A little over a year ago, we released series to hear directly from education leaders who are charged with implementing accountability policies every day. A group of 11 national, state, and district leaders described why accountability is an important tool to improve outcomes for the students and families they serve.

What was clear then, and remains clear today, is that state leaders have the most potential to create educational opportunity for young people. Debates around the purpose of education continue at every level. But federal policy continues to defer the creation and implementation of standards and accountability measures to the states, and Every Student Succeeds Act plans have now moved from document to action.

Are our kids on track? On track for what? And how do we know?

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

Somewhere and somehow, accountability became a quasi-intervention instead of a descriptive or diagnostic tool. Accountability measures highlight what is working — or not — and for whom it is working — or not working. The measurement alone changes nothing. Our charge, as educators and leaders, is to use that information to deploy interventions that will make the system work for students and families. The field’s readiness to intervene is spotty; our students deserve more.

This January, we add the perspectives of five state leaders to this important discussion.

Tennessee has been an education state to watch for more than a decade, thanks in large part to the leadership of Governor Bill Haslam, who left office last week, and former state legislator Jamie Woodson, who recently stepped down as CEO of SCORE.

– Haslam describes the important impact of bipartisan leadership in Tennessee and shares how workforce needs drove new policy around access to postsecondary education. He also cautions us to be clear-eyed about America’s slipping global leadership in education.

– Accountability’s purpose in Tennessee, Woodson explains, is to measure whether students receive a year of learning for a year in the classroom. She describes quality education as the best pathway for a young person to achieve economic independence and full participation in his or her community.

“Simply put, students who are off track academically greatly reduce their chances for prosperous, self-determined lives.”

A trio of state chiefs — Louisiana’s John White, Nevada’s Steve Canavero, and Pennsylvania’s Pedro Rivera — describe how accountability policy factors in the success of their respective state’s students.

– White encourages us to think about the intersection of trust, accountability, and decentralized school systems. All system leaders can build coherence within their systems, reducing the chaos and increasing the trust, both of which allow adults to focus on improving outcomes for students. He acknowledges that work as being difficult but also possible and essential.

– Canavero distinguishes between Big-A and Little-A accountability, describing the former as the summative judgment and consequences policy that often draws heated debate and the latter as the daily practice of adults committed to improving conditions for kids. He also flags the importance of district-level accountability for those making decisions about financial or human resources that directly impact principals and teachers.

– Rivera describes accountability as the contract between educators, policy leaders, and communities around shared expectations. He details the importance of using accountability to highlight, and solve for, root causes of issues. A diagnosis without a plan is not an effective solution, whether at the doctor’s office or in the school district.

(Click through the grid below to read the ‘A’ Word conversations from the first part of this series)

Gaining a clear picture on student success in a state or city does not rest on a single data point, something the Bush Institute’s recently updated tool demonstrates. The tool tracks a range of data, including academic outcomes, enrollment, teacher salaries, and per-student spending. While all of that matters to build a picture of a place, claiming to work on behalf of students without centering on student academic progress is the policy equivalent of a Potemkin village.

Calibrating accountability policy and practice is difficult, but critical, as these five leaders describe. Simply put, students who are off track academically greatly reduce their chances for prosperous, self-determined lives. These five state leaders agree that getting this right sits at the core of America’s future — our economic freedom, our democratic freedom, and our leadership in a quickly changing world.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute.

For the past three years, Steve Canavero has been Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction. Before overseeing the state’s nearly 450,000 students, Canavero, who holds a Ph.D. in education leadership, served as deputy of student achievement at the Nevada Department of Education. He also served as the first director of Nevada’s State Public Charter School Authority, which led to the state’s charter school policy being nationally acclaimed.

Canavero spoke with us about the difference between “Big-A ²¹³¦³¦´Ç³Ü²Ô³Ù²¹²ú¾±±ô¾±³Ù²ââ€� and “Little-A accountability.â€� The former involves tests and consequences, he observes, while the latter involves the daily work of being responsible for student outcomes. His goal is to connect the two through regular conversations about expectations and a proven theory of action. The work of improving accountability systems is never done, Canavero believes. But he emphasizes it must continue and involve honest partnerships and honest conversations among adults for the benefit of students.

How do you define accountability? And how has that definition changed for you over time?

I don’t see accountability as a single thing, but it is grounded in clear outcomes and expectations. They are the cornerstones of accountability. And accountability includes conversations about progress towards those clear expectations in a formative and summative way.

Over time, my view has changed. The big idea of being accountable for changing the lives and learning conditions for kids hasn’t changed, but I have recognized a more nuanced approach to accountability.

I’d simplify it by describing accountability as “Big Aâ€� and “Little A.â€� Big A is what we tend to believe in the education space. Big A involves summative consequences and judgments, and Little A is sometimes called performance management. Little A involves adults being accountable for improving conditions for kids and working collectively to be accountable for that outcome.

“We need a conversation related to differential funding or weighted funding based upon the at-risk status of students, or their status as English learners, special education students, or talented and gifted students.”

Why do you think there’s been a split between Big-A accountability, which is sometimes a political hot potato, and Little-A accountability, which is more about the work that’s getting done every day?

The pendulum swung very quickly during the No Child Left Behind era, when accountability with a Big A was introduced. Over time, we have become more comfortable being held accountable collectively for outcomes for kids.

That has helped us create a bridge between an annual summative event to multiple conversations throughout the year that are anchored around expectations and centered on a theory of action that we believe to be true. That enables us to have Little-A accountability conversations that support the high-level accountability about general school performance or subgroup performance.

Is there a more commonly held understanding of Little-A accountability in Nevada now? Or does that work need to continue?

I’m a firm believer that the work is never done, so we need to continue to do this work. We need to continue to forge honest partnerships and have honest conversations around Little-A accountability, about adults and systems being accountable to each other for the benefit of kids.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

So how does your work in Nevada reflect that “Little A� drive towards successful student outcomes?

The distribution of ownership is critical. Within the Legislature and the Clark County School District, which is now the nation’s fifth-largest district, there is a clear effort to flip the design of the district to be school-centered and to give those individuals closest to the challenge the authority to solve their challenges. This is a case where I have specific authority within law to hold people Big-A accountable.

I try to balance the high-level accountability with the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month accountability by being a persistent partner. I may be the person in charge of accountability, but I’m also accountable to the citizens of the state and the Legislature. By being a persistent partner, I’m able to forge relationships towards these outcomes, build trust, and have honest conversations about the barriers. That way, we can achieve the outcome that we all want.

These specific conversations drive towards the expectations and hold all the adults accountable. There is a differentiation of responsibility so people know where their lanes are and what they’re accountable for. I am excited about having more authority and autonomy at the site level, and the resources to exercise them.

Where have we gone wrong in building broader support for accountability policies or practices?

Early in this large policy move there was a heavy bet placed on accountability, with a commensurate bet placed on transparency. The theory of action was that providing the information enables the accountability and spreads responsibility for it. It wouldn’t just be the state telling local communities what to do. We would have a community telling their district and locally elected officials that our kids deserve better.

In my experience that didn’t necessarily pay off. The piece we missed was the communication and accessible communication, especially in an English-as-a-second-language state like Nevada. We are a majority-minority state.

Who has the biggest influence on that Big-A system in your state?

My default position is, the governor signed it!

Seriously, we are big believers in coherence. We have one accountability system that reflects the values and beliefs of our state that is also in our federal plan.

We’re trying to align the entirety of the system around that plan, rather than having various indicators, rating systems, or competing beliefs at the same time. We just have one system, and it was approved by the governor and the feds.

One of the areas that we could certainly improve on is the engagement of teachers in this process. When we were building our Every Student Success Act plan, we did have community members that reflected our state’s diversity. We had principals and teachers, but there is more than simply having a few of them attend our meetings once or twice a month.

What do you value most about the perspective that teachers bring to the table?

Teachers hold the same high expectations for kids that we do. When teachers have a seat at the table, we learn about their real challenges: outdated curriculum, large class sizes, and other factors that impair or create additional challenges as we try to meet those higher expectations.

Teachers also learn a lot about the accountability system and about assessments, about the hard conversations, questions, and decisions that have to be made. In turn, they are able to communicate with their parents, kids, and colleagues. And they can do it with a perspective that is enhanced by that experience.

If you could create an ideal accountability system, what would be in the mix?

I am deeply interested in district-level accountability. There’s an aspect missing and it involves those who make decisions about financial or human infrastructure and resources. District-level decisions greatly impact those that principals get to make and the learning environments those principals lead.

Ideally, I would love to have post-high school data. I would like feedback to the system from employers, the labor market, and institutes of higher education. They would be valuable in helping us round out what we believe to be true about the high school diploma as a valuable certificate.

Tell us how you are reconstituting the Clark County School District. How is that working, and how is accountability impacting that work?

I’m not sure everybody’s bought into it. But Superintendent Jesus Jara has really picked up the mantle. Dr. Jara believes in empowering his principals and holding the system accountable to achieving the outcomes. That really helps as we engage in conversations that are looking for solutions. There is not only accountability for outcomes, but for bringing solutions to the table.

We also are bringing in expertise to help us navigate the challenges. And we have included an equity study. Distributing authority to principals is one of the easier parts of this reorganization. Ensuring that they are prepared and ready to exercise that authority creates another degree of difficulty. We need to own that responsibility.

We also need to deliver resources. Part of our focus at the state level has been to identify, review, and analyze the equity of the funding. We are trying to create a system that brings decision-making and resources to the challenges that principals most face day-to-day.

(Click through the grid below to read the ‘A’ Word conversations from the first part of this series)

A number of new governors are coming into office, bringing along education chiefs. What advice would you offer them?

A real clear vision for education and expectations about what can be accomplished within your state is important. For us, the ESSA plan was a good opportunity. The ESSA plan can be viewed as a great opportunity for a governor’s policy advisors to shape a plan that expresses the state’s values and expectations. Plenty of people are actively doing this around the country. It is worth having some discussion with them.

What holy grail issues in education have we been unwilling to address?

Funding equity and looking deeply at the distribution of resources to schools, human and financial.

Why is that?

We understand as a nation that education funding that relies upon property taxes creates disproportionate gaps in available resources for kids. There has been a lot of discussion around that. But as we sit down with school-level expenditures under ESSA, we will see a lot of schools, typically in suburban settings, are spending more to maintain a staff that is likely more experienced and expensive than in urban centers.

The holy grail is to ensure those resources are equal. That is the responsible thing to do. And we need a conversation related to differential funding or weighted funding based upon the at-risk status of students, or their status as English learners, special education students, or talented and gifted students.

There’s a disproportionate impact across our state, and, I would imagine, across many states. This is a big issue that we have to get right.

I will add one other one: our ability to integrate with other community organizations that serve the same students and families. That is organizationally challenging for us. A lot of resources could be coordinated to address some issues that we’re all trying to address, such as wraparound health services. That could ensure a full network of support for students and adults.

“When teachers have a seat at the table, we learn about their real challenges: outdated curriculum, large class sizes, and other factors that impair or create additional challenges as we try to meet those higher expectations.”

What is the state of bipartisanship in Nevada when it comes to education and some of the big issues you face?

When I compare myself to other states, and listen to some other state chiefs, we’re in an incredible position. There have been a few cases where bills in my governor’s term have passed along party lines. But there are more cases where we have uniform agreement.

Yet we clearly have our work cut out for ourselves. Our Legislature understands that and has found bipartisan agreement on funding matters.

We had an all-Republican Legislature that decided to tax itself for education, specifically to fund children in poverty and students with English as their second language. We also had bipartisan agreement on the decentralization of the Clark County School District. I think we’re in a very good spot.

What is at stake for us as a country, and also what’s at stake in Nevada, for us to get these education issues right? What is at stake to get accountability right and use it in a way that serves all kids?

What’s at stake for the country are civil rights concerns. That is one of the reasons why accountability was put in place. If we lose the ability to transparently focus on outcomes for students, we lose a lot of our political ability to obtain funding and policies that support the civil rights community. That would be a dramatic step backwards, so we have to get it right. We can’t simply lose it.

