HENRY S.

DYER

Henry S. Dyer, holder of S.B., Ed.M., and Ed.D. degrees from

Harvard, served as school and college teacher and college admin
istrator before joining the Educational Testing Service as vice
president in 1954. He remained in this post sixteen years, served
an additional year as senior adviser, and retired in June, 1972.
During his career in educational testing Henry Dyer held the
positions of director of the office of tests at Harvard University
and associate director of the College Entrance Examination Board.
 HOW TO ACHIEVE ACCOUNTABILITY
IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

By H y S. Dyer,
vice pr Sl&nt, retired,
Ed n stoi.og,Service

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-76470

Copyright© 1973 by the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation,
Bloomington, Indiana
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 0 oo 00 oo 00 00 0 00 000 00 00 00 0 oo 0 oo 0 00 00 0 0 000 00 00 0 000 00 00 00 00 0 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 00 00 0 0 0 00 0 7

The Four Aspects 0 oo o 00 0 o oo o oo 0 0 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 00 00 000 0 0 000 0 00 0 0 00 0 0 0 00 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 0 00 0 0 0 00 00 0 00 0 9

Accountability for Cash oo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo 9
Accountability for Things oo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo 11
Accountability for Deeds 0 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 0 14
Accountability for Results OOoOOOOOoo oo oooo oo oooo oo oooOOOOOOOOooo oo oooo oo oooo oo oooo oo 19

Information Problems 0 0 00 0 0 00 0 00 00 0 0 00 00 0 0 000 00 000 000 0 000 00 00 000 0 000 00 00 0 0 00 0 0 00 00 000 0 0 00 0 27

The Problem of Scope 0 oooo oo oooo oo oo ooo oo oooo oo oooo oo oooo oo oooo o ooOOOoOOOo 0000 0 000 00 27
The Problem of Sources OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoOOOO:oOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoOoO

30
The Data Reduction Problem Ooo oOOOoOOOOoOOOOOOOoOOOOOOoooo oo oooo oo ooo ooo oo oooo o 32

Constants and Variables of Teacher Accountability o oo oooo oo ooo ooo ooo ooo o 35
Accountability to Whom? OOOOOo OOoo ooo oOoOoOooOOOOOOOOOOOooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo 35
Accountability for What? ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo oo 38
Minimum Requirements-The Constants 00 000 000 000 00 0000 00 00 0000 00 000 00 39
Good Works-The Variables OOOOoOOOOOOOOOOOOOoOOOOoOOooooooooOOOOOOOOoOOOOOoOOOO 41
 INTRODUCTION

The term accountability has lately become attached to so many

different schemes for the conduct of instruction and the man
agement of schools that it is in danger of losing any usefulness
as a means of rational communication. It figures prominently in
discussions related to community control of the schools. It is in
voked as one of the goals to be achieved through such devices
as performance contracting, education vouchers, merit pay, and
differentiated staffing. It turns up in controversies over teacher
tenure and in bargaining over contracts between school boards
and teachers' unions. It is a theme that runs through much of
the theorizing that seeks to apply to school administration the
techniques packaged under labels like "planning-programming
budgeting," "cost-effectiveness," and "management by objectives."
This diversity of usage underlines an important fact: account
ability is not a simple concept. It is one that encompasses a num
ber of distinct though closely interwoven elements. Each element
must be seen in the context of all the others if the whole notion
of accountability is not to become just another short-lived slogan
in the rhetoric of education.
Accordingly, in the first part of this essay I shall try to develop
an overall perspective on educational accountability by examining
what I consider to be its four main aspects: accountability for
cash, accountability for things, accountability for deeds, and ac
countability for results. The purpose of my analysis is to focus on
some of the major assumptions implicit in the principle of ac
countability in order to show the kinds of operational problems
they can generate.

1
 In the middle part of the essay I shall briefly discuss a perva
sive problem that must be continually in mind if the principle of
accountability is ever to become as functional in education as
one might hope. This is the problem of providing the flow of in
formation necessary to keep the public adequately informed and
school systems adequately responsive to the needs of students
and the needs of society.
In the last section I shall attempt to put all the pieces of the
puzzle together by examining the role of the individual teacher,
because this is the person in whom any effort to make educa
tional accountability workable must begin and end.
Throughout the discussion I shall take note of two tendencies
that appear to be working at cross-purposes in the effort to hold
educators accountable. On the one hand, there is the tendency to
force all units of the educational system into rigidly uniform opera
tional patterns to provide the linkages among the units that seem
necessary in a fluid and technologically interdependent society.
On the other hand, there is the tendency to give each unit, how
ever small, a free hand to work out its own destiny in light of the
needs and aspirations peculiar to the students and the community
that the unit is attempting to serve.
In my view, the principle of accountability, if seen as a whole
and if properly implemented, offers the chief hope of reconciling
these opposing tendencies.
 THE FOUR ASPECTS

Accountability is a principle with deep historical roots. It is an

idea that has informed the organization and conduct of all kinds
of institutions in which people have come together to achieve
benefits for themselves and for others.
One can find it more or less at work in the city-states of an
cient Greece and the nation-states of the present era; in the craft
guilds of the Middle Ages and modern industrial corporations; in
church bodies, labor unions, philanthropical soCieties, and politi
cal parties, and in educational institutions as far back as they are
traceable in the annals of man.
The success of all these different types of institutions has de
pended in large part on the degree to which the people in them
have grasped the essential nature of accountability in its various
meanings and have been able and willing to devise the instru
ments and abide by the procedures for giving it effect.

Accountability for Cash

Current discussions of educational accountability sometimes omit

the core of the accountability concept: namely, the keeping and
rendering of financial accounts. To be accountable, in the first
instance, has meant, and still means, counting the cash. Financial
information must be accurate and easy to interpret. It must an
swer these questions: Where are the institutional funds coming
from? Where are they going? Is the money being honestly and
wisely used in the interest of those whom the institution is sup
posed to be serving? Questions like these must be answered in
any kind of social institution, whether public or private, large or
small, whether organized for educating the young, making and
selling automobiles, enacting public laws, providing health care,
or delivering the mail.
In the matter of financial accountability there are at least three
basic assumptions that suggest a paradigm for the notion of ac
countability in general. These assumptions are: (1) that the in
formation furnished by the institutional accounts will be accurate;
(2) that the information will be readily accessible to anyone
who
has a legitimate interest in the conduct of the institution; and
(3) that the information will be so organized and presented as
to be truly representative of the institution's condition at any
point in time.
If these three assumptions fail in any particular, the institu
tion will probably be in serious trouble as a going enterprise. At
least some of the troubles encountered by school districts these
days are traceable to the fact that the data on which the schools
must rely for assessing their financial condition are often inac
curate, hard to come by, and something less than truly repre
sentative of the way matters stand. Cost overruns in school sys
tems have been no less distressing to the local citizenry than
cost overruns that have bedeviled some defense contractors. A
case in point is the difficulty the federal government has in ex
tracting from some school districts an adequate accounting of
funds dispensed under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965.
To a certain extent the inadequacies of school accounting can
probably be attributed to outright cheating; to conscious attempts
to cover up improper uses of money and commingling of funds
obtained from different sources. To some extent accounting de
ficiencies are probably also attributable to an honest fear on
the part of local personnel that, if they display financial infor
mation in too much detail, they invite unwarranted and unwise
intrusion into the making of local administrative decisions.
But there is good reason to believe that the accounts of school
systems often leave much to be desired simply because school
officials lack the expertise to cope with the task. For it is a task
that is peculiarly complicated by the multiple sources of school
funds, combined with the multiple special purposes for which
they are intended.
10
 It is hardly surprising that school administrators, despite all the
good theory about program budgeting, cost-benefit analysis, and
the like, find it extraordinarily difficult to show unmistakably
what is happening to the many different types of educational
dollars that pass through their hands-federal tax dollars, state
tax dollars, local tax dollars, football gate receipts, pupils' lunch
money, collections for the Red Cross, and so on. This problem is
especially acute in state and large city systems, but it is not un
known to small systems as well. Thus, until there is a wider dis
tribution of practical know-how for tackling the problem, genuine
financial accountability in education is likely to remain more of
a promise than an active principle.

Accountability for Things

Accountability also means counting and accounting for the in

numerable things that educational dollars buy-books, buildings,
pencils, audio-visual aids, furniture, laboratory equipment, band
instruments, and so on ad infinitum.
Accountability for things begins with accurate inventories, and
because of the large number and variety of persons among whom
the things are distributed-students, teachers, secretaries, cus
todial personnel-the keeping of good inventories is a problem
of considerable magnitude. Indeed, it is so large a problem that
efforts to cope with it have not been unknown to get in the way
of the educational uses for which the things are intended. The
classic example is the school library where the books are kept
locked up most of the time, and the prime concern seems to be the
preservation of the books rather than the encouragement of stu
dent reading.
But accountability for things implies a good deal more than
keeping up-to-date inventories. It also involves the notion that
the things of a school are common property intended for com
mon use.
This has some interesting implications. Consider, for instance,
the accountability of the student who borrows a book from the
school library. The book is not "his" book and it is not "their"
book; it belongs to the whole educational community of which
the student is a member. He is therefore accountable for the book

1
in several ways. He is expected to return it on time and in good
condition so that others may use it. He should not borrow the
book in the first place unless he has a real need for it, lest he
deprive others whose need may be urgent; and while the book is
in his hands, he should actually use it. If he loses or damages the
book, he is obliged to replace it or to furnish a well-substantiated
explanation that the loss or damage was not his fault. In this
latter connection he should, in his own interest, make sure that
the book is in good condition before it is signed out to him.
We assume that underlying these considerations is an enforce
ment procedure that requires the student to pay a penalty if he
fails to meet his obligations in regard to the book. And this leads
to a further consideration that must be strongly emphasized as
we round out the idea of accountability for the things of educa
tion: before the transaction takes place, the school librarian, or
someone else clearly designated, has an obligation to the student
to make sure that he understands all the rules and regulations
under which he is to be held accountable for the book he borrows.
This parable of the library book illustrates seven points hav-
ing to do with accountability for school things in general:
1. Before anything, from buildings to pencils, is acquired
by the schools, someone in the system should be obliged
to determine that the item to be purchased will meet a gen
uine need of the system. Since there are always competing
needs and competing opinions about which needs are the
most urgent, such a determination is often extraordinarily
difficult. Nevertheless, it is a determination that must be
made by somebody, and whoever makes it has a responsi
bility for acting on the basis of the best evidence he can
assemble on the probable uses to which the item will be
put.
2. Similarly, whoever is responsible for acquiring the item
must also be responsible for making sure that the item is
in good condition before it is accepted. This would seem
to be routine, but when schools find themselves with equip
ment that is forever breaking down or wearing out or be
ing used up before its time, we can only infer that some
where along the line the routine has failed, and the prin
ciple of accountability for things has not been working.
 3. Following the acquisition of anything, there is an obli
gation on the part of various persons in the system to make
sure that it is used to good purpose. When new books lie
idle on the shelves or in cartons, when film projectors ga
ther dust in the basement, when school buildings are
empty more than half the time they could be profitably
occupied, it is reasonable to assume that several people
should be called to account for not using available re
sources to the fullest extent.
4. By the same token, accountability for things implies
that school property will not be misused: that it will be
maintained in good condition, that supplies will not be
lost or wasted, and that they can be found whenever they
are needed.
5. If an item is in fact misused, accountability for things
further implies that the person involved in the misuse shall
either furnish an acceptable explanation or make good
any damage he may have caused.
6. It follows from the foregoing that there should be some
procedure of enforcement based on a set of rules and regu
lations for acquiring, distributing, and using the property,
accompanied by appropriate penalties for failure.
7. Finally, the principle of accountability for the things
schools use implies that rules and regulations shall be
framed and disseminated so that everyone who uses school
property, whether student, teacher, administrator, or who
ever, shall know and understand what the rules and regu
lations are.
It should be clear that accountability for educational things is
an important aspect of the overall principle of educational ac
countability. It is, however, an aspect that can, and often does,
get emphasized out of all proportion to its importance.
Too great a preoccupation with the things of a school, as evi
denced in a perpetual and frenetic checking up on minutiae,
sometimes tends seriously to inhibit the freedom of teachers to
teach and of students to learn.
Accordingly, if accountability for things is not to distort the
fundamental purposes of education, it must involve an element
of trust that the great majority of people in the system will have
respect for the property they all hold in common and will exer
cise good judgment in distributing and using it. To operate on the
assumption that nobody in a school can be trusted for anything
only tends to make the principle of accountability for things un
workable and self-defeating.

Accountability for Deeds

Clearly the concepts of accountability for cash and for things

imply accountability for what people in the system are doing with
the cash and the things it buys. These two aspects of educational
accountability are in a sense special cases of the more inclusive
aspect, accountability for deeds. This means all the deeds of any
kind that are presumed to have some sort of impact-good or bad,
direct or indirect-on the development and well-being of students.
Under this more inclusive aspect of educational accountability
there are several assumptions with important consequences for
the ways schools operate and are organized. One such assumption
concerns ideas and fantasies about what the authority structure
of an educational system is or ought to be.
A common notion of what this structure looks like might be
called the "Hourglass Model of a School System" as it is depicted
in Figure 1 on page 15. The lower part of the hourglass is
meant to look something like Max Weber's idea of the "ideal
bureau cracy" through which any complex institution
supposedly func tions. Above the bureaucracy are the
electorate-the people who vote for legislators, school board
members, and other public of ficials-and the policy makers who
are the legislators, the school board members, and other public
officials. The policy makers are accountable to the electorate
which can exercise its authority
over them by threatening to vote them out of office when elec
tion day comes
around.
One of the most important deeds of the policy makers is the
appointment of an executive officer who is answerable to them
for his own deeds and who in turn wields authority over the ad
ministrators who report to him. The administrators are account
able to the top executive and exercise delegated authority over
the teachers, support personnel, and specialists like guidance
1
counselors, psychologists, and attendance officers. At the bottom

2
are the students upon whom the weight of the whole authority
structure rests. Presumably they are accountable to their teachers
while in school.

