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EDUCAT ONAL LEADERSH P

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February 20151 Volume 721 Number 5
Improving Schools: What Works? Pages 66-70

Commentary I Needed: An Updated Accountability Model

Marc Tucker
We won't get the results we need until we treat teachers as true professionals.
If you're in charge and someone who works for you isn't doing the job you hired them to do, you hold them accountable .
If you point out that they're not delivering and they still don't buckle down, you get someone who will do the job. Simple,
right?
It must have seemed that simple to the framers of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001. They were angry people, both
Republicans and Democrats. For years, leaders of both parties had poured more and more money into federal
programs for disadvantaged students, at a rate greatly exceeding the increases in Inflation ; yet the improvements in
reading performance, for the student population as a whol e and for disadvantaged students in particular, had been
modest or flat. It appeared that the money had gone down a rat hole , and Congress was ready to hold schools
accountable. Under NCLB, the money for school improvement would still flow, but if the students were not on track to
reach full proficiency by 2014, schools could be closed, principals could be replaced, and teachers could be fired. It
was time, Congress thought, to get tough.
Accountability became the nation's top school improvement strategy. When NCLB was passed, that accountability fell
on the school. When the Obama administration implemented Race to the Top in 2009, that target shifted; now teachers
would be held accountable on the basis of their students' scores on standardized tests of basic skills.
NCLB marked a sea change in the relationship between government and education in the United States. Up to that
point, it had been clear that the states were in charge of education policy, with the federal government providing aid to
the states. Now the federal government was in the driver's seat, and It was determined to make sure that it got value for
its money.
It hasn't worked out very well. After 1Oyears of test-based accountability, test scores are still flat. There's no indication
that the performance of disadvantaged stud ents is improving (Jennings, 2013); one nation after another is surpassing
the United States in the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) rankings of student performance; and
we're still among the handful of nations with the highest cost per student in elementary and secondary education in the
world (Orga nisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013).
It would be bad enough if this strategy just hadn't worked. But ifs worse than that. Good .teachers are leaving our
schools in droves, citing test-based accountability as a principal cause (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014).
Applications to school s of education are plummeting (Sawchuk, 2014 ), in part for the same reason. One can
reasonably argue that test-based accountability not only has failed to make things better, but has actually made things
much worse.

An Obsolete Model
I believe the problem is not the idea of accountability per se, but rather the model of accountability we are using. That

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model is grounded in a theory of industrial management that may have made sense a century ago, but no longer
makes any sense at all.
Factory work in the early decades of the 20th century was dirty, dangerous, exhausting, and often just plain boring. Few
jobs required much skill or craftsmanship. To meet the needs of the Industrial economy, school s were only expected to
educate their students to basic literacy stand ards. School districts hired superintendents to manage school s in th e
same way that much-admired industrialists managed their companies. There was no reason to go to the expense of
educating teachers to university standards; the assumption was that quantity was much more important than quality
and that docile and cheap teachers, told what to do by management, would be able to do the job.
Following World War 11, the common schools became less common. As the suburbs developed, far more was invested
in the sons and daughters of the wealthy, who got excellent teachers and the best facilities and were expected to go on
to fill the professions and run government and private enterprise. The kids in working-class communities got the basic
skills, which was enough to give them a ticket to the growing middle class. Although the sons and daughters of former
American slaves, American Indians, and others were largely denied access to decent schools, the system as a whole
was very efficient, producing a remarkably successful country for the majority of its citizens.
By the 1970s, however, events in the global economy would render the cheap-teacher model obsolete. Employers the
world over were discovering that they could produce goods and services wherever they could get the least-expensive
workers at the skill level needed to do the work. Global labor markets developed. At the same time, advances in
technology were making it possible to automate the routine jobs that had provided employment to millions of
Americans a century ago-the very jobs the education system had been designed around.
The result has been a disaster for working Americans who bring only basic literacy to the labor force. The skills they
offer often make them unemployable or only employable at poverty wages. As a result, the mass education system,
which was designed to produce graduates with only those skills, is obsolete. We now need a system that can produce
far better-educated graduates, people whose work cannot be automated or shipped overseas. For the first time in the
history of the United States, the future depends on educating a// children to standards previously reserved for only a
select few.
That goal simply cannot be met with the cheap-teacher industrial model. It can only be accomplished by highly trained
teachers who are tru sted to exercise their judgment and who are treated as true professionals. And this new model is
precisely what the world's top-performing education systems have adopted.

A Little Theory
What does all this history have to do with accountability? Everything. It's all about assumptions.
A century ago, few jobs were intrinsically rewarding. Most managers, not unreasonably, assumed that workers would
slow down and shirk their responsibilities unless employeIrs held them strictly accountable for the number of hours they
worked and the number of widgets they produced. Workers, these managers assumed, would need close supervision
and strong extrinsic incentives to perform.
In 1960, Douglas McGregor, an MIT professor, ca lled that assumption ''Theory X." He posited that managers could
make a di fferent assumption- that workers are ambitious, are willing to work hard, want to take pride in their work, and
with some encouragement can be very creative. McGregor thought the managers he was training would get a lot more
out of their workers if they embraced this assumption, which he called "Theory Y."
Almost a decad e later, in The Age of Discontinuity, Peter Drucker (1969) said that the future belonged to countries that
hired knowledge workers to do knowledge work. Unllke blue-collar workers, who expected a fair day's pay for a fair
day's work, knowl edge workers expected an extraordinary day's pay for an extraordin ary day's work. Instea d of
needing to be closely supervised, knowl edg e workers appli ed a wealth of knowl edge and skill to solve unique
problems.
Recently, in Drive, Daniel Pink (2011) pulled together the literatu re th at stands on the should ers of Drucker's iconic
book. The old carrot-and- stick methods that industrial engin eers developed a century ago, he said, don't work
anymore. Today's highly educated, professional workers n1;ied to be abl e to find meaning in the ir work, autonomy on
the job, and the opportunity to continually develop new skills and conquer new challenges. They're capable of great
things, bu t only if they're treated as professio nals.

From Theory to School Practice

In the fie ld of public education, implementing Theory Y would requ ire a whole new approach to the teach ing
profession. We'll need to attract the most high-performi ng high school graduates into teaching. For that to happen, we'll
need to make teaching a high-status profession . Colleges of education will need to be a lot harder to get into, teachers
will need to have deep understanding of the subjects they teach, and they will have to spend a lot of lime masterlng
their craft under the tutelage of master teachers. The standards for student performance will have to go way beyond
basic skills, and the tests we use to measure the acquisition of those skills will have to capture a far wider range of
student performance than the cheap, computer-scored, multiple-choice tests we have used for a long time.