What is at stake for accountability is the tension between measuring outcomes — English, math, science — and measuring conditions. I’m not adverse to measuring conditions, like the climate of the school. But I don’t think measuring conditions in a Big-A way without the necessary supports and some Little-A accountability is the right approach.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute.ÌıWilliam McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

Pedro Rivera serves as Pennsylvania’s education secretary, a post he has held since June 2015. Before being selected by Democratic Governor Tom Wolf, Rivera led Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s school district for seven years. The district’s reforms during his tenure led to students showing greater proficiency in reading, writing, and math. His work prompted the White House in 2014 to name the former teacher, principal, and union executive a “Champion of Change� for his work in transforming urban education.

Rivera tells us that accountability sets standards and conditions for policymakers, educators, and communities. But he also likens it to a doctor’s diagnosis. It tells you the need, but adults must dig deeper into the conditions that created that need.

How do you define education accountability? And how has that definition changed over time?

Here in Pennsylvania we define accountability as being about a contract. We see it as an agreement among policy leaders, whether at the state or national level; educators; and the parents and families who entrust their kids to us. Accountability is the agreement that sets the standards and conditions by which policy leaders, educators, and the communities we serve come together and share expectations.

It is our job as policy leaders to establish the conditions and to ensure every student has access to resources so they can succeed, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, language, learning need, sexual orientation, or family income. It is up to stakeholders to speak up when what we expect from them and the supports being offered don’t line up. And it’s up to the parents, community members, and students to help inform the practice of accountability at the local level and the policy at the broader level.

This arrangement ultimately impacts the next generation workforce and our next leaders.

“Whenever you set a mandate and it doesn’t support teaching and learning, people don’t do it.”

And, yes, the definition has absolutely changed over time, especially as we learn more and are able to fit some context around accountability. Folks have tried to steer clear of an intentional conversation around accountability. In Pennsylvania, we’ve tackled that conversation.

We’ve done that by meeting with thousands of stakeholders across the Commonwealth. That includes educators, leaders, researchers, parents, student advocates, and lawmakers. There is now a common theme around what they want to see in their education system and accountability system.

Let me make a connection between a school system’s accountability system and going to your doctor. Let’s say you visit your doctor. He tells you that you have high blood pressure and gives you a pill to take. Nothing changes, but the doctor keeps giving you medications. He is only managing the situation without looking at the root cause of this diagnosis.

In that scenario, accountability is like the diagnosis. It tells you the need. But you need to dig deeper to better understand the conditions that created that need. We have to use the data that accountability systems produce to look more specifically at the root cause of the diagnosis. What is now needed in that education system?

When you tell a parent their child’s school is an A, B, C, or D school, or a focus school, or a priority school, without any explanation as to why or how they can improve, they’re not going to be interested in that accountability system. It is like your doctor giving you a diagnosis and not explaining what it means and how you can combat it.

You really have to focus on areas to improve and use strategies in digestible bites that allow schools to see progress and momentum. Folks start to rely on that kind of system, just like when your doctor focuses on your needs in a more holistic way.

We can look at education the same way. Look at equitable resources. Use diagnostics to look deeply into a problem. And provide opportunities for learners to meet their needs and to continuously improve. There isn’t a parent or leader that wouldn’t buy into that philosophy.

As a system, we need to be willing to make that kind of investment and explain why this strong, clear system of accountability is important.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

You mentioned using data to drive improvement. How did you use data to drive change at the state level or while you were superintendent?

It’s important to give credit to Tom Wolf, our governor, and the team that we’ve pulled together. Governor Wolf allowed us to have a hard discussion. At first, it was to explain that our current system of accountability lacked credibility. It wasn’t equitable, and it heavily relied on standardized tests. We didn’t have multiple measures to address the needs of students.

We took two years to engage with stakeholders and get feedback. Scores on the state test used to count for most of a school or district rating, but now they count for about a third of the rating. We also have put a heavy reliance on growth to ensure students are growing year-to-year in the content of a subject.

And we have on-track measures. The research tells us that if we focus on specific factors, we can help ensure that students are going to graduate on time and are less likely to drop out. The factors we look at are third-grade reading-level attainment, seventh-grade math-level attainment, English acquisition for English learners, and meeting the needs of students with special needs and chronic absenteeism.

We also track college and career readiness. Our school districts submit to us a college and career readiness plan, which starts as early as elementary school. The plans seek to orient students around college and career options and engage kids in that conversation.

Part of this strategy was informed by my experience as a superintendent. I realized through surveys that parents of kids as early as third grade already started to believe that they couldn’t afford to send their kid to college. As local educators, we realized we had to change that perception and the information parents were getting.

We took that practice with us to the state level, where we engage first in elementary schools. Middle schoolers take a career inventory and then we support and identify college and career pathways at the high school level.

But we’re not stopping there. With the governor’s support, we’re also tracking data after high school graduation. And we’re working with agencies to track employment data, higher education data, and military data. This will allow us to start analyzing what kids are doing after they graduate from high school.

Now that you have finished your Every Student Succeeds Act plan, tell us how you engaged with stakeholders in its creation.

We’ve never stopped. When you engage with stakeholders and community members in an organic, authentic way, they never go away. When you don’t connect with them regularly, they’ll call you and ask, “When are we meeting again?â€�

We have continued to use our stakeholders and partners to inform all aspects of our education systems. We went from accountability and ESSA to school improvement, now from school improvement to STEM and computer science, and from STEM and computer science to workforce development equities. I can’t imagine us ever wanting to stop engaging our partners and stakeholders.

That said, when we started at the governor’s direction, I knew we had to engage stakeholders. Otherwise, we would just be creating policy that we thought would drive practice in the classroom. Having spent most of my career in a classroom, I knew that wouldn’t work. Whenever you set a mandate and it doesn’t support teaching and learning, people don’t do it.

We have engaged third parties to help facilitate engagement with stakeholders and parents and take notes. We set the agenda to make sure we were having a strategic conversation, but we let the facilitators guide the conversation. Today, I can say, “We’ve met with well over 3,000 stakeholders across the Commonwealth. We tried to meet with every different kind of demographic, and we didn’t always hear what we thought we’d hear.â€� They challenged us, which was healthy.

“There were many times where I felt like something was being done to me, especially in terms of accountability. If we can change that mindset for educators, students, parents, and community members … so they know we want to work with them on equity and continuous improvement, we will continue improving our schools.”

We have a number of new governors across the country. What advice would you have for them and their education advisers as they grapple with these issues?

First, it is possible to work on education in a bipartisan manner. Our governor is a Democrat. The General Assembly is overwhelmingly Republican. Many members are rural and very conservative. Working together and being open and honest and engaging in good, rich, deep dialogue, we were able to accomplish five significant parts of our agenda.

We adopted a basic education funding formula that was heavily focused on equity. We were able to pass our ESSA plan along with a strong accountability system. We strategically reduced the number of days students are administered state standardized tests, and we’re testing later in the school year to allow for more instructional time. We were able to pass new graduation standards that identify college and career readiness as well as the traditional standardized test pathway. We were able to pass an aggressive school safety bill that focuses on the social and emotional needs of kids. And we provided money and grants for everything from mental health services to safety and security and infrastructure.

Those examples show bipartisan work is possible.

(Click through the grid below to read the ‘A’ Word conversations from the first part of this series)

Tell us about the continuous improvement process you all have around your ESSA plan. What does that look like in Pennsylvania?

We ran a pilot first. We identified three school districts – one rural, one suburban, and one urban – to work with us to inform our practice. We engaged their leaders to help us create a plan that would focus our school improvement efforts on their individual needs, looking at everything from their performance status to their demographics. We developed a draft plan to build upon the strengths and needs of those kids and educators.

There have been “aha� moments working through the pilot. We started with classroom instruction, but we realized we had to take a step back and look at district leadership. District leaders ensure continuity and a focus on the district’s goals and support systems.

We also recognized that school leadership is extremely important and that the voices of teachers ensure a focus on the applicable practice of our strategies. By engaging all stakeholders, you can build a plan to move forward.

We are now also creating a clearinghouse of practices for schools to use as a resource. That allows us to help all the kids across the Commonwealth.

What holy grail issues have we been unwilling to address in education?

There is the “E� word for equity. You cannot be true to a focus on accountability and continuous improvement without providing an equitable distribution of resources. We know this nationally. And we know this historically. Some of the neediest communities also happen to be some of the lowest-performing districts and least-resourced districts.

Equity doesn’t mean taking resources away from one school and community to give to another school and community. Equity means identifying what works in some of the high-performing communities and providing those opportunities and resources to every community in a manner they need and at a time they need them.

Equity is about providing the same resources and opportunities to all students regardless of zip code.

What is at stake for us as a country to get these issues right? What’s at stake for Pennsylvania?

I’ve only been in government for four years. I’ve been a practitioner my whole career. There were many times where I felt like something was being done to me, especially in terms of accountability. If we can change that mindset for educators, students, parents, and community members alike, and change the narrative so they know we want to work with them on equity and continuous improvement, we will continue improving our schools.

Going back to the doctor analogy, the medicine the doctor gives you doesn’t do away with your high blood pressure. It just masks that something needs to be addressed. The same is true when you are not using your accountability structure in the right way. You’re not getting people to look at the root cause of a problem.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute.ÌıWilliam McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

Until Jan. 19 of this year, Bill Haslam had served as governor of Tennessee for eight years. During his two terms, Tennessee students sharply improved their classroom achievement. His state also became the first to offer free community or technical school to high school graduates and adults. And the Republican launched “Drive to 55” to ensure that enough Tennesseans earn a postsecondary degree or credential to match the 55 percent of Tennessee jobs that will require a degree or certificate in the near future.

Haslam shares in this ‘A’ Word interview how educating all students means “all” students, no matter their background. The process starts with holding policymakers, educators, parents, and students alike accountable for a successful outcome. The former Knoxville mayor recalls how education wars are as brutal as any public debate, but he reminds the nation’s new governors and their top education advisers that their roles will be as important as any in shaping their state’s future. Before Haslam left office, he spoke with us about modernizing Tennessee’s accountability system so testing data flow faster into classrooms. That way, teachers can have more information to help students master their courses.

How do you define education accountability? Has that changed over time? If so, how?

Accountability means holding everyone who’s involved — the federal government, state government, teachers, students, parents — for both the investment being made in education and the outcomes for those students. People get caught up in the argument about whether we need to invest more dollars before you talk about accountability or whether we only need accountability and input doesn’t matter. I’m on the side of input and outcomes matter, and we need to be serious about both.

How did you apply as governor what you just talked about to various education policies?

We’ve been in the middle of that battle over accountability the whole time we’ve been here. Tennessee was one of the big winners in the Race to the Top funding. Our three planks, which our Democratic governor initiated and I am glad our state did, were about raising our standards, having a year-end assessment that matched those standards, and tying the teacher’s evaluation to the student’s progress on those year-end assessments.

I think that’s why Tennessee was the fastest-improving state in the last two NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] reports. We did all three of those and tried hard not to back up even as the pushback has grown loud.

“We have to still insist on accountability for everyone. It can’t just be accountability for teachers. It has to be students and parents and elected people like me. And we have to remind everybody what is at stake here. This idea that we are preparing our students for their future in the right way, just because we are in America and have this history of leading in education, that just isn’t true.”

Tennessee does have a fascinating story over the last decade in particular, but talk about the current situation. Where have we gone wrong in building support for accountability, including for those three planks?

I would back up before those planks. First, we went through an extraordinary period in our country. We had a Republican president, George W. Bush, who said that No Child Left Behind means all students. Our version of that in Tennessee is all means all. When we talk about educating all students, it means all students whether they are disabled, low income, or students of color. We believe in their potential.

I love it that you had a Republican president focusing on that and saying we are not going to accept that some kids in some zip codes can’t learn. That was a huge step for the country.

Then you had a Democrat president go against the Democrats’ biggest voting base, the teachers unions, and tie teacher evaluations to student outcomes. That was a huge step for President [Barack] Obama, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for the political courage to do that.

Those two presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, made hard decisions that resulted in the nation focusing on every child. Are we measuring and holding ourselves accountable for what those students learn? That was an extraordinary period, and it paid huge dividends.

That said, a lot of people in the education world have a vested interest in things being like they always were. As much progress as we’ve made in Tennessee, a lot of folks would like us to go back. I will say, “You want us to go back to being 45th out of the 50 states?â€� And they will reply, “Well, no not that.” The way they would have us go would result in us going from being in the low-30s among states to back in the mid-40s.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

Do you attribute that to general resistance to change, or to something else?

Some of that is resistance to change, but an organized effort is working against those things. If you talk to anybody who’s been involved in education reform over the last eight years, they would say it went from having the wind at our back to having the wind in our face.

Some argue we are adding too much stress on the system and our children by testing, which they say we have to do for this year-end assessment you want. And they say when you tie teacher evaluations to it, now you have overly stressed teachers. You’ve created a situation where learning is not the objective, they say, it’s doing well on the test.

That is a good argument on its face. But, in reality, you are saying we don’t think it’s important to measure what students learn. Who suffers the most is our historically underserved populations. One of the beauties of No Child Left Behind and Obama’s efforts was that we started to disaggregate all this data and ask where students are making headway and where they are not.

I don’t think forces against reform would say they are OK with historically underserved communities not making progress. But I do think they would say the environment that you created added too much tension into the system and that’s not healthy.

Governors frequently focus on workforce development and economic growth. How does your educational system and some of the accountability measures connect to that in Tennessee? Has that ebbed and flowed along with accountability’s ups-and-downs?

That’s a great question. This is foundational to why we do what we do. We did a survey five years ago that showed by 2025, 55 percent of the state’s jobs would require a postsecondary degree — whether a two-year or four-year degree or a technical training certificate.

We were at 32 percent of the jobs requiring one of those, so we launched an all-out effort to get 55 percent of the population with a degree or certificate. The keys to Drive to 55 were Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect. They are basically two years of free community college or technical school for everybody.

We improved access to postsecondary education. But access isn’t the goal, success is. And we found that a large percentage of our students coming out of our schools needed remedial work in community college. If you need remedial work, there’s a very low chance that you will complete and get a degree or certificate.

Our efforts on measuring how well we are doing in K-12 preparation is about more than seeing how well we can do on tests. It is about making sure people are prepared for postsecondary education, which is increasingly necessary for employment.

“The governor and that commissioner [need] to realize this is not a job for sissies. I don’t know any wars that are as brutal as the education wars. And you better be ready to take some arrows in the back and in the front and on the side.”

Has Tennessee’s business community been meaningfully engaged in that discussion of late? Nationally and in states, they once were part of the wind at our back you were referencing. What does that look like for you in Tennessee now?

The business community is still engaged, and they talk to us all the time about workforce development and the employees they need. Most every conversation that I have with a business in Tennessee today, or one who is looking at coming here, is about whether we have the appropriate workforce.

That said, their main business is their main business. It’s hard for them to keep that kind of enthusiasm and political pressure going. Meanwhile, the main thing some folks do is represent the education association and various education communities. And, increasingly, you see a lot of educators running for office. That in itself is a good thing, but we need folks focused on student outcomes as their primary measurement and objective.

I’ll add one other point. One of the big changes with the Every Student Succeeds Act is that the federal government has a lot less power than it did before over education. As a conservative, I believe that’s a good thing. It has devolved power down to local school boards and county commissions and state legislatures. But I’m not sure our business community realized the decisions that were being dictated out of Washington are now being decided at their local school board. I’m not certain that we’ve engaged in the right ways with those entities.

If the federal government no longer has the same clout, what will it take to get school trustees, superintendents, people at the local level to continue to use data to drive change?

My approach is to tie it into the workforce preparation question. Folks have to realize that a lot more of our students need that postsecondary degree or certificate. To do that, they have to be prepared when they leave K-12. To succeed in middle school and high school, they better be reading at grade level by third grade. You have to connect all of the dots for folks to see. Ultimately, what does this child need?

What two or three data points do you use regularly? And is there is a data set you wish you could get your hands on, or you wish you could have used?

The ones that come to mind are reading proficiency in third grade, because I do think that is foundational. And we do pay attention to the ACT scores of our graduating seniors. It is not a perfect test in that it doesn’t really match the standards we are teaching in our schools. Our year-end assessment, TNReady, does that better. But we need some way to measure ourselves against the rest of the country. The ACT is one way to do that.

So I pay attention to third-grade reading, ACT scores, and our own TNReady test to see how well we are doing compared to prior years.

Ultimately, it becomes about postsecondary credentials that are achieved. A certain percentage of our students will never achieve those, and we understand that. But we need some measure that shows how our students who are graduating from high school are succeeding when they go beyond that.

Could you describe how TNReady is trying to get its testing data back to educators faster?

We have struggled with the online portion of that test. “Struggled” is a nice word. We’ve actually had a couple of disasters. Part of that is people wanting to take it with pencil and paper. We can do that, but it takes a lot longer to get those results.

The second thing is, the complexity of the test determines how long it will take to get the results back. Our teachers want us to be able to drill down into certain areas to see how well they are doing at teaching a standard. But the more you can drill down, the more complex the test becomes and the longer it takes to return that to the teacher.

We think it is important to get it to the teacher quickly. In most cases, teachers want to know how well they’ve done at teaching a standard so they can adjust for the next year.

(Click through the grid below to read the ‘A’ Word conversations from the first part of this series)

Are you satisfied with getting simple enough information to educators and parents that they can use it to improve achievement?

We have the right data. It is more a question of the timeliness of the data so they can use it. I feel very comfortable where our standards are now. And I feel good about our assessment matching the standards. Our issue has been delivering the platform to get the test done and get those results back.

A number of new governors are coming in and bringing on state education chiefs. What advice do you have for them?

My first piece of advice would be to be bold in who they are looking for as a commissioner. The second would be for the governor and that commissioner to realize this is not a job for sissies. I don’t know any wars that are as brutal as the education wars. And you better be ready to take some arrows in the back and in the front and on the side. That being said, this position can influence the future of the state as much if not more than any other position.

Tennessee has plenty of examples of bipartisan education work. Do you have a favorite example of something that works as a result of bipartisanship?

Yes, the Democrat governor and Republican Legislature set standards and assessments and evaluations tied to assessment. That led to Race to the Top funding.

Also, when all of the unease happened around Common Core, we put together a group of Tennessee educators who came up with high-quality standards. I think they are world-class standards.

What holy grail education issues have we as a nation been unwilling to address?

The biggest issue is whether we are going to stick to our guns and have that year-end assessment and tie teachers’ evaluation to it.

Number two, a year-end assessment that has consequences means you will have a lot of preliminary benchmark tests. Educators will want to see how they are doing midstream. Schools will do more testing than is required by the state. This gets you into the dangerous territory of how much time are we spending testing our kids?

We have yet to figure out that battle. But it is critical that we don’t back up on the importance of the year-end assessment.

What is at stake for Tennessee and the country to get these education issues right?

What is at stake is our national competitiveness. You’ve seen the scores that match how we are doing as a nation. We all think of ourselves as a leading nation for education. The truth is we are no longer setting the standard for educational excellence in the world. That’s a wake-up call.

We take great pride in being the fastest-improving state in education, but that still means we are somewhere in the bottom half. We are somewhere in the 25-to-35 range of the 50 states of a country that is falling further and further behind all of the time.

What do you think it will take to address some of these systemic problems?

To circle back to where we started, we have to still insist on accountability for everyone. It can’t just be accountability for teachers. It has to be students and parents and elected people like me. And we have to remind everybody what is at stake here. This idea that we are preparing our students for their future in the right way, just because we are in America and have this history of leading in education, that just isn’t true.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute. William McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

John White has served as Louisiana state superintendent of education since 2012. During that time, the former English teacher has drawn national attention for Louisiana’s work to ensure every student is on track to a postsecondary degree or a good career. The former superintendent of Louisiana’s post-Katrina Recovery School District, White has served as deputy chancellor of schools under former mayor Michael Bloomberg and former chancellor Joel Klein. He now is chairman of Chiefs for Change, a nonpartisan group of state education leaders.

In this ‘A’ Word interview with us, White observes that proponents of accountability need to recognize where accountability has been working and where it has not been working. Louisiana’s top education official contends that the nation’s diversity and decentralized education system requires accountability systems to ensure students are on track. But the lack of trust that arises in holding others accountable requires making sure educators, parents, and students understand the terms of the accountability system. That will help build trust and keep the real goal in mind of equipping students for their futures.

How do you define accountability?

Accountability is literally the accounting of what happened insofar as it can be objectively explained. It provides information to the responsible parties and relevant consumers. It’s a simultaneous telling of a story as objective fact and showing the need to react and improve in light of that story.

And has that definition changed any over time?

No, those principles remain true. But there is a connotation to the word that we should at least understand.

The connotation rose out of a political movement that united civil rights and business interests concerned about international competitiveness. They were suspicious of the education establishment’s claims that it was holding itself accountable by having credentialed people do the work. You know, “Trust us. We’re accountable.” The response was, “No, we’re going to hold you accountable.â€�

There are legitimate questions as to the trade-offs inherent in that approach. Anytime you insist on holding someone else accountable, you are in part saying they can’t hold themselves accountable. I don’t say this lightly, but 35 years into that movement, it’s worth looking at what has been accomplished and how the balance between external and local accountability is and is not working.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

Do you have an alternative in mind?

Critics of the contemporary accountability regimes say that we need to operate in a more high-trust manner. We should be wary of that perspective because of the decentralized way that our education system is structured. Until that structure changes, operating a high-trust environment, as some of the more productive educational systems around the world do, seems pretty naïve. But there is a lot to be learned from those systems.

Where do you see an example of a high-trust environment?

The system is routinized in some East Asian and European systems so teachers and students can have faith that Y will result if they do X. If you do these things proficiently, you can count on certain things happening.

That is a more managed vision of what school systems look like. There isn’t the incessant negotiation between management and labor that there is in the United States. There isn’t our mismatch of standards, curriculum, professional development, and preparation. Teachers and students navigate through articulated, routinized pathways in a way that gives them more to count on.

We probably will never get to, and maybe wouldn’t want to get to, a level of routine or systematization that some of these countries have. It would be antithetical to the pluralism that is at the heart of our republic. We have a more dynamic and diverse environment than most nations.

But you do generate a lack of trust when you hold accountable an individual teacher and don’t give them a high-quality or standards-aligned curriculum. Or a college of education doesn’t train them to use the school system’s curriculum. Or a state certifies a math teacher who doesn’t know math, but holds that person accountable for math results. You generate a lack of trust when you don’t you give that teacher the X + Y = Z equation that they can count on.

This is not to say accountability is wrong, not at all. But an exaggerated accountability response in combination with exaggerated chaos within the system will produce distrust. We should understand the trade-offs and should provide a more coherent system at every turn.

You’re describing a more effective accountability environment. Is this thinking about the consequences in a fairer way?

Yes, although I’m not really saying that the system is unfair. All I’m saying is that the underlying condition that necessitates robust accountability in the United States is fragmented governance, pluralism, diversity, and the historical biases that come with a mistreatment of different populations within our society. We have gravitated toward a system that measures outputs for the sake of trying to be consistent across inconsistent political subdivisions and communities.

The result is some school systems make their academic environments more consistent and less chaotic. But in those places where incoherence remains, teachers experience a more amped-up version of the academic chaos.

And that is the tension in American accountability. In other places where there’s greater central control, they can manage the levers within the system to create the X + Y = Z equation that engenders trust and may not necessitate the amplified focus on outputs-oriented accountability. We don’t have that control at the central governmental level here and probably wouldn’t want it.

So, we have relied on back-end accountability, but we need to understand that the effect of that goes in two directions. It is positive where there is or can be a coherent academic environment. And it is potentially negative where locals have resisted coherence or been unable to achieve it, because it amps up the lack of trust. Maybe that leaves us with the conclusion that we need to get the incoherence within the system to be more coherent.

How do you apply accountability in your work?

We have both quantitative output systems and qualitative input systems. We set up those structures to evaluate pre-K through 12th grade public and private school-system providers, educator-preparation structures, and providers of charter school services and course-offering services.

But the important thing is that every party, whether a producer of the services or a consumer of them, be as conversant as possible in the terms of the system’s academic values, what we’re trying to achieve. The fluency with which various constituencies speak about academic values helps create trust.

It is no small thing to have even the senior-most people of the organizations understand the terms of the accountability system. You want them to understand what it means to achieve proficiency in a subject versus mastery of it. You want them to understand the distinction between graduating from high school and graduating with a valued industry-based credential. And you want them to understand that those things shouldn’t be fetishized to the exclusion of developing highly capable, literate, responsible young men and women.

You want the accountability system understood as being about producing self-directed, responsible young adults, not just the metrics that everybody wakes up in the morning thinking about. That’s a tricky tension that any manager will understand.

“We have gravitated toward a system that measures outputs for the sake of trying to be consistent across inconsistent political subdivisions and communities.”

States are now implementing their accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act. What do you worry about or feel hopeful about?

I am hopeful about everything that we have discussed. I’m hopeful about more coherent school systems. I’m hopeful about more focused school leaders and district leaders. I’m excited about a system that is more ambitious in its aspirations for students in a state that has historically been besieged with low academic and education outcomes and still faces real challenges. I’m very hopeful about the role of accountability.

If I have a concern about ESSA, it is that I don’t think we took a step forward in defining what we want the education system to do or what we hope for our children. We had years to work on that, and we didn’t move the ball very far.

If you look at where we moved between A Nation at Risk in the early Reagan years and the congressional legislation of the 1990s, we moved very far in terms of defining what we want schools to do. Between 2002 and 2016, when No Child Left Behind and ESSA were implemented, I don’t think we changed much of our definition of what we want schools to achieve. We changed the governing model and the rules around it. But as we exercise tremendous authority over what schools do, the law did not evolve the definition of what we want them to do.

For example, when Congress allowed states under ESSA to offer measurement systems that were beyond those that existed under NCLB, the majority of states went after absenteeism and chronic absenteeism. We can call that valid or not, but we need to understand that states are including that in their systems principally because they can measure it. They didn’t go after it because they thought that absenteeism was the most important thing they could direct schools to focus on, important as it is. First and foremost, it was quantifiable.

That is a real step backwards. To have no real opportunity for states to improve the development of children through better measurement is a missed opportunity.

(Click through the grid below to read the ‘A’ Word conversations from the first part of this series)

Is it possible, or even a state responsibility, to say, “Here is our vision, and here is the coherence that leads to it�? A very short list of state ESSA plans actually did that.

First, every state is structured differently. Some states are in a position to have the commonality that you’re seeking, but some states are less likely.

Coherence goes vertically for the students. You want the family to be able to look out from early ages and say, “By the time my student exits the education system, whether that’s at age 19, 22, or 25, they will have had a set of experiences where the expectations were always evident to us, that one experience led to the next, and that it culminated in real value for my child.�

Coherence should go laterally for teachers. They should be able to look from the moment they entered the profession to the moment they proved themselves in a residency to the moment they were trained on using specific curriculum by qualified professional-development providers to the moment they were evaluated.

They should understand that the evaluation is directly linked to how well they have learned to implement changes and ultimately to their leadership path as educators. They should be able to see whether they can get really good at this job and take on more responsibilities. Those are the promises of coherence for teachers.

The verbal promise for the child and the lateral promise of progress and growth for the adult does seem possible. It’s hard, but it seems eminently possible.

Accountability systems obviously produce ample data. So how do you use data in your role, and what limits you from getting the data you wish you had?

Short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term data are all important.

On a short-term basis, we should be prototyping and piloting initiatives. We should be doing daily implementation and observation in school systems. Administrators like me should be receiving those data on a regular basis and making quick adjustments in light of those outcomes.

Secondly, we should be receiving annually what has happened in a school year and making adjustments to our overall strategy in light of that information. Any school system and school should be able to do that.

Third, we should be in touch with research that isolates factors more clearly. We should be voracious consumers of research that allows us to direct our strategy in more than a yearly or daily adjustment.

States and most school systems are not well set up to get the daily data feed. The post-NCLB world has generated a private sector that’s interested in providing data to teachers and administrators, but it’s not clear always what the data are in the service of or that they’re consistent with the goals of the district.

“If I have a concern about ESSA, it is that I don’t think we took a step forward in defining what we want the education system to do or what we hope for our children. We had years to work on that, and we didn’t move the ball very far.”

New governors are selecting education leaders. What advice do you have for people who are coming into a role like yours or as a senior policy adviser?

This is not a particularly complicated industry. It is a complicated business to implement, but there’s a lot of evidence as to what works and what doesn’t. My strong suggestion is to establish priorities that are based in evidence and that have a chance of affecting people’s lives positively. And try to wall yourself off from all the distractions that don’t have much to do with scalable, positive outcomes for students. Get a plan together, stick with the plan, and stick around long enough to make adjustments when things need to change.

What holy grail issues in education have we been unwilling to address?

Public financing of education. People don’t want to talk about it, but how states finance their education systems needs to be addressed. We cannot expect to have a better system and continue to fund education with no real plan for greater productivity than our present model.

I don’t say that as a partisan advocating greater levels of disruption nor as a traditionalist advocating for more resources. But you can’t expect to finance an enterprise in the same way for a century and expect to get different outcomes.

That said, we can do more to be successful and productive even within the current system’s constraints. We have artificial, random divisions of governance between early childhood and K-12, between K-12 and higher education and the workforce, and between colleges of education and schools. We have tolerated institutional self-preservation rather than a productive synergy.

There are serious opportunities for changes within the guts of the system and on the periphery, if states are willing to tread new ground.

What is at stake for us as a country to get this right? What is at stake for Louisiana?

This may be expected, but it still is right: A skilled, engaged, and connected population is the best way to maintain a nation’s economic viability. But there’s even more at stake. The education system is essential to our country being what it wants to be.

The founding of our country is based on the idea of self-interested citizens who are ambitious and want prosperity for themselves and are self-directed. The founding also is based on strong community members who are capable of navigating our society and contributing to it.

This is a country where more rides on the capacity of any individual and more value has been derived from the contributions of individuals than maybe in any society. We have a delicate balance between the communal and the individual that necessitates an educated, informed, and capable citizenry.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute.ÌıWilliam McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

Jamie Woodson served from 2011 through the start of 2019 as the executive chairman and chief executive officer of the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, a Tennessee-based nonprofit and nonpartisan education research and advocacy organization. Before that, the Republican served six years as a Tennessee state senator, including as chairman of the Senate Education Committee. She likewise served in the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005.

The University of Tennessee graduate elaborates in this ‘A’ Word conversation why accountability is needed to make sure students receive a full year of learning for a year in the classroom. At the same time, accountability needs to create a sense of urgency about getting the right supports to help students receive that full year of learning. She explains in this exchange with us how Tennessee is attempting to make its accountability system and the data it produces work better for the state’s students.

How do you define accountability in education? And tell us if that definition has changed over time.

Accountability has to be centered on what’s best for our students. For us in Tennessee, the purpose of accountability has been to measure whether students are receiving a year of learning for a year in the classroom. Accountability is also about creating support and urgency, so that we can encourage schools and districts to move with a sense of urgency when students aren’t learning.

The definition has changed over time. States now have more flexibility in their accountability measures. The Tennessee Succeeds Plan, which is essentially our [Every Student Succeeds Act] plan, does a better job shining the light on academic growth and achievement of underserved students. And our accountability ratings now more clearly show the stark disparities in achievement in schools and districts. Our plan also had consistent and considerable public input that included six town halls attended by over 1,000 Tennesseans and over 5,000 comments from the public.

The evolution of accountability includes how we identify where we can support educators in the classroom as well at the school and district level. That way, they can meet their students’ needs in a changing environment.

“Our republic’s success depends on our citizens being critical thinkers and problem solvers…. this is a keystone to our nation’s success or failure.”

Whether as a state legislator or in leading SCORE, you had to make decisions and recommendations that impacted students and adults. How did you use accountability practices or policies in guiding those decisions and recommendations?

We think of accountability as a framework in Tennessee. We know it’s essential to raising student achievement, so first we set high expectations for all students, grades, and subjects. And we scaffold those standards so students graduate from high school ready to succeed in postsecondary education and their chosen career.

Second, we use assessment to measure how well our kids are meeting those expectations. And third, accountability is acknowledging when students aren’t meeting the bar and taking steps as communities, districts, and schools to serve them better.

In some ways, this requires us to not blame the background or circumstance of a child but rather focus on what adults should be doing differently with policies and practices. Our teacher evaluation process is an example. We began that process in 2011. It has been refined over time, but we have preserved its focus on ensuring students are learning and growing every year.

Probably 36 percent of our educators in 2011 felt like the evaluation system was improving instruction. That is now up to 72 percent. And 69 percent of our teachers believe that the process improves learning in classrooms, which is what this is all about.

It is not too far back in the rearview mirror to a time when we were very publicly called out for Fs in truth-in-advertising. We were saying that our students were prepared and our standards were up to snuff. And they simply weren’t, compared to our peers across the country. As a result, we facilitated an outside review to determine whether our new standards were as rigorous and challenging as previous standards. We’ve had a pretty sharp lens on making sure that the accountability system has support, both within the public sector and the private sector.

You had a great line about “a year of learning for a year in the classroom.� So how does Tennessee get data to teachers fast enough so they can make sure students get that year of learning for a year in the classroom?

We put student achievement data at the heart of all the policy and advocacy decisions. As an example, our teacher preparation report card showed that only a few of our 40 teacher prep providers were producing candidates who were positively impacting student achievement. So SCORE presented a proposal to improve teacher preparation.

We know that principals are the No. 1 factor in retaining great teachers. We also started thinking about what the data says about our principals and how they spend their time. Tennessee principals self-reported that most of their time is spent on issues that aren’t even related to leading instruction or leading people and the talent in their building. We used data to think about how we could help principals change their focus.

We also know that 34 percent of our kids enter the workforce right after high school. The average salary for those citizens is a little less than $11,000 a year. A citizen clearly cannot be economically independent and participate fully in their community if their annual salary is that low. That data shows why all the component parts of education need to be working well so students can move into postsecondary education and a career.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

Tennessee’s data is the envy of many states, but is there any data point you wish you had?

I love that question. The data point that we are seeking, and I’m not sure that it’s going to be a singular data point, has to do with completing high school successfully. How do we know whether a citizen has a successful chance at gainful employment and economic independence? We know that completing high school is critical. So is access to higher education. But does a citizen have the skills to pursue an independent life full of choice?

Is there a data point or multiple data points that show what true independence for a citizen looks like? We are seeking answers to that question in Tennessee.

So much of this makes sense, but there’s been a lot of pushback against accountability. Where do you think we’ve gone wrong in building support for its concepts? What would help now?

Anybody who’s been in this work has learned many lessons. A big lesson has been that the critical and tough work comes in the classrooms and the schools after a policy is put in place. It is important to ensure that educators’ use of the policy is working for students.

We have tried to honor the important school-level and classroom-level view in thinking about leadership programs. As an example, we have a Tennessee educator fellowship through SCORE, and the Hope Street Group has an educator fellowship. Both have been essential in elevating the voice of student-focused teachers. These programs and others have allowed teachers to be integrated into decision-making more than ever before.

That includes the Teachers’ Cabinet within the governor’s office. The State Board of Education has engaged classroom teachers and school leaders in a variety of policies. And we have a liaison between the schools and the state on our assessment program.

Many of us tend to approach accountability from the head perspective, but accountability touches the heart so much. Many data points can show if a school is persistently failing, but individual students will be hurt the most. So will families who receive report cards that say their child is getting As and Bs, but they realize after high school that she or he may not have the skills needed to succeed.

Our work in Tennessee is not perfect, but we are committed to a cross-sector philosophy of leadership. Education success isn’t the responsibility of any one sector, whether education, government, or philanthropy. There is a genuine belief that we are all accountable.

“Many of us tend to approach accountability from the head perspective, but accountability touches the heart so much. Many data points can show if a school is persistently failing, but individual students will be hurt the most.”

As you consider the state plans ESSA requires, including the continuous improvement process, what are you hopeful about? And what does the continuous improvement process look like in Tennessee?

We’ve seen historic gains, yet so much work remains. We’ve taken ownership through the Tennessee Succeeds Plan to drive improvements and student outcomes.

For us, continuous improvement plans aren’t simply a reflection of a mandate or accountability requirement. Continuous improvement is critical for how we get from where we are to where we want to be for students.

We are excited about how our plan embeds success measures for every school and how they give parents, teachers, and community members greater clarity on whether students are being served well. Schools will have new and clearer data about the academic success of students of color, students from low-income families, students with disabilities, and students who are English learners. That will help inform their decision-making.

We’re excited about the Ready Graduate initiative we spoke of before. We still think there’s room for clarity and being sure we get what we need out of it. But the initiative increases opportunities for a high school student to earn college credit and industry certification and gain skills that will help them beyond high school.

We’re also excited about the clearer, more comprehensive approach towards turning around chronically low-performing schools. It will be interesting to see how the new collaborations evolve between districts and state-level partners. We are watching that closely.

This work is hard, but we are optimistic because of what we accomplished in the last decade in Tennessee. We have stayed focused on students and tried to let that lead the conversation, even when that means a hard conversation among adults.

If we hold ourselves accountable as partners, that will keep us moving students forward.

Why do you think that ecosystem exists the way it does in Tennessee? It doesn’t necessarily exist in all states.

I can’t speak to the context in other states, but I can about ours. This is about leadership. It has been critical in our research, accountability structures, and school factors that drive student outcomes.

And the leadership has come from different areas. Former governor [Bill] Haslam and Governor [Phil)] Bredesen before him provided strong leadership from the governor’s office. And the talented commissioners and teams at state’s education department have been very important.

Philanthropic and business leaders, as well as policymakers at every level, also have focused on identifying common horizon points, taking the best research and data and using it frequently to inform our decisions, having an appetite for continuous improvement, and holding each other accountable.

That is a unique recipe, but it is possible in any state. It takes leadership at the highest levels to not only serve their own organizations or populations but to also think about the whole and drive forward with partners.

Policies matter, too. Preserving high expectations for students and adults through standards, aligned assessments, and a meaningful educator evaluation system are important. Leadership and policies with a focus on continuous implementation have been at the core of our work and success.

(Click through the grid below to read the ‘A’ Word conversations from the first part of this series)

All of those things are good advice for new governors and policymakers around the country. Is there anything else that you would say to them as they contemplate their education priorities?

After saying “congratulations,� I would say there is no more important job for a governor than the opportunities that exist in education and how they can improve a state and life for its citizens.

In making education a signature issue, I would start with putting students’ interests at the center of all decision-making. That will keep the conversation focused even though important adults also are impacted.

My other advice includes investing well in the policies that will most dramatically advance student achievement growth. Communicating well with the education experts — at the state department of education and in the schools — also matters. Talk to them about how you value them and, most important, listen to their feedback and ideas.

Finally, reach beyond education to build solutions-oriented coalitions. Government has its role, but there are leaders from business and philanthropy who are interested in supporting a strong education vision.

What is at stake for us as a country to get these education issues right? What’s at stake for Tennessee?

What’s at stake is whether we have one decade of success or success for multiple generations for students. It is more important than ever for education to give all young adults and citizens the capacity and freedom to pursue a life of financial and personal fulfillment.

The future of the education profession is at stake as well. We need to recruit the best talent to teach and then support them. After all, they have the most important role in a community. Our republic’s success depends on our citizens being critical thinkers and problem solvers. Not to be overly dramatic, but this is a keystone to our nation’s success or failure.

Is the achievement gap solvable? If so, what it will take?

There is no silver bullet, but there are two areas that stand out in Tennessee. First, we need outstanding preparation programs for teachers and principals and compensation strategies that incentivize the best teachers and leaders to serve in schools where they’re needed most. That particularly includes in economically distressed areas. And we need deeper, more targeted support for teachers and leaders early in their careers.

Second, we need to believe that students can do challenging work. The TNTP report on “� shows how we have failed as adults to believe in them. The report details how students spent more than 500 hours in the school year on assignments that were below grade level. That was because the instruction didn’t ask enough of them. Eighty percent of the teachers surveyed supported standards for college and career readiness, but only half of them thought their students could reach that bar.

That is an expectations gap, and that’s fixable. But it will take a cultural change. We’ve clearly learned in Tennessee that, if you set the bar high, students will meet that bar or exceed it.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute.ÌıWilliam McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

Since Tom Boasberg’s appointment as superintendent of Denver Public Schools in 2009, the district has posted record enrollment increases and increased its four-year graduation rate by over 25 percentage points. Over the past decade, DPS has moved from being the district with the lowest rate of student academic growth among major Colorado districts to the district with the highest rate of student academic growth.

DPS has received national recognition during this time for several initiatives, including exceptional leadership development programs for teachers, school leaders, and principal supervisors; school choice; collaboration among district-run and charter schools; and promising new schools.

Boasberg, a Yale University graduate and Stanford University–educated lawyer, brings a breadth of domestic and international education, business, and political experience to his current role. In this ‘A’ Word interview, Boasberg makes it clear that organizations, including schools, cannot function without strong accountability systems. They are a way to reward people who are excelling, and are a way to guide decision-making when change is needed. Boasberg is adamant, though, that accountability is not about punishment. It is about meeting goals, and making sure teams and individuals have the supports and resources to meet their goals.

How do you define accountability? And has that changed over time?

Accountability is being clear on your performance goals and standards. It’s being transparent on where you are reaching and not reaching those goals. And, importantly, it’s a willingness to change when you’re not meeting them.

For me, in a nutshell, that is accountability. The importance of having clear goals, being transparent about the degree to which you’re meeting them, and possessing the willingness to make changes and improvements. Critically, that includes supports when we’re not meeting our performance goal.

Everything is accountability when you’re part of one organization; it’s shared. Accountability is not for any single unit. We share accountability for performance as well as individuals being reasonable and accountable for their own performance.

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Has that changed or evolved as you’ve had time under your belt as superintendent?Ìı

I don’t think it has. Fundamentally, accountability is not about punishment. That is very important. Accountability is being clear about what you’re seeking to achieve, being transparent about when and how you are going to achieve those goals, and being willing to make changes to get there when you haven’t reached your goals.

Accountability is not about punishment. Accountability is about change and improvement to reach goals.

How have accountability practices and principles supported some of the decisions you’ve made? Ìı

Importantly, accountability is one of our district’s core shared values, which were picked by well over 1,000 of our educators. They include putting students first, integrity, equity, and collaboration. You can’t have students first, integrity, or equity without accountability.

We’re accountable for everything we do, whether at the district level, support level, school level, or individual level. We’re accountable for the results we seek to achieve, and we’re accountable to take the steps and, in some cases, make the changes to reach those goals.

Accountability is a shared core value of Denver Public Schools, and it’s at the heart of everything we do in delivering results for our kids and for our families.

You just rattled off a great list of core values. Were you surprised by where the process of creating them led you? Ìı

We brought in employees from bus drivers to teachers to food service for a whole day. There was a question about what values people ultimately were going to come up with. But as people got together, they took pride in their performance. They believed that we all have to rely on each other.

In a team, members need to be accountable. No one wants to play on a team where other members don’t have a degree of accountability for their performance.ÌıIt was striking to see that accountability is as much a value of our teachers as it is for our school leaders and district leaders.

How did you navigate a time when you and your team were trying to implement an accountability practice and encountered resistance?

The example that I have in mind has to do with achievement gaps and opportunity gaps in our district, just as you see throughout the country. It’s very important that we are transparent about what those gaps are and that we are accountable to make changes to address those gaps.

You can’t just say, “Oh, gee, the gaps are there. We’re really unhappy about them.â€� The issue is, what are you going to do, or do differently?Ìı That, to me, is accountability.

We have had important discussions around what fixes and practices we have that provide our most talented leaders and teachers the supports they need to work in our higher-poverty schools. The discussion also focused on getting our higher-poverty schools resources on a differentiated basis to better meet the needs of their kids.

This means our higher-poverty schools are going to get more resources than others. Supporting our teams and kids is a key part of accountability.

Accountability also includes moving to restore or replace a school with a stronger school if the campus doesn’t see stronger student growth after receiving supports for a period of time. This is about both personal and organizational accountability. It’s about being responsible for supports and making changesÌıwhen we’re not seeing the results that we need.

What do you wish your colleagues, DPS parents, the media, and community leaders in Denver understood about accountability?

That when we’re not seeing the kind of results we want to see for our kids, it is really important to make changes. Most people agree with that. At the same time, you see lots of change and resistance when those changes affect individuals and relationships, which we naturally are concerned about.

Our fundamental responsibility is to our kids. At times, that’s going to mean making difficult and painful decisions about individuals and schools. Most people understand that in their heads, but sometimes it’s hard to see the individuals and relationships we care about being affected.

Do you have an example of finding common ground with a constituent or partner who was not in favor of an accountability-based practice or a decision?

Sure. Before one of our low-performing elementary schools had gone through a turnaround, we sat down with parents and discussed how the kids weren’t getting the growth they need. We talked about needing to redesign the school. ThereÌıwere a lot of concerns, resistance, and questions.

We had to start with, does the school need changes? What do the results say? And then we talked about how we could shape those changes so we end up with a stronger school. We asked, what do you want and need?

We wanted to make sure the community was included on what changes were made and how they were made. At the starting point, the changes were painful. But we felt it was our duty in running schools to say, “Here are the standards, and here is where the performance and growth standards have been repeatedly missed. A change is needed, and a turnaround is needed.�

A year later, it wasÌıstriking to see those parents say, “Thank you. Our kids are doing much better.â€� They made it clear the changes were painful. But they acknowledged their kids were doing better and that they appreciated the supports and changes.

Where do you think we’ve gone wrong in building this kind of broad support for accountability?Ìı

Too often it is seen and described as a punishment, and that elicits lots of resistance. Often, we don’t do enough at the beginning to establish a shared path of goals. This is not about punishing someone for the state’s or the district’s goals, but saying, “We as a community share a common set of goals, and we as a community are going to work together to achieve those goals, including making necessary changes.�

This means bringing people into the goal-setting process so that they have an ownership stake in those goals and reaching them.

Do you have the right kind of autonomy and supports to achieve the aggressive goals that have been set for you? Or, put another way, are there obstacles that keep you up at night?Ìı

Sure. There are tons of obstacles, from historical practices to resources, to funding, to this increasingly divisive political environment. I’m extraordinarily upset and concerned about the divisiveness of the rhetoric coming from some of our national political leaders. They hurt efforts to bring people together, to unite them.

At the same time, I do feel that we have the autonomy and that it’s up to us to perform. It’s up to us to work with our community. It’s up to us in our democracy to have two-way dialogue to generate a political consensus and support around goals and around key activities, and it’s up to us to recognize, in a democracy, there’s never going to be 100 percent support for anything, and there are times when you’re going to have to make decisions that people are going to disagree with.

It’s very important to hear their voices, but the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good, and as a leader, you have to sometimes make difficult decisions that some members of your community are not going to agree with. And that’s the nature of democracy.

What data points do you pay attention to the most? Is there something you wish you could track that you can’t easily do so now? Ìı

First and foremost, I pay attention to student growth. The students come in high-achieving, middle-achieving, low-achieving, or very in-between. We want to see them grow, right?

For example, we look carefully at how kids, on our whole-child indicators, are being supported and challenged and engaged, for an example, so I think that whole-child data is important. I think we have to look very carefully at equity data, which involves our kids from different economic and racial backgrounds receiving support, making the same progress, getting the same access.

We also look at adult data, which is how are we doing in terms of recruiting and retaining and developing our educators.

For you, what would a perfect accountability system look like in Colorado?

I’m not sure there is a perfect one. In fact, I’m sure there’s not one because so many conflicting values go into it.

But I think that it’s a system that places a premium on the growth of kids as opposed to just their status, and one that pays very careful attention to closing gaps. We’re a state in the country with very wide gaps in inequities in our schools and in our society, so we need to pay really close attention to how we’re doing in closing those gaps.

What uncomfortable truths in education have we been unwilling to address?

I think it’s, very clearly, the inequities of opportunities for kids. We see that in so many ways, from the way we construct our districts to isolate kids in poverty to our funding mechanisms that don’t provide the necessary resources and supports to help kids in poverty. There’s just so many elements of our system that advantage families that already have the most advantages and don’t provide necessary resource supports for families who have the least.

Too often this conversation divides into “Are you for accountability, or are you for support?� That often is the way the debate gets framed.

Like so much else in our political discourse, it’s a polarization that turns into an “either/or� conversation that should certainly be about both. We must have high levels of supports for our teachers, our school leaders, our schools, and we must have clear accountability.