Electorate
I I I I I
I I I I I
-----_1 _I 1I _I1_I 1_1_-----
I

IIIII
Policy
Makers
I I I
I I I
-r r1 _
I I I

s u d e n s

Figure 1
Hourglass Model of a School System

Through an elaborate set of laws, rules, and regulations,

everyone in the system is thus accountable to someone above
him for carrying out orders that are supposed to make the system
work for the benefit of all. If, at any level of this all-inclusive
bureaucracy, an individual disapproves of the orders he gets, or
considers them unwise or unfair, he may-so goes the theory-get
the orders changed by appealing through channels to the higher
ups. These appeal procedures are also spelled out in a body of
laws, rules, and regulations. If, on the other hand, anyone dis
obeys his orders and is unsuccessful in his appeal, he is liable
to dismissal from the system or some other kind of penalty.
One trouble with the Hourglass Model of the authority struc
ture is that it omits the forces that actually do govern the ac
tions of people all up and down the line, especially parents.
Legally of course it is the state electorate that is supposed to
exercise the ultimate authority, but that electorate usually con
sists of subgroups of local electorates, many of them with diverse
views of how far the state should be permitted to go in control
ling local actions.
By the same token, there are many different sets of policy
makers and top executives, some at the state level and many
more at the local level. They have their own ideas about what
should be done to make the schools prosper, and frequently they
take direct action on the basis of those ideas.
As a consequence, there is sometimes no little confusion about
where the legal authority actually resides for governing the many
kinds of deeds that are supposed to add up to educating the
young. This confusion is further confounded by thousands of
pages of laws, rules, and regulations that constitute what is
ordinarily referred to as the "state education code." These laws
and rules, having been accumulated over several decades, may
be laced with any number of internal contradictions.
Furthermore, the legal authority, however it may be construed,
intersects at all levels with the very real power of numerous poli
tical action groups. Each of these may be capable of imposing
on the system or on individual schools its own notions of the
deeds for which any person working or studying in the system
should be held accountable. Taxpayers' associations, teachers' or
ganizations, civil rights groups-all exert a certain amount of
clout on goings-on in the schools.
In short, the lines of authority, legal and political, in the real
world of public education are frequently so tangled that almost
anyone in the system may be hard put at times to get a straight
answer to the question: "Who is really my boss, and what does
he expect me to do or avoid doing?"
 Although the Hourglass Model has in it elements of fantasy,
it is nevertheless close enough to reality to have prompted some
educational philosophers and sociologists to assert that school sys
tems are by their very nature coercive systems in which the en
during concern is not so much to foster learning in students, as
to make people obey orders. Slavish insistence on obedience to
rules and regulations that start with the highest authorities and
proliferate as they filter down to the classroom, is not only ed
ucationally counterproductive, these critics suggest, but tends to
have an effect that is precisely the opposite of the one intended.
Insistence on obedience to shoals of arbitrary rules tends to
undermine respect for authority and thereby makes people less,
rather than more, accountable for their deeds.
The hypothesis is that accountability is something to be learned
and that merely giving orders is not the way to foster that kind
of learning. It is an hypothesis that, in light of much that has
been recently happening in the schools and elsewhere, is not
lightly to be brushed aside.
Another dubious assumption that ordinarily underlies the con
cept of accountability for deeds is that there exists a body of uni
versally accepted doctrine for determining whether any school
related deed is good or bad. This assumption runs into the dif
ficulty mentioned by Aristotle some twelve centuries ago. In mat
ters of education, he observed, "not all men honor the same
virtue." A modern instance crops up in the issue of whether to
spank a school child. Is spanking to be regarded as a good deed
or a bad deed? Three states prohibit corporal punishment alto
gether in their schools. The remaining forty-seven condone it or
applaud it and have a wide variety of rules under which it may be
administered. Thus, under identical conditions, spanking a child
in the schools of Dallas can be a good deed, while spanking the
same child in the schools of Boston would be a bad deed.
There are of course many other kinds of school-related deeds
on which there is less than perfect agreement as to whether they
are good or bad: marking systems, ability grouping, the self
contained vs. the open classroom, the kinds of books students
should be allowed to read, the use of tests in assessing the per
formance of teachers, the degree to which students should be
permitted to choose for themselves what they are to study, con-
solidation vs. decentralization of school districts, racial integra
tion, and so on.
Ultimately the problem comes down to this: How do we
achieve the right balance between freedom and control? How do
we achieve a balance between allowing each person in the system
to make his own decisions, as against requiring him to follow
rules laid down by someone not as close to the situation as he is?
This problem of balance has not received the systematic and
sustained attention it deserves. If the principle of accountability
for deeds is ever to serve a positive function in the total educa
tional process, we face a pressing need to find out how we can
define more precisely the extent to which students, teachers,
and those in the higher echelons should be given freedom of
maneuver, freedom to deal with situations as they arise from day
to day in the classrooms, administrative offices, and board rooms
that make up the miscellaneous collection of bureaucracies we
euphemistically refer to as a state or, indeed, a national "sys tem"
of education.
In my own view, the system that is most likely to be educa
tionally effective is one in which detailed restrictions on freedom
of maneuver are kept at a minimum for all positions in the hier
archy beginning with the top executive and moving down (up?)
to the classroom teacher and the students.
This view has two implications for the principle of accounta
bility for deeds. First, it implies that, within certain constraints
that are clearly necessary to keep the total system on course,
each person should be given broad responsibility for exercising
his best judgment in coping with the multitude of occasions in
which he must act hour by hour and day by day. Second, it
implies that the prime responsibility of anyone in a superior
position consists of (1) helping each of his subordinates to find
for himself what ever needs to be done to optimize student
learning and (2) provid ing him as best he can with the means for
doing it.
In this system the chain of accountability begins in the class
room with the teacher being accountable to his students for do
ing what he thinks best to help each one learn in the way best
suited to him. It moves from there to the school principal who
is accountable to each teacher for helping him to help the stu
dents learn. An so on up the line to the policy makers and the
1
electorate, all of whom have an obligation to the top executive
to help him fulfill his own responsibilities to his subordinates.
It is a measure of the magnitude of the problem of achieving
accountability in educational systems that this more or less up
side down view of the Hourglass Model is itself unlikely to be uni
versally accepted by the people who run the schools, or the
people who attend them, or the people who support them.

Accountability for Results

Up to this point have been considering three aspects of ac

countability that are often lumped together in the all-encompass
ing term educational process. In the popular lexicon of school af
fairs there seems to be a tendency to draw a sharp distinction
between accountability for process and accountability for product,
in terms of what students know and do and feel as a result of go
ing to school. This distinction has led to controversy over whether
school people are to be held accountable primarily for process, or
primarily for product.
In my view the distinction is seriously misleading and the con
troversies based on faulty premises. It would seem axiomatic that
process and product are so inextricably related that account
ability for either must inevitably assume accountability for the
other.
A bit of history may throw some light on what might be called
the "process-product" problem. Until quite recently-and even
now to a large extent-the assessment of schools for the purpose
of accreditation has focused almost exclusively on the processes
of education rather than on the results.
The typical concerns of an evaluation team, charged with the
periodic inspection of the schools, have had to do with such mat
ters as adequacy of the school plant, class size, per pupil expen
diture, teachers' paper credentials, recency of copyright dates in
textbooks, number of guidance personnel, number of books in the
school library, and so on-all in accordance with the innumer
able items catalogued in the manuals prepared by state depart
ments of education and regional accrediting agencies.
A tremendous effort over many years has gone into develop
ing the manuals designed to assess educational processes, and
there is no question that, up to a point, the work has been useful.
But it has almost invariably stopped short of any serious attempt
to find out how much the processes indexed in the manuals have
contributed to student learning. Furthermore, the indices them
selves are frequently so remote from the action that they tell little
or nothing about what is actually happening in the schools or
what impact the happenings may be having on the students.
The whole approach rests on chains of unexamined assump
tions. It is assumed, for example, that more books in the library
will result in more reading by students, and that the more the
students read the more they will learn. Or it is assumed that if
class size is reduced, every teacher will give more attention to
every student and that this increase in individual attention will
in turn result in more student learning. Or it is assumed that if a
teacher has a master's degree, he will know more about how to
teach than the teacher who has only a bachelor's degree, that he
will use this greater knowledge in his day-to-day work with stu
dents, and that such use will result in larger amounts of student
learning. Clearly, there are more than likely to be some weak
links in any such chains of assumptions that claim to forge a con
nection between. the indices of process, and the cognitive and
affective development of students.
With the rise of standardized testing in recent years, a dif ferent
kind of assumption, similarly unexamined, has begun to
take hold in some local and state school systems: namely, that
the performance of students as measured by the tests is the di
rect and sole result of their experiences in school.
On the basis of this assumption, the people in the schools are
charged by people outside the schools with neglect of their edu
cational duties if the students' scores are below par. The diffi
culty in this case is that people fail to differentiate between the
status of a student's knowledge and skills at any point in time
and the results of his school experiences.
It is no doubt extremely important for the guidance of instruc
tion to have the best information obtainable on where students
stand as they complete any phase of their schooling and are
about to begin on another. Schools may reasonably be held ac
countable for doing the best they can to obtain such information
and to make proper use of it.
 But measures of a student's status at any point in his school
career are not in and of themselves measures of the results of
the student's schooling. Taken alone, such measures provide no
information whatever about the multitude of events inside and out
side the school that might have caused the student to perform
as he does. And the term result implies cause. The confusion be
tween students' developmental status and educational results is
pervasive. It is a confusion that is going to need a lot of clearing
up if the notion of educational accountability is to make any
sense in educational operations.
The task of identifying the specific causes of high or low stu
dent performance has occupied educational researchers for a good
many years, but the most they have been able to come up with
has been a series of more or less tenable hypotheses. They have
been unable to assert anything more than that under certain con
ditions certain combinations of educational processes seem to
influence, one way or another, certain kinds of performance in
certain types of students.
In other words, there is not yet any universal formula-nor is
there ever likely to be-whereby we can determine with certainty
whether, or to what extent, any educational process may have
contributed to making the level of a student's performance what
ever it is at any point in time.
But this problematical situation does not relieve school per
sonnel of the need to be accountable for educational results.
It implies, rather, that, as part of their professional obligation,
it is incumbent on them to be knowledgeable about the processes
that appear to have the best chance of paying off for their par
ticular students and for continually checking the processes they
employ against the actual student performance so far as it can be
measured. They shall, in other words, be accountable for search
ing out the most promising ways of doing things and trying them
out to see how well the promise is being fulfilled in their own
schools and classrooms.
A further implication is that school personnel shall be adept
in the techniques of measurement and in interpreting the mea
sures to themselves and others with due allowance for the several
types of error they contain. Failure to apply these basic principles
has probably been the chief reason that experiments like per-
formance contracting and most of the other well-advertised in
novations that have been floating across the educational scene
have foundered.
Obviously this approach to accountability for results is one
that is not likely to be implemented easily or quickly, since it
relies on extensive diffusion of technical understanding and ex
pertise. In spite of years of theorizing, these technical skills are
only just beginning to be acquired by the people who actually
run the schools.
A more familiar problem, but one that is no less difficult,
is that of deciding, in the first place, what the results of educa
tion ought to be; that is, of arriving at some workable consensus
on the goals of education and translating them into appropriate
measures of student performance.
The perennial effort to define educational goals in some useful
way has lately run into two difficult problems: (1) the problem of
who shall determine what the goals shall be and (2) the problem
of specifying the goals in such a way that they can furnish a basis
for well-directed effort without at the same time hamstringing
school people in their work with students.
Until quite recently the definition of goals was left almost ex
clusively in the hands of the education establishment. The work
of the Committee of Ten in 1893 and that of the Committee on
Secondary School Studies in 1918, both of which were under the
aegis of the National Education Association, produced the broad
goals by which most American schools tried to guide their opera
tions throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Similarly, the work on so-called "behavioral objectives" which
had its beginnings in the 1930's has been, and still is, largely the
doing of professional educators. It is only within the last fifteen
years or so that the general public has become seriously, if spo
radically, involved in goal setting. This public involvement has
been stimulated by the actions of Congress in requiring that
citizens' advisory committees be attached to many of the federally
funded programs.
The appearance of such committees on the scene has high
lighted the fact that in a pluralistic society there are deep con
flicts over the values people hold in respect to what the out
comes of schooling ought to be and, more particularly, which
outcomes should be the business of the schools and which should
be left to the family, the church, or some other agency. Until we
can find ways of resolving these conflicts, the principle of account
ability for results will remain extraordinarily difficult to implement.
However, the task is not a hopeless one if professional edu
cators at all levels will hold themselves accountable for taking
some well-thought-out initiatives in resolving the conflicts, in
stead of just sitting back and complaining about public interfer
ence in their professional domain. For educators are also part of
the electorate, and as such they have a responsibility as citizens
to bring their own expertise to bear in helping the public find its
way through these hard questions.
Whether devised by professional educators or by citizen
groups or by both working together, the broad goals of educa
tion that have been worked out for state or local school systems
have usually been phrased in highly abstract language. Consider
the following goal statements, which are only a small sample of
the formulations recently devised by a number of state panels
on educational goals:

Education should assist every individual to acquire skills in speak

ing, listening, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Full education should help every individual acquire the greatest

possible understanding of himself and appreciation of his worthi
ness as a member of society.

Quality education should help every child acquire understanding and

appreciation of persons belonging to social, cultural, and ethnic
groups different from his own.

Abstract goal statements like these are often criticized on the

ground that, as prescriptions of what schools and students should
be achieving from day to day, they are not sufficiently concrete.
They are also criticized on the ground that, because they are so
abstract, they provide no basis for devising measures of the de
gree to which the goals are being attained.
There is merit in these criticisms when, as so often happens,
the abstract goals are left hanging in mid-air. Nevertheless, such
goal statements do serve a necessary and important function in
providing a generalized outline of the areas of concern within
which detailed specifications for planning educational programs
and for devising appropriate measures of student performance
are to be worked out. Without such generalized outlines the de
tailed specifications are apt to be so far out of touch with the
needs of students and the needs of society as to be without di
rection and purpose.
The task of relating the generalized purposes to the detailed
specification of what students should be able to do, in order to
demonstrate that they are making progress, presents a problem
of strategy. It is a problem that has produced more controversy
than constructive analysis.
The question is: How far can one go in elaborating details
without stifling the teaching-learning process altogether? This is
the question that divides the behaviorists from the humanists,
the proponents of rigorously sequenced programmed instruction
from the proponents of open education.
Goals and objectives can be thought of as lying along a con
tinuum that runs from extreme specificity to extreme generality.
On the generality end of the scale are goals like: "Should achieve
self-fulfillment," "Should become a good citizen," or "Should
care for his fellow man." On the specificity end of the scale are
goals like these: "By next Thursday should read aloud with cor
rect pronunciation the words at, bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat,
sat, and vat when presented in any random order," or "By next
Friday should write in five minutes the correct sums for any ten
combinations of three single-digit numbers." Somewhere in be
tween are goals like these: "Should by the age of sixteen
habitually seek and derive enjoyment from reading a broad
range of mod ern and classical literature of his own choosing,"
or "Should by the age of eighteen habitually maintain an
accurate account of his personal finances."
Too great specification of learning objectives assumes that for
any domain of human development one can identify exactly, and
describe in advance, an invariant sequence of particular events
by which all students will learn what they need to learn. Too
little specification, on the other hand, assumes that there is noth
ing whatever that is lawful about human behavior and that the
developmental process must be left to largely random encounters
accompanied by purposely vague ideas about the good life and
the good society.
Educational truth of course lies somewhere in between. Little,
if anything, has been done to locate the points on the specificity
generality continuum where statements of goals and objectives
can be most useful for guiding instruction without inhibiting it.
This is another instance where the need for finding the right
balance between freedom and control in educational processes
must be met if the principle of accountability for results is to be
actualized.
A common way of trying to get around the inherent difficulty
of defining specific goals has been to fall back on the comfort
able fallacy that the grade norms that come with standardized
tests can serve as goals. The goal statement then sounds some
thing like this: "All fifth-grade children should be able to read on
the fifth-grade level."
The fallacy in such a statement rests on two impossible as
sumptions: (1) that the fifth-grade norm-that is, the average of
all the scores that all fifth-graders make on any reading test
they happen to take-defines a level of reading performance that
is to be regarded as in some sense satisfactory; and (2) that, by
some mathematical magic, the half of the student population
which is below average can reach the average without raising it.
One city superintendent found an interesting way of deliver
ing the results that the parents in his community were demand
ing. The parents were disturbed by the fad that most of the third-
grade students in his schools were reading "on the second
grade level" on a certain test. The superintendent therefore
switched to a different test with different norms, and the third
graders were then found to be reading "on the third-grade level."
We might well question whether that kind of solution demon
strated true accountability for results.
 INFORMATION PROBLEMS

The Problem of Scope

An educational system is in essence a vast communication

network in which every individual, whatever his role, is plugged
in at some point to get the information he needs to do his own
work properly and to supply others with the information they
need to do theirs. The quantity of information that should some
how work its way through the system and into the world outside
is larger and broader in scope than most people, concerned with
their own immediate tasks, generally realize. Its scope can be
visualized by considering the informational components of what
I have called the "Student-Change Model of an Educational Sys
tem," which is diagrammed in Figure 2 on page 28.
This model is built around three major concepts. The first
concept is that an educational system is a dynamic system con
sisting of a series of time segments through which students pass
as they go through school. A given segment may be any length
appropriate to the information needs of anyone inside or outside
the system-a week, a month, an academic year, the entire
elementary school period, etc. It is designated in the chart by the
distance between t 1 and t 2 •
The second concept is that the central concern of the system
is with the changes that take place in students as they go through
any segment, however short or long. In what ways is a student
different at the end of grade six, say, from what he was at the
beginning of grade four? Or how does his command of arith
metic this week compare with what it was last week?
The third concept is that, if the system is to operate effect
ively in the interest of student development, there must be avail-

1
able a wealth of information about (1) the changes in students
that take place in each time period and (2) the many factors
inside and outside of school that may be affecting these changes
for better or worse.

Input EDUCATIONAL
Output

--------------- -----
(Student (Student
PROCESS
characteristics characteristics
before) after)

Figure 2
The Student-Change Model
of an Educational System
 This information falls into four general categories which I call
input, educational process, surrounding conditions, and output.
These categories are defined as follows:

Input consists of all the characteristics a student brings with him as

he enters any segment of the system at t 1: his physical make-up,
his past learning, his feelings about himself and others, his inter
ests, his values, etc. Thus input is defined as the student's initial
status in any time period.

Output consists of all the comparable attributes of the same stu dent
when he has completed a segment at the point t 2• This is his final
status for that time period, and it is also his initial status for the
time period that follows.

Educational process consists of all the act1v1t1es that students and

school staffs engage in during any time segment and which are ex
pressly designed to bring about changes for the better between the
student's initial status and his final status. In other words, it en
compasses all the human transactions-some planned, some per
haps unplanned-that are supposed to help the student learn.

The surrounding conditions are all those aspects of the environ

ment that may help or hinder the educational process. As indicated
in Figure 2, there are three kinds of surrounding conditions: home
conditions, school conditions, and community conditions. Home
conditions include the attitude of the student's parents toward his
education and the opportunities afforded for study in the home.
School conditions include the quality of the school building and its
equipment, the training and experience of the teachers, and the
rules and regulations the people in the school are expected to
abide by. Community conditions include the size, population den
sity, and economic level of the school's enrollment area, the
amount of money the community spends on its schools, the num
ber and quality of available social and recreational agencies out
side the school, and so on. The double-pointed arrows in the chart
suggest the many interactions between the surrounding conditions
and the educational process, some of which are within the control
of the school system and some of which, like the economic level of
the community, are clearly beyond its control.

To gather and organize and analyze the relationships among

all four categories of information in ways which will show how
well a school system is functioning in all of its segments for all
of its students, and to show how the educational process in each
segment might be changed to make things go better, is a task of
enormous magnitude. Clearly it requires a high degree of cooper
ation among everyone who has anything to do with the schools,
not only students, teachers, and administrative personnel, but
also parents, policy makers, and the public at large.
It is a task that never has been, and probably never can be,
fully accomplished. Yet it is one that must be constantly at
tempted if school systems and the public that supports them are
to take seriously the idea that the schools are indeed accountable
for meeting the developmental needs of students.

The Problem of Sources

One reason that the informational requirements of a school sys

tem are so hard to satisfy is that every bit of data entering the
communication network depends ultimately on the perceptions
and judgments of human
beings.
Some years ago the late Sir Josiah Stamp put the problem in
a nutshell:

The government is very keen on amassing stat1st1cs. They collect

them, add them, raise them to the Nth power, take the cube root,
and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that
every one of those figures comes, in the first instance, from the vil
lage watchman, who just puts down what he pleases.

We must assume-and it is a very large assumption indeed

that the people connected with schools are not quite like the vil
lage watchman, that at least they try in one way or another to give
the best information they can on the basis of what they have
seen, heard, or otherwise known. But even their best is always
contaminated by some amount of human error, for the nexus of
the communication network in a school system is always an in
dividual responding from his own knowledge to a question put in
some form by another individual.
The respondent may fail to understand the question; the
30
knowledge on which he bases his answer may be inaccurate or
incomplete without his realizing it; and the questioner, also
without realizing it, may put a wrong interpretation on whatever
answer he gets.
The typical instruments for accomplishing this fundamental
ad of communication are face-to-face interviews, questionnaires,
and tests. The instrument may be lacking in semantic precision,
and it may be used in situations where any number of nonrele
vant disturbances may garble both the question and the response.
Running through all these uncertainties is the ubiquitous concern
for the confidentiality of whatever messages get through and the
fear that they may be used in ways that could harm the
respondent.
One small incident will suggest how shaky the basic data can
be when one is trying to get firsthand information on that most
important series of classroom events labeled "educational pro
cess." On a visit to a well-known elementary school, much pub
licized for its innovations in flexible scheduling, independent
study, and the like, I came upon a room where a group of un
supervised students were quietly reading. Sitting down beside
one youngster, I asked simply, "What are you doing?" He looked
at me with a half smile and answered, "I'm doing what we're
told to do whenever we have visitors!"
How far can a single response like that be credited as an indi
cation of what "independent study" in that school really amounted
to? Was the student kidding me? Or was he kidding the school?
Or was the school staff possibly kidding itself about what was
actually happening underneath its own rhetoric? These are not
easy questions.
It is fair to say that human error can never be wholly elim
inated from the many assortments of basic data embraced in the
Student-Change Model of an educational system. Hence our ob
jective should not be to uncover absolute truth, but to invent
procedures for reducing the error as much as possible and for
getting some believable estimates of whatever amount of error
remains.
As matters stand, this objective is somewhat remote. It is one
of the unresolved problems that we must tackle energetically if
the principle of educational accountability is to come into its own
in the operations of the schools.
1
 The Data Reduction Problem

Another facet of the information problem, just as serious, has to

do with getting together all the bits and pieces of data so that,
whatever their inaccuracies, the information they contain can be
made accessible to anyone inside or outside the schools who may
need it to make decisions. This data reduction task has been
handled in various ways, but probably the commonest is the one
that involves constructing what we might call educational index
numbers
.
There are many kinds of educational index numbers, most of
them quite familiar. The final mark a student receives in any
subject is an educational index number, since it summarizes in
one single figure all the observations and judgments a teacher
has made of the student's performance in that subject.
Similarly, the score a student makes on a reading test is an
index number that summarizes, again in one single figure, the
series of responses he has made to all the items in the test. Other
types of index numbers generated by school operations are per
pupil expenditure, student-teacher ratio, percent of students'
families on welfare, classroom footage per student, average daily
membership, average teacher experience, median educational at
tainment of students' parents, and the like.
The great power in any kind of educational index number re
sides in the fact that it combines a large number of individual
observations in such a way that the human mind can take hold of
them and put them to use. For this reason index numbers are
absolutely indispensable in maintaining the flow of information
on which people in educational systems must depend for making
operational decisions and for reporting to the public how the
system is doing overall, and in its several parts.
In any educational index number, however, there are two
major flaws that are too frequently overlooked both by those
who construct the numbers and by those who use them. First, an
index number hides from view the human errors in the many ob
servations and judgments of which it is composed, and this tends
to make people more confident about the accuracy of the index
than is usually warranted. The assumption is sometimes made
that if the index is made up from many observations, the errors
in the individual observations will tend to cancel out, thereby
making the index a closer approach to informational "truth" than
any of its components.
But there are many circumstances in which this assumption
can be quite wrong. The mark a teacher gives a student is a case
in point. Regardless of how many observations of the student's
performance the teacher may have made, if each observation is
colored by a prior unalterable conviction on the part of the
teacher that the student is either bright or dull, there is no way
in the world that the mark will automatically "cancel out" the
prevailing bias. Similarly, if the amount of state aid a school
system receives depends in part on average daily membership,
and if the system is hurting for funds, any doubts about who
counts as a student and who does not-and such doubts can be
numerous in some systems-are more than likely to be resolved
by counting students in rather than counting them out.
The second major flaw in any educational index number re
sides in the fact that, because it is a single figure, it may filter out
certain details of information that could be crucially important
for anyone who wants to make the most nearly correct educa
tional decisions. The index per pupil expenditure furnishes an
example of the problem. In most school districts it is ordinarily
computed by dividing the sum of operating expenses by the aver
age daily membership for the entire district. Thus, taken by it
self, it tells nothing whatever about the per pupil expenditure in
any one school. In a school where the teachers have been long in
the service of the system, per pupil expenditure will be high rela
tive to that of the district as a whole because of higher average
teachers' salaries. In a school where most of the teachers have
been recently hired, the reverse will be the case. Yet these dif
ferences in per pupil expenditure within a district are usually
unavailable for school officials who must make decisions regard
ing the deployment of personnel and other resources. In the mat
ter of educational accountability such decisions are often of the
utmost importance.
We can sum up the data reduction problem in a single
question: How far can the reduction of data go so that the indices
it produces will be maximally accessible and informative, while
minimally misleading?
 This is another question that has not yet found many good
and, more particularly, many practical answers, but it is one for
which we must find answers if the principle of accountability is
to work as it should.
We can therefore ask the further question: Who should be held
accountable for seeking the answers?
 CONSTANTS AND VARIABLES
OF TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY

From all of the foregoing, we might infer that the prospect of

attaining accountability in any educational system is so gloomy
that we might just as well abandon the effort. Such an admission
of defeat, however, is neither necessary nor wise.
In this section I shall try to relieve the gloom a bit by focus
ing on the role of the most important professional person in any
school system: the classroom teacher. By so doing I hope to
sketch some positive steps that can be taken forthwith to make
the principle of accountability a workable proposition.
In passing I shall suggest some of the things that must be
done by other people in the system to make this possible. My
basic thesis is that there are certain constants and variables
that de fine the practical limits within which the individual
teacher in a public school is, or can be, professionally
accountable. These limits are to be sought in answers to the
double-barreled ques tion: To whom and for what is any teacher
accountable?

Accountability to Whom?

A common notion that grows out of the Hourglass Model of

a School System is that the classroom teacher is professionally
accountable to a single designated superior, ordinarily the school
principal, or someone else in a superordinate position-perhaps
a department chairman-acting for the principal. This may be
legally true in most school systems, but if a teacher is to get on
with his teaching job, he or she must recognize that, in fact if
not in theory, he is also accountable to three groups of people
who can and often do wield a good deal of direct power over
him. These are his students, their parents, and his fellow
teachers. Hence, schematically, the human world to which a
teacher is di rectly answerable shapes up in the manner
indicated by Figure 3 below.

Official hierarchy

Fellow
teachers Parents

s s

Figure 3
Persons to Whom a Teacher is Accountable

The circle in the chart encloses the collection of people that

form a "school." It is meant to suggest the outside limits of the
human domain in which a teacher is accountable.
 If accountability implies being rewarded for good deeds and
punished for the other kind, then the teacher is multiply account
able. Each of the three groups, in addition to the principal, has
a claim on the teacher's services, and each has a certain amount
of power to enforce that claim. His fellow teachers, for instance,
can help him in his work, neglea him, or ostracize him; parents
can be supportive, or indifferent, or hostile to the point of bring
ing charges against him; students can befriend him, or tolerate
him, or make his classroom life a living hell.
The fact that the claims of all four parties may be in conflict
with one another-as they often are-does not mitigate the fact
that the teacher is accountable in four directions at once, as
indicated by the arrows in the chart. Indeed, it highlights the
kind of situation a teacher must contend with if he is to survive
professionally.
Conversely, it also highlights a fact of school life with which
the "official hierarchy," represented in the school by the princi
pal, must HELP the teacher contend if the school itself is to be
viable as an educational institution. The individual teacher can
not be expected to shoulder alone the full burden of resolving
the confliaing concerns of the various people to whom he is an
swerable, although, as part of the school himself, he has a pro
fessional obligation to share in their resolution.
In a larger sense, a school and the broader educational system
of which it is a part must be seen as a cooperative enterprise in
which the four aspects of accountability are the joint and collec
tive responsibility of teachers, administrators, policy makers,
parents, students, and the public at large.
The old image of a school as Mark-Hopkins-an-a-log-with-a
student is an educational myth that does not work any longer
in the complex and technologically interdependent society of
which the schools are only one part. Nowadays no school, no
teacher in a school, can function effectively as an isolated unit.
One obvious reason for this is that learning is cumulative.
It is the result of the multitude of transactions that a student has,
not only with a particular teacher in a particular classroom during
the particular time-period, t1-t 2, but with all his teachers over
many time periods in many classrooms, as well as with his par
ents, his schoolmates, and probably not least with his television
set and other elements in his "life space" that may occupy his
waking hours.
Thus, a given teacher cannot take sole credit for having in
creased a student's competence in any area of learning-math,
reading, science, human relations, or whatever-nor can he be
given the sole blame if a student fails to develop as his teacher,
the student himself, and others might hope. Some of what the
student learns or fails to learn while with any one teacher is the
result of what other teachers may have done for him earlier or
are doing for him concurrently. Similarly, some of his learning is
unquestionably the result of opportune experiences outside the
school setting in the "surrounding conditions" beyond the purview
of the school itself.
This unfathomable complexity of influences on the student
does not, however, excuse the teacher from his obligation to
teach. He is still accountable (1) to his students for creating a
classroom environment in which they can learn-and hopefully
will want to learn-and (2) to his school principal, his fellow
teachers, and the students' parents for contributing to the neces
sarily joint effort to optimize the learning effects of each child's
total school experience, pre-K to 12.

Accountability for WhaH

The preceding paragraph suggests the general nature of what

the individual classroom teacher can be held accountable for. It
implies that his initial responsibility is for his own conduct in
the classroom-his deeds-rather than for the end product of stu
dent learning. The responsibility for the latter is one that, in the
nature of the case, the teacher shares with others. There is, how
ever, the further implication that he is under obligation to all
"others"-parents included-to work with them within the frame
work of the school to see that this responsibility for student
learning is met as well as it can possibly be.
Because we have so little information about causal connections
between teaching processes and learning products and because
solid research on teachers' classroom behavior is so recent, some
people would relieve the teacher from meeting any specific de
mands whatever. Teaching, it is contended, is still an art, not a
science; therefore nothing definite can be prescribed that will
guarantee student learning in any and all circumstances. Art can
not be compelled.
As I have suggested above, there is no little truth in this con
tention. But so-called "process-product" research is not totally
barren of results. Moreover, there are some fairly obvious aspects
of teacher performance that should not have to wait for research
to prove that they are at least necessary, if not sufficient, condi
tions for effeaive teaching. They are, therefore, clearly within the
bounds of matters for which an individual teacher can be and
should be held accountable.
These matters can be divided into two groups which I am call
ing minimum requirements and good works. Minimum require
ments are those deeds for which a teacher is responsible regard
less of the circumstances of the school in which he teaches. They
are the constants of teacher accountability.
Good works are those things a teacher can be expected to
know and do to the extent that the school and the larger system
give him the means and the opportunities for knowing them and
doing them. Thus, good works are the variables of teacher account
ability. The constants and variables may be visualized as form
ing a group of concentric circles as shown in Figure 4 on page 40.
The inner circle represents the range of absolute minimum
requirements a teacher is expected to meet no matter what the
surrounding conditions of his school may be. The outer circle
suggests the maximum range of good works for which he could be
held accountable under the most favorable conditions.
The series of intermediate circles, drawn with dotted lines,
represents the several ranges of a teacher's responsibility for
good works which are dependent on the varying resources of the
school and the varying surrounding conditions that are beyond
the teacher's own control. Some examples may help to clarify the
distinaion between the constants and the variables.

Minimum Requirements- The Constants

At an absolute minimum it would seem to be a necessary, if not

a sufficient, condition for effective teaching that a teacher be in
contact with his students. That is, he must come to school and
be available to them on a regular basis. Hence, there should be
no question that he is to be accountable for keeping his ab
sences from school as few as possible, consistent with unavoid
able sickness and unforeseen accidents.
By the same token there should be no question that he is to
be accountable for keeping himself physically and mentally fit to
teach. Anyone who has been through the mill knows that teaching
is a physically demanding job that cannot be handled adequately
after having had, for instance, too little sleep or too much high
living.

Figure 4
Constant Minimum Requirements and Variable Good Works
Expected of a Teacher

It might be argued that such considerations impinge on the

private life of the teacher and should therefore be regarded as
outside the range of behavior with which anyone other than the
teacher himself has a right to be concerned. This argument is
specious. If a teacher's conduct in his personal life tends to in
capacitate him for his work, then it is clearly within the bounds
of his professional responsibilities to avoid such conduct.
There are other fairly obvious types of conduct that a teacher
is bound to avoid: for example, physically injuring any student,
or encouraging a student to cheat, or appropriating school prop
erty for his private use, or stealing any student's possessions,
or making invidious distinctions in the treatment of students be
cause of their race, religion, or social class background.
Thus the first, and generally quite feasible, task incumbent
on the management of any school system is to spell out in un
mistakable terms what the minimum requirements for teacher
conduct should be, what procedures are to be followed for de
termining whether a teacher has met these requirements, and
what action will be taken in cases where they are not met.
This implies defining the constant obligations in such a way
that every teacher in the system will know exactly where he
stands in resped to them and will be protected from any whim
sical or false accusations of having failed to meet them.

Good Works-The Variables

Beyond the minimum requirements there is a multitude of

good works for which a teacher is to be held accountable pro
vided he is given the opportunity to perform them. They come
in three interrelated categories: (1) knowing the subject, 2)
knowing his students, and (3) acting in such a way as to make as
certain as possible that the students will· learn the subject.
That a teacher should know his subject seems obvious
enough. The old man in the south Texas filling station said it
well: "You cain't no more teach what you don't know than you
can come back from where you ain't been."
But "knowing the subject" implies many levels and kinds of
knowledge, from keeping one jump ahead of the students in the
textbook to being broadly familiar with the latest developments
and the unsolved problems in the field, and familiar also with
methods and materials that have been worked out and tried out
for helping students penetrate the subject.
 The degree to which a teacher is to be accountable for know
ing his subject is a function of four variables: (1) his pre-service
training, (2) the amount of time the school administration gives
him to keep abreast of his field, (3) the accessibility of the in
formation he needs in order to do so, and (4) the quality of the
available information.
Measuring and applying all four of these variables presents
some problems, but the directions in which school management
should move are clear enough to constitute an obligation for ac
tion that need not await the ultimate refinements in data gathering.
That a teacher should know his students would also seem
fundamental to effective teaching. Knowing the students can
mean as little as merely knowing their names, or as much as
knowing where each one stands day by day in his cognitive and
affective development and what things are going for him or
against him in the business of learning.
To know a student fully means, among other things, to know
the pertinent details of the student's educational history, to know
his hopes and outside interests, and to know his parents and
their attitudes toward him and their aspirations for him. It is of
course impossible for any person to know any other person com
pletely. Nor, in the case of the student-teacher relationship, would
such total knowledge be desirable, even if it were attainable.
Respect for the student's privacy is essential if his integrity as a
human being is to be preserved and nurtured. Nevertheless, the
cliche is still sound that, within proper limits, the better a teacher
knows each of his students, the better he will be able to adapt
his teaching to the learning needs of each one.
How far a teacher is to be held accountable for knowledge of
his students depends, again, on a number of variables which may
be easier to identify than to measure. Many of the more obvious
ones, however, can be reasonably well approximated. Class size
is a case in point, since it goes without saying that the more
students a teacher has to face each day, the less chance he has
for knowing each of them in the comprehensive sense suggested
above.
Some of the other variables reasonably within reach are: (1)
the completeness, clarity, and accessibility of students' cumula
tive records; (2) the frequency with which it is possible for the
teacher to have conferences with students' parents, both in· the
school and in the home; (3) the availability and utility of tests
and other devices for diagnostic purposes and for obtaining per
iodic feedback on how each student is getting along.
The difference between knowing and doing is of course enor
mous. A teacher may know everything he needs to know about
his subject and his students, but unless and until he takes posi
tive action based on what he knows, no teaching occurs.
Therefore, a third good-works variable consists of the way a
teacher acts when he is in contact with his students. The general
nature of the classroom action patterns I have in mind is depicted
in Figure 5 below. The double-pointed arrows represent class room
interactions. The teacher, under the right conditions, is to be
accountable for making these interactions work as smoothly and
productively as possible. That is, he interacts with the stu dents
and his subject matter in such a way that the students themselves
will have the best possible chance to interact with the subject
matter, with the teacher, and with each other in order to achieve
learning.

Figure 5
The Classroom Interaction Pattern
 Despite all the theories that have been spun about the teach
ing-learning process, there can never be an absolute guarantee
that any given set of aaions by a teacher, or any given set of
reaaions on the part of students will produce any specific kind or
amount of learning. All learning is probabilistic. It is of the ut
most importance that this fact be recognized by teachers and
everybody else concerned with the education of the young. Fail
ure to recognize it can result in the sort of deadly routine that
takes students nowhere.
The classroom interaction pattern, if it is to have the best
chance of bringing about desirable learning, must be regarded
as in the nature of a continuous experiment. In this experiment
any num ber of alternatives are tried successively by the
teacher and the students until the hoped-for changes in the
students' develop mental status occur.
The teacher's obligation is to keep the experiment going and
to keep it under control. This means, first, that he shall use the
knowledge he has of his subject and of his students to help them
select alternatives that seem to have the highest probability of
paying off. It means, second, that he shall observe what hap pens
as carefully as he can, and alter his strategy as needed.
This model of the teaching process is admittedly somewhat
abstract, but it may nevertheless serve to suggest some of the
variables that must be considered if we are going to determine
the extent to which a teacher can be held accountable. For ex
ample, how much freedom is he allowed for initiating action
which he believes may help his students learn? How large a
variety of learning materials do he and his students have at their
disposal to choose from? To what extent is the classroom pro
cess hindered by inadequate physical space? By lack of continuity
because of student turnover and absenteeism? By outside dis
traaions and untoward interference? Such factors, all of which
can be observed, define the variable boundaries within which
any teacher may be held accountable for good works in dealing
with students in the classroom.
There are other types of good works for which a teacher
should be held accountable outside the classroom if his school
as a whole is to be the effective teaching organization it ought
to be. As I have suggested above, each teacher bears with his
fellow teachers, the administrative staff, and the students' parents
a joint responsibility for making sure that the end products of the
enterprise are as good as they can possibly be.
This implies that every teacher be accountable for exchanging
information, the best he can obtain, about how his students have
done and are doing and about any factors he knows of that may
be helping or hindering their development. It implies further that
each teacher shall share in the search for ways to make the in
structional process increasingly relevant to the students the
school serves.
The degree to which a teacher is to be held accountable for
participating in this joint effort is contingent in large measure
on the quality of administrative leadership. Does it invite such
participation or discourage it? How much time does it (or can it)
allocate for the effort? What resources in the form of consultant
help does it (or can it) make available to ensure that the collec
tive effort will be as fruitful of good works as possible?
The upshot of this overall approach to responsibility for good
works suggests that teacher accountability is a variable which de
pends upon a number of conditions that determine the scope of
the teaching act. The broader the scope, the more a teacher can
be held accountable for his professional behavior. The general
recognition of this principle is vital to the amount and quality of
learning that any school or school system can be expected to de
liver. It is therefore a principle that ought to be the prime con
cern of administrators and policy makers in fulfilling their own
obligation to inform the public not only about how well their
schools are serving the young, but also about the nature and
needs of education and what must be done to help teachers serve
students better.
 The manuscripts for this series of fastbacks (Numbers 14-
20) have been solicited and edited by Pi Lambda Theta,
national honor and professional association for women in
education.

This book and others in the series are made available at low
cost through the contribution of the Phi Delta Kappa Educational
Foundation, established in 1966 with a bequest by George H.
Reavis. The Foundation exists to promote a better understand
ing of the nature of the educative process and the relation of
education to human welfare. It operates by subsidizing authors
to write booklets and monographs in nontechnical language so
that beginning teachers and the public generally may gain a
better understanding of educational problems.
The Foundation exists through the generosity of George
Reavis and others who have contributed. To accomplish the
goals envisaged by the founder the Foundation needs to en
large its endowment by several million dollars. Contributions
to the endowment should be addressed to The Educational
Foundation, Phi Delta Kappa, 8th and Union, Bloomington,
Indiana 47401. The Ohio State University serves as trustee for
the Educational Foundation.
The fastback titles now available are:

1. SCHOOLS WITHOUT PROPERTY TAXES: HOPE OR ILLUSION? by Charles

Benson
and Thomas A. Shannon
2. THE BEST KEPT SECRET OF THE PAST 5,000 YEARS: WOMEN ARE
READY
FOR LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION, by Elizabeth Koontz

3. OPEN EDUCATION: PROMISE AND PROBLEMS, by Vito

Perrone

4. PERFORMANCE CONTRACTING: WHO PROFITS MOST? by Charles

Blaschke
5. TOO MANY TEACHERS: FACT OR FICTION? by Herold
Regier

6. HOW SCHOOLS CAN APPLY SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, by Joseph

E. Hill

7. BUSING: A MORAL ISSUE, by Howard Ozmon and Sam

Craver

8. DISCIPLINE OR DISASTER? by .Emery Stoops and Joyce King-

Stoops
9. LEARNING SYSTEMS FOR THE FUTURE, by Ron
Barnes .
10. WHO SHOULD GO TO COLLEGE? by Paul
Woodring

11. ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLS IN ACTION, by Robert C.

R1ordan

12. WHAT DO STUDENTS REALLY WANT? by Dale

Baughman
13. WHAT SHOULD THE SCHOOLS TEACH? by Fred
Wilhelms
14. HOW TO ACHIEVE ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, by Henry Dyer

15. NEEDED: A NEW KIND OF TEACHER, by Elizabeth C

W1lson
16. INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES IN EDUCATION.• by.-l/lrrame
Math1es
17. SYSTEMATIC THINKING. A.B T ,EDUClllON, btAiu:e
H\,HIY
and Giftld!M.'!Hir ef\;on
18. SELECTIIG tcftltOR!N'S READING. by Claire E. Moms
19. SEX DIFfE.&f{C JN lt'ARNINC Ul EAD. l)lr o M':'Stanchfield
20. IS CREA'IM'N-Te"'tCHABLE? by E. aJ,I!,Jorrji'ITGe <fJ, P4 l or rt:e

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