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In addition to these necessary changes, we need to transform the way we manage our schools. The essential
ingredient of the new model of accountability is career ladders leading to the position of master teacher, a position that
pays as much as school principal. For the first time, this would make it possible for teachers to have a real career in
teaching and to earn the kind of recognition, status, pay, authority, and responsibility that members of all the high-status
professions get if they make the enormous effort to stay at the top of their game throughout their professional lifetime.
When advancement depends on increasing professional competence rather than time on the job, when the job a
teacher has on the last day in the classroom is no longer the same job that teacher had on his or her first day in the
classroom, when people know that the person who leads other teachers in their work in the school not only received a
rigorous university education but also worked to get better and better at his or her craft, when a beginning teacher's pay
is comparable to a beginning engineer's and goes up only as a teacher goes up the career ladder-then, and only
then, will we be able to attract to our schools large numbers of young employees that Google would have been proud
to recruit. The top-performing countries do this at a fraction of our cost (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2013).
The way a school implements career ladders matters. Most of the top-performing nations have teacher-pupil ratios
comparable to ours, but they have larger class sizes (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
2012). Teachers spend about a quarter of their time working collaboratively with one another, rather than facing
students in the classroom. In the best of these systems, all teachers, except those at the top of the career ladder, have
mentors.
In many countries-among them Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore-teachers meet frequently, often
weekly, by grade and by subject taught. Teachers in the upper ranks of the career ladder put teams of teachers
together and lead them. These teams analyze the data on student performance, figure out what's working and what's
not, determine what priorities they want to work on, do extensive research about the issue, develop new units of
curriculum or new approaches to instruction on the basis of the research, and build prototypes of the new approaches.
Master teachers demonstrate the new lesson or teaching technique while other teachers critique them, and then they
all go back to work to perfect it until they get it right. They repeat the same process, over and over again, in other areas
where the data suggest they could improve. They are continually in one another's classrooms, taking notes and talking
with one another about what they've seen (Tucker, 2011; 2014a).
This model provides the structured feedback-not from mentors alone, but from many colleagues, all the time-that is
essential to becoming an expert in any field (Tucker, 2014b ). Everyone knows who is a spectacular teacher, who is
getting better, who is trying but is not likely to improve, and who has given up. The spectacular teachers and those who
are getting steadily better go up the career ladder, and the ones at the bottom feel compelled to leave.
Being a good teacher is essential to progress up the ladder, but it's not enough. One also has to show that one is a
good mentor and leader of others. Slackers don't survive in this environment. That outcome is not decreed and
enforced by school administrators or by policymakers-it's the result of a professional culture in which every
professional is accountable to the other professionals.

A Different Kind of Accountability

The United States has been trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip. It has been unable to improve its schools, despite
enormous increases in spending, because it has failed to recognize that the management model it adopted 100 years
ago to meet the education needs of a burgeoning industrial society has exhausted its usefulness. This model cannot
produce the results we now require, no matter how much money we throw at it. We need another model of schooling
with its own form of accountability-one that can get the best out of true professionals.
The model I have just described is a professional development system, an accountability system, and a continual
improvement system. It is a professional development system embedded in the way the school is organized and does
its work. It is a model of how accountability works in a professional, not a blue-collar, work environment. It is
spectacularly successful at improving both professional competence and student performance. What is the biggest
difference between this system and test-based accountability? This system works.

References
Drucker, P. (1969). The age of discontinuity: Guidelines to our changing society. New York: Harper.
Ingersoll, R., Merrill, L., & Stuckey, D. (2014). Seven trends: The transformation of the teaching force (CPRE Research
Report# RR-80). Philadelphia, PA: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.
Jennings, J. (2013, December 19). Are current school reforms imperiling long-term gains? Huffington Post. Retrieved
from [Link]-jennmgs/are-current-schoolreform b 44687 4 7 .htm
McGregor, D. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Center for Educational Research and Innovation. (2013).
Education at a glance 2013. Retrieved from [Link] /eag-2013-en

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2012, November). How does class size vary around the
world? Educator Indicators in Focus, 9. Retrieved from www .[Link]/edu/skills-beyond-school/EDIF%202012-
N9%[Link]
Pink, D. (2011 ). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead.
Sawchuk, S. (2014, October 21 ). Steep drops seen in teacher-prep enrollment numbers. Education Week. Retrieved
from [Link]<.org/ew/articles/2014/10/22/09enroll .[Link]
Tucker, M. (2011 ). Surpassing Shanghai: An agenda for American education built on the world's leading systems.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Tucker, M. (Ed.). (2014a). Chinese lessons: Shanghai's rise to the top ofthe PISA league tables. Washington, DC:
National Center on Education and the Economy. Retrieved from
www .ncee .orq/wpcon ten t/u ploads/2013/10/ChineselessonsWeb .pdf
Tucker, M. (2014b, September 10). Tucker's lens: Dylan Wiliam on feedback and improving the practice of teachers.
Retrieved from the Center on International Education Benchmarking at [Link]/2014/09/luckers-lens-dylan­
wil iarn-on-feedback-and-improving-the-practlce-of-leachers

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the
2014 NCEE report Fixing Our National Accountability System.

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