What’s in a Word? Meanings of Educational Accountability in a Postmodern Age

• In Event: Performance Management and Performance Information

Abstract

Accountability is central to democratic legitimacy. From John Locke through The Federalist Papers to the present, public actors have deemed officials and policies legitimate in part based on whether they faced procedures requiring that they account for their actions and consequent results. Accountability is a focus of policy and scholarly debates regarding government activities in general, and education initiatives in particular. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was billed as ushering in a new age of accountability in public education.
What does accountability mean in the postmodern administrative state? Behn (2001) describes multiple forms of accountability, including accountability for performance, law and ethics, transparency, politics, process and procedure, and finances. Typically, financial and procedural accountability trump other forms, particularly accountability for actual performance. Civil service systems also render it difficult to hold officials accountable for performance. Political appointees in theory can be accountable for performance failings (Bearfield, 2009), though this may prove merely symbolic, especially in a postmodern age in which the activities of government are interpreted through ideological lenses.
Accountability models in economics and political science (Moe, 1984) endorse intertwined assumptions that performance matters, that accountability holders have sufficient information regarding performance, and that they retain means to hold officials accountable for performance, if necessary by termination. Do these accountability models operate in the academic field of Education? Regarding schooling, some school boards and superintendents have structured nontransparent reporting practices and elections to evade performance accountability (Berry & Howell, 2005; Polka & Litchka, 2008), and education intellectuals (Glass, 2008) defend such practices. Accordingly, we study how the academic fields of Education and Public Administration define accountability.
Our purpose is both descriptive and analytic. Descriptively, we seek to establish how often and how accountability is portrayed by scholars of public administration and education policy. Analytically, we seek to test the hypothesis that scholars of education policy are less likely to conceptualize accountability as having employment consequences than are scholars of public administration. We conducted a computer search of the titles and abstracts from the universe of articles in 2000-16 in the five highest impact journals in the public administration field and the two highest in the education discipline, according to the rating site Scrimago. Our search identified all articles that used the term accountability in their titles or abstracts. The five public administration journals included were Public Administration Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Educational Administration Quarterly, and Governance. The two education journals, which publish more articles per issue than the top public administration journals, were American Educational Research Journal and Educational Researcher. We content-analyzed all of the accountability-themed articles identified, coding them regarding which meaning of accountability each study used and whether said use involved the possibility of employment termination. Inter-coder reliability checks were used to gauge and promote the accuracy of the codings.
For the Public Administration journals studied, 95 out of a total of 2,315 articles (4%) employed the term accountability, often in multiple ways, with 60% referring to performance 51% to transparency, 38% to procedural accountability, 18% to legal accountability, 16% to financial accountability, and 3% to market accountability. A striking 47% of the public administration articles on accountability referred to possible job loss, while 11% did not define the term. For education journals, 58 out of 1,100 articles (5%) addressed accountability, with 86% referring to procedural accountability, 83% to performance, 72% to transparency, 52% to organizational sanctions, 5% to legal accountability, 5% to financial accountability, 2% to democratic accountability, and 2% to internal accountability. Only 14% of the education journal articles on accountability referred to possible job loss as an aspect of accountability and 14% failed to define it.
Our study suggests that the academic field of education defines accountability differently than do politicians, voters, and other stakeholders. While the latter commonly define accountability as a relationship between performance outcomes and job tenure, as an academic field education defines accountability in procedural manners less likely to drive output improvements. This may be one reason why accountability based strategies for school improvement have produced so far modest results, at best.

Authors

• Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas

• Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas