SABER’s domain of school autonomy and accountability: A critique

• In Event: The World Bank’s SABER: critical analyses of assumptions, operations, and consequences

Proposal

Accountability is a very complex, debated, and nuanced set of ideas, yet SABER treats it as unproblematic. The SABER framework paper (Demas and Arcia, 2015) begins by referring to the World Bank’s (2003) World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People, which argued that there are two “routes” to accountability – the “long route,” in which citizens exercised oversight indirectly through government politicians and policy-makers and their connections to the bureaucracies and administrators of service delivery organizations, and the “short route,” in which citizens as consumers exercised direct influence on service delivery organizations.
SABER adopts the short route idea to offer a simplistic accountability-as-information framework that adds assessment of students to the mix. Assessment plus school autonomy with suitable local governing structures, such as school councils, then becomes the way in which accountability is conceived and ensured, and all of SABER’s recommendations for “best practice” come from this framework.
However, it is clear from the voluminous literature on alternative ways to frame and operationalize accountability that SABER’s framework is ideologically biased. Accountability has been conceived of as social, political, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, mutual, deliberative, professional, and more, each implying different foci for practice. For example, UNESCO’s (2017) Global Education Monitoring Report treats accountability as not only focused on schools, but on all stakeholders in education, including government, teachers, parents, students, international organizations, and the private sector.

Author

• Hang Minh Le, University of Maryland