We need to reframe this as a “both/and� discussion. You can’t have support without accountability, but likewise, you can’t have accountability without support.

Accountability — what does it mean today? We have been discussing this question for several years at the Bush Institute. We’ve always stood for accountability in education, but it seemed that instead of getting heads nodding in agreement when we talked about our work on accountability, there’s been growing skepticism of the concept. We wanted to talk to experts, those charged with implementing educational accountability at the federal, state, and local levels, which is what led to this series of interviews.

Upon reflecting on what each of these experts said, the good news is that the core principles of accountability that have guided progress in our schools are still widely agreed to: setting high standards, assessing regularly to those standards, measuring improvement, and providing supports for students and consequences for schools that don’t improve. Disaggregation of data is vital and has led to a focus on closing achievement gaps, especially for poor and minority students. Those basic tenets guide the work of these experts no matter what political party they are affiliated with or what position they hold.

But they also acknowledged the fundamental truth that policymaking is an imperfect process.Ìı No policymaker gets all the details right, and policymaking in and of itself requires different sides to bring together their varying points of view, which inevitably leads to some level of trade-offs.

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This imperfect policymaking process has led to shifts over time in how accountability has been implemented at the federal, state, and local levels. The focus on accountability largely grew out of efforts by several states back in the 1980s and 1990s.

While some states were leading the charge, others were lagging behind, so the federal government took on a much more significant role through passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. But we’ve now seen a shift back to the state and local level with the perceived overreach of the federal government. The Every Student Succeeds Act keeps some of the fundamentals in place, but shifts authority for the design of accountability systems back to the state level.

No matter where the balance of control lies and what kind of progress we’ve seen to date, there still is serious room for improvement. The experts we interviewed outlined a series of issues that have yet to be fully addressed if we are to improve outcomes for kids and remove barriers that stand in the way.

Some of these issues should be addressed by policymakers, but many of the challenges still in place can’t be tackled via policy change. They instead are in the hands of administrators, school boards, teachers, parents, and engaged citizens. For example:

• While we have general agreement on the importance of an annual test to measure whether students are learning to read and do math on grade level, we still often find too much test prep in our schools. There is widespread support for the annual assessment, but an overreaction to that assessment with too much test prep.
• Parent voices in communities across the country are too often limited to a segment of parents — often white, upper-middle-income parents. But they are usually the minority of parents within a community, so it’s important that low- and middle-income parents are engaged and heard from as well.
• There’s room to grow the accountability system and look at not just how students do through high school, but beyond high school. Danny King in Pharr–San Juan–Alamo wants to know how students graduating from his South Texas district are persisting into higher education. That signifies a local leader willing to take ownership.
• Data receipt is often too slow to be actionable. For all the progress we’ve made on the use of technology to deliver real-time information, there are still serious lags in getting data and information to parents to understand how well their child is performing and whether they are on track.
• Finally, there was an acknowledgement from several experts on the disconnect between what accountability and data tell us and how resources are aligned — or too often misaligned — to the priorities that data tell us we should focus on. Kevin Huffman discussed that the billions of dollars that are spent on professional development across the country are often spent independently of accountability. It’s been a widely known fact that professional development dollars have been poorly implemented and targeted for years, and yet we’ve seen little change. That’s a significant set of resources that, if aligned more seriously to the needs of kids and teachers in a particular district, could make a real difference.

What was particularly encouraging from these interviews was the leadership each person has demonstrated. The implementation of accountability at the ground level can lead to different reactions. It can be seen as a tool for improvement or can stoke a culture of fear. These leaders all view it as a tool for improvement. They are committed to using data, and are not afraid to admit when more of the same is not working.

We could use more like them, and I hope they continue to lead. Our students will be better off for it.

Holly Kuzmich, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, worked on educational policy issues at the White House and the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush.

Diane Tavenner is the founder and CEO of , a charter management organization that serves students in California and Washington State. Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report have ranked Summit among the top public schools in the nation. In partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Summit is now sharing its Personalized Learning Platform for free with schools across the country..

A graduate of the University of Southern California and Stanford University, Tavenner has been a teacher and an administrator in traditional public schools in California. She is a Pahara-Aspen Fellow and a Broad Academy Fellow.

In this ‘A’ Word interview, she describes how Summit marries values and data to constantly improve classroom instruction and student outcomes. Summit schools use data in rapid information cycles that provide quick feedback to teachers, students, and parents alike, focusing all the while on preparing students for successful futures.

A self-described optimist about designing better accountability systems, Tavenner contends that accountability needs to expand beyond end-of-year math and reading scores. A modern accountability system would use today’s technologies to provide rapid feedback about whether students are on track for meaningful work and to become productive members of American society.

How do you define accountability?Ìı And has that definition changed over time for you?

As a society, we are all responsible for the success of every single student. Accountability in our education system is essential, and it must be aligned to support high achievement for all students.

Accountability looks different at the school level versus state level. At the school level, accountability has to be about student outcomes for each individual school and their students. At the state level, it needs to be about how we’re investing in the system to ensure we’re getting outcomes for every student.

That’s probably a non-controversial definition of accountability in education, but two other points are central to the way I think about accountability.

First, accountability cannot be one-way. It’s always reciprocal, and it must be an agreement that both sides embrace. For example, if teachers and schools are accountable for student outcomes, then districts and policymakers are accountable for providing them with the tools, training, and support to be effective. If that agreement breaks down, the accountability system won’t be effective.

Second, accountability must be embedded in an improvement cycle. If we don’t have a strategy for using accountability data to do things differently, then we are just blaming and shaming. I fundamentally believe that people and organizations are not motivated to change because they have been blamed for missing goals. They improve when we use accountability data to provide feedback and support.

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Has your definition of accountability changed in any way?

I don’t know that it has changed.

As a charter leader, how have you used accountability in your work?

At Summit we use data and information to examine how we’re doing against our goals and to find ways to get better. We use accountability to ensure that we’re doing what we said we would do, and to make sure we’re constantly getting better.

Our process starts by figuring out our shared values and the purpose of our schools. Our core value is that we believe students need to be prepared to live lives of meaning and purpose. So, we look at theÌıskills, habits, and behaviors that students need to be successful in college and beyond our school.

We then set those as goals. And weÌıhold ourselves accountable by designing tools that help kids get those skills, providing teachers and school leaders with the training they need to enable those conditions, and measuring everything along the way to ensure our students are on the trajectory that we want them to be on.

When we don’t meet our goals, we constantly re-examine what we’re doing. We use the data and information to get ourselves back on track towards where we want to go.

Is there an example of how you all have used data and other tools of accountability to reach a particular goal?

A good example is how we have reached our goal around one-to-one mentoring, which is a unique, critical part of our school model. One of our core values is that students need meaningful relationships and engagement with their broader community to live a life of purpose and a good life.

We know from science that this requires skills like the ability to have healthy interpersonal relationships. Those are driven by kids’ abilities to self-regulate, manage conflict, and build trust with others. We also know that kids who come from backgrounds with childhood trauma have a much harder time building relationships. If they have at least one stable adult relationship in school, they’re far better off.

That’s why we have designed our school model to include a one-to-one mentoring relationship for every student. The mentor stays with them for multiple years to create a relationship that’s built on trust and helps them build those skills.

We’ve structured our school schedule to include times for mentoring and tools for the teachers to be effective mentors. Then, we measure and hold ourselves accountable for those actual outcomes, giving teachers feedback and coaching on how they’re interacting with students. We make sure that we are meeting that goal.

That’s a good example, from start to finish, of how we think about the whole process of accountability.

Could you say more about how you’ve structured Summit to align mentoring with academic rigor? Often, you hear that you can only do one or the other well, given finite resources of time, people, and money. How have you managed that tension? What have you learned?

In addition to the value of relationships and mentoring, weÌıhave values around kids’ abilities to develop their cognitive skills, those important foundational skills that cut across all subject areas. Those skills allow them to analyze and evaluate, make an argument, and communicate effectively. They need knowledge in order to do those things, and they need to be able to have many other habits of success.

We have balanced those pieces by starting with our values. We have articulated what we care about and believe. to understand the best ways to get those for all our learners.

We then designed the entire experience to include those pieces. A lot of people try to take an existing school design, which is a fairly industrial model, and squeeze in pieces or tweak one little piece.

We’ve designed from scratch to get to the outcomes we want, and then implemented the design. We use rapid-cycle data to figure out what’s going well with the design, what’s going well with the implementation, and what we can improve on. We look at those outcomes to make sure that we’re hitting our values.

The short answer to your question is we purposely and coherently designed all those values that we care about into the model and aligned them.

What may have limited your ability to implement accountability practices or policies in your work? Ìı

I have given that a lot of thought, and honestlyÌıcan’t come up with anything that has limited us.

If you look around the country, there has been pushback against the three pillars of accountability — raising academic standards, assessing kids according to those standards, and attaching consequences to the results. Where do you think we’ve gone wrong in building broad support for accountability? And what would help us now?

I feel like we’ve been fighting over accountability in education for decades. There are really two reasons.

One reason for the pushback is accountability is being used to identify and punish underperforming schools and teachers. I get that, but I also believe accountability needs to be a tool that provides feedback for improvement and growth.

The second reason, and this is important and doesn’t get enough attention, is that we don’t have a clear consensus about what we value, the science of learning, and the design of schools. Educators are being held accountable for student outcomes when they don’t have control over these three big pieces that impact their ability to improve outcomes.

If I could sum it up, we have had a far too narrow approach to accountability for the last 15 years. We have been focused on end-of-year math and reading scores. I get that these are available tools, and maybe that is what we could get people to agree to in the early days of accountability. And we have added other metrics likeÌıEnglish language learner proficiency and high school graduation rates. Still, we’re using a narrow focus to hold people accountable.

I don’t think it tells parents and taxpayers what they need to know about our schools. Nor does itÌıreflect the work that the good teachers do in their classrooms. And, disturbingly, it doesn’t tell us if kids are ready to enter adulthood and for the world beyond high school. That is what has gone wrong.

There is good news, and I’m a huge optimist about being able to design accountability frameworks that give us meaningful information and support continuous improvement.

And, I think, we as a country are not very far off from a shared set of values about what we want education to do for our kids and country. I would argue that most people want the high school diploma to mean something. They want graduates to launch into adulthood able to engage in meaningful work and be productive members of society.

If we could agree on that, we could develop an accountability system that people believe in and that actually tells us if that is happening. We have technology and tools today that could help us do that.

If you were designing that system, what would it look like?ÌıÌı

My son is a ninth-grader. What I really want to know are yes-or-no answers to three things: Is he on track to be successful in his next phase of education or life?ÌıHas he been able to discover his interests? And does he have a goal for where he wants to go in the future, and is he on track for that?

The baseline is going to be different for every kid. And you need to know whether your child is meeting that baseline. But those are the answers I want to know.ÌıWouldn’t it be amazing if I could say “yesâ€� or “noâ€� to all of those? IsÌıthe school actually helping him get these things and move him in those directions? How are all the other kids in the school doing on those things?

Something simple and straightforward like that is what I care about and, I think, what most parents care about.

As a value at Summit, how does accountability change how you hire teachers, school leaders, and all the people that make your schools successful?ÌıAnd has that changed over time as your systems have become stronger and your own continuous learning has grown?Ìı

I’m a student of leadership, and the best organizations have clear values and hire against those values. We’ve always been clear about what we care about, and it is a huge part of our hiring. We’re looking for folks who are aligned with what we believe, who care about what we believe, and who are driven by what we believe.

That said, I have a very different perspective than I did two years ago. with more than 330 schools across the country in 40 states. They are mostly traditional public schools run by districts.ÌıI had wrong impressions around what teachers and leaders in these schools believed, valued, and cared about. I have been quite happy to be proven wrong and realize that they all want the same thing that we do for their kids. They get up every morning, and they work really hard.

But they are not often working in systems designed to get those outcomes. They are not given the feedback, the science, and the tools to get those outcomes.

So,Ìıit’s not a mindset or shared-values problem. It is a support-and-systems issue that may impede teachers to do the things they would like to do.Ìı

That’s exactly right.

As you know, the Every Student Succeeds Act gives states new powers to design accountability systems. What should we expect from school board members, state leaders, and district leaders when it comes to ensuring all students have the opportunity to learn and succeed?

