleagues at the Center for Performance Assessment and I have tried to contribute a few pebbles to the mountain of research on school effectiveness. But without application in the classroom, our efforts are in vain.

Two paths lead to the effective application of research. The first is ham-handed prescription in which the carefully nuanced ideas of researchers become mutated into the delivery of a script, an enterprise that would be much more successful were it not for the inconvenient involvement of humans. The second is a process of inquiry, discovery, and personal application. In the first process, teachers in exasperation say, “Just tell us what to do!” In the second process, teachers say, “Let's try it, test it, reflect on it, and refine it. We need to make this work for our students and we need to recognize that this is a school, not a factory.” Thus this book introduces “student-centered accountability” as a constructive alternative to the data gathering and reporting systems that now masquerade as educational accountability.

A fair question is why teachers should be involved in accountability at all. After all, isn't educational accountability something that is traditionally “done to” teachers? Their role, tradition has it, is to carry out the orders of the central office. Here is the great irony: more real accountability occurs when teachers actively participate in the development, refinement, and reporting of accountability. Call it the prescription paradox. Leaders engage in prescription because they believe that it will create greater accountability. In fact, the greater the prescription, the less real accountability that ensues. “Sure, we'll do it,” the teachers respond. But they implement the prescription with neither enthusiasm nor engagement. The students require mere nanoseconds to pick up on the uncertainty and cynicism of some of the most trusted adults in their lives, the teachers. Less prescription surely suggests a risk. Without prescription, variation will occur, as well as inconsistencies and personal judgments. The absence of prescription will also allow moments of discovery, enthusiasm, dedication, sharing of successes, and relentless persistence despite extraordinary challenges. The flip side of the prescription paradox is that with less prescription, there is genuine accountability. There is, in a phrase, accountability for learning.