Educational Goods and Accountability

• In Event: 60.056 - A Role for Quality Improvement in U.S. Educational Accountability?

Abstract

To improve educational quality and accountability, one must start with a clear conception of the goals of education. To that end, in a current book project, we (Harry Brighouse, Helen Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift), introduce the term “educational goods” to signify the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions that enable an individual to flourish and to contribute to the flourishing of others. The adjective “educational’ signifies that these goods emerge from an educational process that includes schooling but is far broader. The term “goods” simply indicates that they are all positively valued. While the ultimate goal is flourishing, we make the concept of educational goods more useful by specifying the various capacities that most people would agree contribute to flourishing. These include, for example, the cognitive skills and knowledge that are valuable in the workplace, the orientations that would make students good citizens, and the dispositions and attitudes that lead to personal fulfillment and the ability to treat others as moral equals. We supplement the concept of educational goods with the concept of “childhood goods” because childhood is itself a significant part of a person’s life, and the quality of a childhood is intrinsically important, independently of its consequences for the quality of the adulthood that follows.

Within our framework, educational accountability should serve to promote the production of educational goods with attention to their distribution and also to the production of childhood goods. In the context of administrative systems such as test-based or school inspection systems, variation occurs because policy makers make different judgments about what they believe schools can and should be pressed to do, and because of what can easily be measured. As a result, particular accountability systems are likely to favor certain educational goods over others with the possibility that other educational goods may not just be ignored but in fact may be harmed.
I use the concept of educational and childhood goods to evaluate the two main types of administrative school accountability systems. In doing so, I will draw on my knowledge of inspectorate systems in New Zealand and the Netherlands, as well as of test-based accountability in the United States. The bottom line is that if education policy makers are concerned about flourishing and its distribution, as we believe they should be, they will need to be attentive to the broad range of educational goods as they design a system for holding schools accountable. That will most likely require some combination of outcomes-based accountability and a review process that attends to internal school processes. How much weight should be placed on each component will depend both on the value that policy makers place on different types of educational goods as well as on the investments they are willing to make to assure the components work well. Neither a test-based system without good tests closely linked to a rich curriculum taught by well trained teachers nor an inspection system without professionally trained inspectors will further the generation of educational goods.

Author

• Helen F. Ladd, Duke University