Agentic teacher accountability; a conceptual framework for comparative research

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Accountability systems in education often have the improvement of learning outcomes as their primary goal (Anderson, 2005; De Grauwe, 2007). Previous school effectiveness studies emphasize the role of teachers and the quality of their teaching in a student’s academic attainment (Scheerens, 2014; Barber and Mourshed, 2007). Their accountability therefore lies at the heart of improving learning outcomes. For an accountability approach to improve the outcomes of learners it must support and enable teachers to offer high-quality education, reduce the likelihood of harmful or inequitable practices, and have means to identify and correct problems that may occur (Darling-Hammond and Snyder (2015, p.3).

Efforts to enhance accountability in education often focus primarily on improving what can be counted and verified, such as curriculum material covered or number of hours taught per subject. Honig and Pritchett (2019) term such narrow approaches ‘accounting-based accountability’. Effective accountability systems however set high expectations and provide rich feedback around a wider set of teaching-level variables that contribute to high learning outcomes: ‘time and opportunity to learn’, ‘classroom management’, ‘structured teaching’, ‘teaching and learning strategies’, and ‘feedback and monitoring’ (Scheerens, 2014; Reynolds et al., 2014). Examples of such systems vary from school inspections where teachers are observed by external assessors who evaluate the quality of their teaching, high stakes tests where the performance of their students are aggregated to provide a measure of their quality, or more horizontal approaches of peer review. Although many of these systems are oriented towards an evaluation of the school, rather than an individual teacher, they often find their way into school-based teacher performance reviews and policies and thereby hold teachers accountability for their work against externally defined standards.

The quality of teaching cannot be easily captured in a set of top-down controls or set of standardized measures. Teaching is, as Glazer and Mehta (2020) describe, a ‘public profession’ rather than an occupation or craft where one follows a script or set of predefined tasks; it requires discretion based on schooled knowledge, experience and moral judgement to do good work for all learners alike. Honig and Pritchett (2019) similarly argue that education and high-quality teaching are ‘thick’; they serve many desirable, mutually interacting goals and require numerous interactions between learners, teachers and content.

These goals and interactions are hard to regulate and standardize in a set of predefined indicators and targets as teachers need to be able to dynamically respond to learner needs and school and community contexts to teach well. External accountability approaches need to enable and support their professional capacity around an ambitious vision of teaching and learning and a strong set of professional norms to improve learners’ outcomes. In turn, teachers who have professional capacity will, by definition of being a professional, take active responsibility for the quality of their work and for being accountable for their students’ learning. This mindset and related behaviours of being a ‘professional’ is quite distinct from those that have been qualified as ‘worker’ (Ehren et al, 2019): teachers who position themselves as functionaries at the bottom of the bureaucratic pecking order, tasked to fulfil administrative directives, maintain detailed administrative records and maximize pass rates. These teachers would focus on fulfilling administrative directives, such as focusing on syllabus completion and covering the curriculum, rather than trying to progress student learning and wellbeing. How teachers are held accountable and the wider regulatory context in which they work importantly shapes their mindsets, behaviours and orientations, often indirectly.

Carnoy et al (2003) for example talk about how educational accountability systems do not directly cause schools to increase the quality of student learning and academic performance. According to these authors (p.190) they, at best, set in motion a complex chain of events that will result in improved learning and performance where schools construct their own conceptions of accountability: to whom they are accountable, for what and how. Westhorp et al (2014) and Eddy-Spicer et al (2016) mention the various relevant school-level conditions which influence such conceptions and chains of events. Systematic literature reviews conducted by Ehren et al (2016) and Eddy-Spicer et al (2016) focusing on school inspections, monitoring and assessment in low and middle income countries point to a school’s innovation capacity, improvement culture and level of resources as factors which mediate the outcomes of various accountability interventions, both positive and negative.

System-level conditions are also relevant and described by Anderson (2005) and Hooge et al (2012). According to these authors, educators work mostly within three types of accountability systems, often simultaneously. In the first (compliance-oriented) system, they are held accountable for adherence to rules and accountable to the bureaucracy. The second (professional accountability) system is based upon adherence to professional norms where educators are held accountable by their peers, such as through peer review, whereas in the third (performance-based accountability), educators are accountable for student learning and outcomes to the general public. The various concepts reflect different types of relations in terms of who holds whom to account, the types of measures and evaluations to inform these relations, the judgements and decisions from these evaluations and the resulting consequences. Borgonovi and Burns (2015) also talk about trust-related social norms and wider structures of coordination and knowledge governance on how accountability is enacted in schools. We expect these structures to have a profound effect on how teachers conceptualize their role and respective responsibilities and how they interpret their accountability with more or less professional agency.

This session first presents our conceptual framework which describes the multileveled nature of teacher agency and teacher accountability and how these are shaped by the school and system context in which teachers work. We then illustrate the framework with findings from recent studies in South Africa, India, Nepal, Honduras, Afghanistan and Pakistan to answer the following question comparatively:

What are the conditions by which teachers take active agency in their professional accountability instead of passively complying to external standards?

Sub Unit

• Teacher Education and the Teaching Profession SIG

Chair

• melanie Ehren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Individual Presentations

• Agency in teacher accountability; a conceptual framework for comparative analysis - melanie Ehren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• The regulatory context of teacher accountability: how unions, external standards and national policies influence teacher professionalism - melanie Ehren, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Erin Murphy-Graham, University of California Berkeley; jean-Francois Trani, Washington University in St. Louis; Artemio Arturo Cortez Ochoa, University of Bristol, UK

Discussant

• Yue-yi Hwa, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford