Striking a Balance with School Accountability:Design and Use of Progress Reports and Quality Reviews in New York City.

School Accountability;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

McMahon, Kelly AnnePeurach, Donald Joseph ;

University of Michigan

关键词: School Accountability;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113332/kmcmahon_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In recent decades, people have turned increasingly to accountability to fix schools.Amidst mounting demands for improved student outcomes, states and school districts are trying to determine how best to apply pressure and provide support.Yet, it remains unclear which strategy will produce desirable changes in teaching and stronger schools. In New York City, in 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein set in motion a series of reforms to overhaul New York City’s school system.These leaders sought innovation and improved performance – neither of which could be achieved evenly across schools under the former system.They pursued these goals through a variety of instruments including a novel accountability scheme. In 2007, the New York City Department of Education designed and implemented two unconventional accountability instruments, the Progress Reports and Quality Reviews.In addition, they created a market for the Children First Networks, external support organizations that were meant to provide targeted supports.The networks were held accountable for school outcomes, as well.This unconventional accountability scheme was meant to change outcomes, as well as, the conditions and processes involved in school improvement efforts.The three studies in this dissertation explore the conceptual underpinnings of accountability as a reform strategy and the case of New York City’s novel approach.I conducted an exploratory study of New York City’s accountability tools and the networks’ use of these tools in the service of school improvement, which draws on data from sixty-eight interviews, more than ninety hours of observation and stacks of internal documents and external reports about the reforms that took place over more than a decade in the country’s largest school district.New York City’s accountability scheme involved a novel attempt to balance pressure and support for school improvement from which we can learn about school accountability as a strategy for school improvement and system reform.The principle lesson from this study is that researchers and designers should avoid looking for whether balance is achieved and consider, instead, how a district attempts to strike the right balance and learn from its efforts.