I have high standards for our leaders. I expect creativity, and I expect courage from them.

What I’m looking for is the opportunity to pilot alternative accountability systems, exemptions from existing accountability systems for folks who are really doing good work, and innovative ways to approach accountability.

We’re going to have to have some opportunity to innovate and move from the very narrow set of things we’re holding folks accountable for. We need to move to a broader, more thoughtful set of metrics that captures the breadth of what we care about and value. That is what I’m hoping for.

You’ve talked a good bit about using data. How does Summit use data to drive daily decisions? What buckets do you track?

DataÌıdrives everything we do. We will be the first to tell you technology is not the answer, but it is an incredibly powerful tool.

We use the Summit Learning Platform to track real-time information about what teachers and students are doing on a daily basis, and the choices that they are making at a micro level.

For example, we can look at the types, quality, and frequency of feedback that teachers give kids on their daily work. We can look at the choices that students make in preparing to show their mastery of content. We can look at the goals that students are setting, if they’re achieving them, and if they’re shifting strategies when they’re struggling to meet a goal. We also canÌılook at the type of coaching they received, and if it was effective.

We use sort of a limitless amount of information. That’s coupled with bigger, longer-term data. Are students getting accepted to college? Are they persisting through college? Are they building relationships? Are they forming good habits?

We use all this data to inform the improvement cycle. We give it to parents. We give it to teachers. We give it to students. The information is transparent and in real time. We use it to meetÌıwhat we set out to do and to get better on rapid, short cycles.

And, of course, we use it as an organization to figure out whether we have a design problem or a flaw, whether we are creating new science about learning, and whether we are learning something new or different.

That’s a lot, but data is really our life here.

Are people ready to use data like that in the traditional public schools you are working with?

We’re finding that, one, it depends very much on how you share and present the data. If it’s hard to get, really wonky, and not easy to use, people don’t use it.

But we keep trying to figure out what data would teachers and students use in a particular moment. We watch teachers and talk with them. We watch kids and talk with them. We observe what they use and give them data. We test how we’re showing it to them to see what they do with it. Data can become intuitive. If you present it in the right way and show it at the right moment, it does drive behaviors.

I’ll give you an example. We have a one-to-one check-in between mentors and their mentees. Recently, some of the mentors realized they didn’t have key pieces of data about their students, such as their goals for the week, whether they achieved them, and where they are in their various classes.

They didn’t have that easily organized, so we put together a dashboard for them so they can easily pull up that information. That saved half of the check-in time and allowed them to have more quality interaction with the student.

What uncomfortable truths in education have we been unwilling to address?

I am a huge fan ofÌıThe End of Average, Todd Rose’s work. It changed the way I look at the world.

The fact is our accountability systems are based on averages, and what they mostly tell us is how a group of kids performs in schools on average. Even at the individual student level, grades and test scores are averages. For me, that’s the biggest uncomfortable truth. That’s how we’re looking as a system. We’re aren’t getting to the individuals.

Our organization has been built on a seriousness around all kids, every single one of them, and there is a real uncomfortable truth that we’re aren’t serious about all kids in some of the systems we’ve designed. We are very comfortable setting goals for schools to have 50 percent, 60 percent, or 70 percent improvement year over year, knowing full well that whole generations of kids are going to go without what they need to be successful.Ìı

What’s at stake for us as a country to get these issues right?

I know I’m biased as an educator, and I certainly don’t want to sound hyperbolic, but I really believe that everything is at stake. Look around our world. There are a bunch of unhappy people. They feel hopeless. There are tremendous problems. I fundamentally believe that education is the core of the solution. But the only way that we’re going to realize that solution is if we focus on what we care about and the outcomes we want, and then relentlessly design and execute against that.

My shorthand for this problem is that the high school diploma in America doesn’t mean anything anymore. Everyone knows that. But, when I think about the investment we make in K-12 education and what 18-year-olds are capable of, I don’t know why we can’t make the high school diploma mean something again.

I don’t know why it can’t mean every person in this country launches into adulthood equipped with the skills, knowledge, and experiences that they need to succeed in their next stage of life, on a pathway that they have crafted for themselves. That’s the opportunity, and everything is at stake.

Danny King leads the Pharr–San Juan–Alamo school district along the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas. About 90 percent of the students qualify for free lunch; 99 percent of the students are Latino; and the district’s dropout rate once nearly doubled the Texas average.

In recent years, the district has shown remarkable success, including a sharp reduction in its dropout rate, the creation of new pathways for students who often are the first generation in their families to further their education beyond high school, and partnerships with organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

King, a member of the George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Advisory Council, has been a major driver of that progress. Slowly and methodically, he has lifted up a district that easily could have been left behind. He did so through insisting upon high standards, measuring student progress, and attracting talented teachers and principals. His work has culminated in many awards, including his being honored as Texas Superintendent of the Year in 2013 by the American Association of School Administrators.

He emphasizes in this ‘A’ Word interview that his next step is tracking post-secondary completion rates. His vision of accountability’s future includes knowing whether his district’s students are succeeding in college of some kind. If they are simply being remediated, King says, his district is not succeeding.

How do you define accountability?

Accountability is taking responsibility for student outcomes.

Has that definition changed for you over time, or has it been pretty consistent?

The definition has been consistent. What I like to include in it, and what I like to hold myself and our system responsible for, has probably broadened.

How so?

Looking more beyond 12th grade is one way, making sure that we are improving our students’ completion of post-secondary education. We want to have an impact on that.

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How have you used accountability principles and practices in your work as a district leader? How does it influence your decisions?

Accountability has impact in all areas, from the way we work with curriculum to how we schedule, to how we develop staff. We’ve been doing some performance pay that’s aligned to accountability. That affects staff assignments, as well as hiring or reassigning staff.

You mentioned curriculum. How has accountability impacted your work there?

We look at the curriculum in areas where we are underperforming. And we might look at other districts that are performing well in areas where we might be struggling. We look at what they are doing, and bring in outside experts to help us.

Basically, we dig in and turn everything upside down to get to the bottom of performance issues and any aspects of the curriculum.

How has this kind of accountability worked in a district like yours with a large number of students who are English language learners?

In general, it’s the same. We try to look at the big picture and not necessarily go for the quick fix. For example, we emphasize bi-literacy and use a dual-language approach, where other districts may look at the quicker path of getting them to English, dropping the Spanish, and just focusing on test prep. We look at more of the long haul.

Tell us about some of the trade-offs or decisions you made around resources and time as you adhere to “taking responsibility for student outcomes.�

To keep going with the example of bi-literacy, we need resources for training and curriculum. And we have worked with some individuals who looked at students being tested in English and thought, “Why not get them to English immediately and forget about the Spanish?� The research shows that strongly developing the student’s first language will have a better long-term payoff.

How do you get people to be willing to do the hard work with you? Does research help?

Using research helps; so does being persuasive, tenacious, and persistent.

What has limited your ability to use principles of accountability in your policies and work?ÌıIs there parental pushback? Resistance from educators? Perhaps a lack of knowledge of what this entails?

I don’t think we have faced that in terms of limiting accountability. We have not had any problems implementing accountability metrics in areas that make sense. In other areas, we’ve had to make sure we’re measuring quality and not just quantity.Ìı

What examples are you talking about when you say “metrics that make sense�?

We measured from the beginning when we began to look at reducing the dropout rate. We wanted to make sure we were measuring the increase in the number of graduates. A metric like the dropout rate has different codes. Depending upon the situation, the state may not categorize someone as a dropout or hold schools accountable for them as a dropout.

Early on, we wanted to make sure we were monitoring the number of students who were being coded with those kinds of situations. For example, a homeschooler doesn’t count as a dropout. If we were going to increase the emphasis on not dropping out, we quickly decided it was important to measure homeschoolers. If the number of homeschoolers shot up, we wanted to make sure those students were legitimately homeschoolers.

Students also could be taken off the dropout list if they returned to Mexico or had a court-ordered requirement for a GED. Whatever the reason, I wanted to make sure we were measuring correctly. I wanted to make sure we were not looking good because of factors we were not measuring. I wanted the improvement to really be due to increased student success.

How do you explain to parents, teachers, and the public when you’re rolling out a new form of data, like graduation rates? Ìı

We explain what we’re ultimately trying to accomplish. I’ve learned to define what we are trying to accomplish and that the result is a positive impact in the student’s life.ÌıWe’re not looking at numbers; we’re looking at student success and at each student level.

Making the best decisions for students is what drives us. Any increase in accountability numbers is based on making good decisions for students and increasing the quality of education for students. It is not based on anything else.

What you just explained, that accountability is really in the best interest of the students, has been lost to some extent. Where have we gone wrong in building broad support for accountability?ÌıWhat would help us now to build support?

I know the first answer a little better than the second one.

Yes, join the club.

A classic error was made in terms of the testing component of accountability, which is an important component. We got caught up with the idea that if a little bit of testing is good, a lot more will be a lot better. We were doing well when we kept it on the three R’s, the fundamentals of education.

It went bad in Texas when we moved a few years ago to 15 tests in high school. That’s where the tide really turned. Before that, you had people griping now and then. But we lost it when high school students had to take 15 exams. TheÌımajority of the public and educators in Texas, I think, had bought into accountability. Then, parents and others started saying, “Whoa.â€� It was good that the state cut back to five exams.

Is this making a difference at the grassroots level? Are people reassessing accountability and seeing some of the positive aspects?

There has been some momentum. During the 2013 legislative session, when lawmakers rolled back high school tests to five exams, there was a big move by parents to roll back middle and elementary school exams, too. But they didn’t succeed then or in the next session. They have lost some momentum to roll back testing. Testing may have needed some adjustments, but we may be finding equilibrium. We’ll see.

Nationally, we’re in a different era with the Every Student Succeeds Act. As you know, it transfers more authority for accountability decisions back to the states. What should we expect of school board members, superintendents, and state leaders when it comes to ensuring all students have the opportunity to learn and succeed?

TheÌıproblem today at the national level is that everything gets politicized, so when the administration changed from Republican to Democratic in 2008, a lot of very conservative states didn’t want to be held to any kind of national standard. There’s still a lot of resistance to anythingÌınationalized. Certainly the latest election shows a rebound to the state level. Our best bet in Texas is continuing to focus on getting it right and being an example of what can be done.

Texas was at a very different place than most of the nation when accountability started gaining momentum in the 1990s. Texas had been moving towards and experimenting with accountability since the early to mid-’80s. Few states had an exit exam, for example, but Texas created one in 1987. You had to pass an exit exam to graduate.

What would your perfect accountability system look like?

My perfect system would include state testing, which is a common way of measuring whether students have a good educational foundation. Since we’re scaling early college work, the perfect accountability system also would include knowing our students’ progress in college coursework. AndÌıit would look at how graduates are doing in post-secondary education, the percentage of students that complete a post-secondary degree. Then, districts could bring in the community as college partners and build plans to increase the percentage of students completing such a degree.

Getting accountability right would mean findingÌıthe right balance and level of testing. Also, it would mean finding the right ways to provide assistance and interventions when a school or a district struggles over a period of time.

Data is central to accountability systems.ÌıHow do you use data in your work?

We use data extensively. On my desktop I have a dashboard button that I can click and see what percentage and how many of my students have passed the college readiness exam. I don’t go this far, but I could look at how individual students are doing on state accountability metrics. I also could look at their attendance and classroom grades. I have aÌıdashboard button on my computer where I can pull up data anytime and go as deep as I want in any issue we think is important in our district.

How do you translate that orientation to the school level? How are you getting teachers to use it, for example?

Some of this we do well, and some we need to get better at doing. A lot of this is working with teachers to see how information can help them, make life easier for them, and help them to be more successful in their jobs.Ìı

How do you hire or develop educators with an entrepreneurial mindset for student success? What do you talk about with them or work on to develop that drive?

It takes a good balance between being patient but yet expecting things. I call it a patient impatience. This is critical.

We’re in a time where superintendents are brought in from the outside and seen as miracle workers. But most of them don’t last more than about three years. A lot of times they bring in a whole team with them from the outside, and they just get spit out.

I came in here as an outsider, butÌıI started working with the people inside and then gradually brought in a few people from outside as needed. Most districts have the people inside that can do the work. It is changing the mindsets.ÌıThis requires working by example. A lot of work has to be done within when you’re trying to change a culture and create systemic change.

Focusing on key areas and getting some early wins is important. That builds credibility. We made progress here quickly on the dropout rate, for example.

We started celebrating successes, too, in our key areas. As people saw out-of-the-box solutions making a difference, like opening a dual-enrollment high school for dropouts and students between the ages of 18 and 26 who did not complete high school, they saw we valued solutions. Then, things started happening.

What uncomfortable truth or truths have we been unwilling to address in education?

For one, we’ve been unwilling to address the resources it takes to educate the very hardest-to-serve students. For example, some of our students need case management at our dropout recovery programs.

Another uncomfortable truth is that, as a system, we’ve failed to fully deliver on the promise of some of the choice options, such as charter schools.ÌıWhen Texas started discussing charters in the 1990s, a lot of the idea was to take what we learned from charter schools and use it to improve schools in general. I don’t think we’ve kept that focus.

We haven’t dug in and looked at what it would take to design a charter, or two or three top charters, toÌıreally turn around education in a struggling neighborhood in Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston. We should give the people with the best proposal a neighborhood and let themÌıtake responsibility for the entire neighborhood. The current system doesn’t allow us to dig in to know what it really takes to work with every student.

What is at stake for us to get these issues right?ÌıWhat’s at stake for Pharr–San Juan–Alamo?

Everything’s at stake for Pharr–San Juan–Alamo, the whole state of Texas, and our economy. If we don’t improve social mobility, we’re going to become more divided than we already seem to be.

Our experts agree: Accountability allows us to organize and operate schools in ways that put kids first, and the stakes could not be higher for us to get this right. Either we master the duet of accountability and support or we risk what makes our country distinct and what has accelerated itsÌıprosperityÌı—Ìıeducated citizens who are able to provide for themselves and their families, who create new ideas and opportunities, who engage in their communities, and who value democracy and the right to vote. A society that declines to meaningfully invest in all of its youth will steadily weaken over time, both morally and structurally.

At the outset ofÌıThe ‘A’ÌıWordÌıseries, we acknowledged that the work of educating children well is incredibly complex, especially for our most vulnerable young people. We also asserted that complexity does not justify a retreat from working to get this right. To paraphrase President George W. Bush, we cannot solve the problem if we cannot diagnose it correctly and comparably. Connecting effective supports — people, interventions, funding — to the right schools and students happens only if we effectively measure student progress.

But as our experts detailed, there is a range of plausible indicators for an accountability system. MakingÌısenseÌıof that can be overwhelming, but two simple questions can help sort the significant from the noise. First, do parents and educators understand what was measured and why it matters? Second, are the data actionable for parents and teachers — do they know what supports their student needs? These questions may seem obvious, but they are too often obscured in practice.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

Much of today’s accountability policy discussions and debates center on the Every Student Succeeds Act, which presents both an opportunity and a risk by asking states to lead instead of to follow federal mandates. We know that some states will take advantage of this moment to bring their best to bear, and their kids will benefit. Some states will not, and their kids will be left behind.ÌıThe plans submitted to date reflect this variance.

AsÌıMargaret SpellingsÌıso clearly stated in her interview, “There is this crazy quilt of accountability systems across the country, with lots of local latitude to maneuver the fine print. This is harsh language, but there is no central authority to monitor any of that and keep them honest. Left to their own devices, they’re going to go easy on themselves. That’s human nature.â€�

Given that, it is up to all of us to pay attention to implementationÌıandÌıresults, to keep talking about both, and to keep peering behind the scenes to understand the adult forces at play throughout. is a good place to start forÌıinformationÌıand insight. We recommend a focus on the following as well.

More is not more. State accountability indexes require a level of complexity to ensure validity, but that complexity should never supersede clarity. Some proposed state plans include accountability indexes that are nearly impossible to follow — or that measure so many things that they are meaningless for educators and parents.

California’sÌıÌıof many colors, as eye-catching as Joseph’s coat but with significantly less meaning, is a perfect example of the latter. The dashboard is muddled and messy. Parents and educators are left stranded without accessible and actionable information. To make matters worse,ÌırecentÌırevisionsÌıby the state agency moved some schools out of the bottom categories because too many schools were measuring as failing. Adult optics beat student needs once again.

Anyone who creates or signs off on a state accountability index should be able to explain it, clearly, to educators, parents, and community stakeholders. What are the indicators measuring, and why is that important to know? How are these being weighted to determine overall performance of a district or school? Are all students included?

Diane TavennerÌısaid it best. As a parent, she wants to know the answers to three yes-or-no questions about her own son: “IsÌıhe on track to be successful in his next phase of education or life? Has he been able to discover his interests? And does he have a goal for where he wants to go in the future, and is he on track for that?â€�

These questions are not unreasonable; in fact, we should expect every parent, guardian, and educator to ask and know this information about their students. Far too many educators are unaware of or ignore state accountability plans because they seem overly complex and disconnected from daily classroom practice. We should not require that parents, teachers, and principals make meaning of too-often opaque policy on their own. It is our job to make it explicit, over and over and over.

Yin and yang are paired for a reason. Our experts agree:ÌıAccountability without support and support without accountability are equally ineffective at improving student outcomes.ÌıTom BoasbergÌıdescribed this well: “For me, accountability is having clear goals, being transparent about the degree to which you’re meeting them, and possessing the willingness to make changes and improvements. Critically, that includes supports when we’re not meeting our performance goal.â€�

Well-designed accountability policy, on its own, does four things well:

1. It requires participants to believe that all students can learn and succeed.
2. It measures the academic progress of all students over time.
3. It highlights gaps between different groups of students (be they grouped by racial, geographic, socioeconomic, special education and gifted students, or English language proficiency categories).
4. It assigns consequences for not meeting goals around student progress.

Accountability policy points to the need for support in targeted or comprehensive ways, but it does not deliver those supports specifically. Those supports and interventions need to be readily available, high-quality and research-based, and delivered meaningfully to schools and districts. In other words, a day of lukewarm professional development doesn’t cut it, even if everyone attending gets matching T-shirts to celebrate the initiativeÌıdu jour.

It is an open secret that there are not enough high-quality and research-based interventions available to educators. Education is a sophisticated profession, not a craft, and it deserves proper research-based supports for its practitioners at the instructional level, at the systems level, and points in between. Supporting applied research in education is critical; federal funding is important, as are incentives for higher education and others to focus research on issues of practical, K-12 student success.

Several state plans describe a planned shift in the state education agency from a compliance mindset to a support mindset. While this is entirely correct, it is also an enormous lift to execute this type of culture change and to staff it for long-term success.ÌıThis is a place for all of us to pay attention. Our lowest-performing schools, largely serving our most vulnerable kids, will struggle to improve without sophisticated support from experienced professionals.ÌıAll educators and schools deserve this, but mostÌıstate systems are in the early stages of doing this better.ÌıLouisiana is aÌıÌıto watch and learn from in this area.

Implementation of “the what� is equally important as “the what� itself. Education is littered with well-meaning interventions that looked great on paper and sounded better in the sales pitch. The implementation, however, left most of the impact on the table. It is not difficult to tally up millions of dollars spent in and for schools that have left minimally discernible impact in their wake.

Schools and districts are complex human environments. Change is difficult, but not impossible, and we can all learn from the schools and districts that have very intentionally changed practice to better serve students, as well as fields beyond education that think deliberately about implementation. Medicine is a good place to start (hospitals and clinics are also complex human environments), as its rigorous focus on science, measurement, and protocol is worth better understanding and adapting.

At the Bush Institute, we are deeply concerned and curious about how to better support and promote effective implementation. In fact, our soon-to-be-launched district cohort focused on our Ìıwill have a two-pronged curriculum. The first is centered on the technical specifics of the Framework, and the second is focused on tools and support needed for effective implementation. We are relying on experts both inside education and beyond its borders to create an implementation framework that goes further than planning timelines to incorporate tools for problem-solving and understanding political capital. We know we have much more to learn here, so we will be sharing as much as we can over the next three years of the project with others also grappling with these questions.

Education accountability matters so intensely because young people deserve agency in their futures. We want the children we love personally to have that agency, which means we need it for all children. It is up to us to ensure that every child, regardless of personal circumstance, has options and choices for their own lives. Without real accountability, we are simply unable to deliver on this promise. This work is difficult. It is messy. It requires challenging long-held assumptions and structures, as well as some leaders.

To invoke the lessons of Greek philosophy, we canÌınowÌıchoose toÌılead asÌıSisyphus orÌıOdysseusÌıas we look forward.ÌıIf we choose the former, we resign ourselves to being the kindÌıof leaders who push thatÌıboulder up and up for all eternity, never creating meaningful progress asÌıwe repeat the sameÌıactions. If we choose the latter, weÌıelect toÌıbe the kind of leaders who understandÌıthat this journey isÌılongÌıbut worthwhile, and that successÌırequires bravery, strength, persistence, andÌısmarts.

Nothing more than our future is at stake to get this right.Ìı

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute. William McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

Dustin Marshall has served as a Dallas Independent School District trustee since 2016. Marshall survived four contested elections in that short tenure (a special election, a regular election, and runoffs in both races). His support for data and research-based education reforms galvanized parents to vote in each race. The Dallas businessman, who was a member of the 2016 Presidential Leadership Scholars class, is known for using data to drive decisions and to best determine the strategies that will help Dallas students succeed.

In this ‘A’ Word interview, Marshall explains the pressures that exist in a district to not upend the status quo. Teachers unions or associations particularly stand in the way of change, in part through blocking efforts to remove underperforming teachers. He also details how some school trustees obstruct change, often by voting against a measure that actually would help students in their districts.

Marshall, though, is hopeful that reform groups in Dallas and forward-looking educators will succeed in using data and the principles of school accountability to improve the educational outcomes of students. As he sees it, nothing less than North Texas’s economic success is at stake.

How do you define accountability?

For me, accountability is about bringing data to bear on tracking outcomes, and the inputs that go into outcomes, in a measurable and definable way. It means using that data to evaluate against a benchmark, and using data to make more-informed decisions at all levels in the organization.

Has that changed for you over time?

As a definition, accountability probably hasn’t changed overtime. The practical reality of how to implement accountability has changed. Since serving on the Dallas school board, I’ve been enlightened a little bit that it’s not as easy as I’d like it to be. What is accomplishable within the political context is probably what has changed.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

What specifically has enlightened you?

It’s easy to underestimate the fervor with which some people will protect the status quo. They’re vocal, and they support the current power structure. And they will protect the status quo at any cost. That makes it difficult for folks that want to use data to make decisions to make progress.

Why do you think they work so hard and fast to protect the status quo?

I’ve thought about that until I’m blue in the face and stayed up nights thinking about it. I don’t have a silver-bullet answer. It’s some combination of a couple of things.

One is racial politics. In DISD’s case, there’s a general opposition to anything that is being pushed by anyone who’s perceived as too white, too Republican, and too associated with business.

Second, teacher unions or teacher associations influence elections. There’s an effort to protect all teachers, whether they’re underperforming or not.

Finally, a lot of this is cronyism. School board members know many of the teachers in the schools in their districts, and they like them as people, whether they think they’re effectively educating kids or not.

Is it worse than you thought it would be?

Way worse.

How so?

I come from a management consulting background at Bain. Every decision is supposed to include data, and data is not thought of as a bad word. A partner at Bain had a plaque above his desk that read, “In God I trust. Everyone else must bring data.�

It was shocking to me, and fairly appalling, that there are actually arguments made in education that data is bad, that you need not talk about data because data’s misleading.

Are there DISD educators who are willing to use data at the classroom level?

Yes. I would array teachers along two different continuums. One is a continuum of performance, from strong to weak. But there’s also an important continuum of a willingness to be assessed and to learn from that assessment.

Many teachers want to be supported and improve their practice. But there are also teachers who say, “Leave me alone. I know what I’m doing. Don’t talk to me. I’m an expert.� In my district, quite a few teachers are eager for assessment and coaching and professional development.

How do you see the Dallas school board using accountability practices?Ìı

I try to make accountability come into play on everything we vote on. Certainly, the principal-effectiveness evaluation system and the teacher evaluation system are the two largest centerpieces.

We’ve also been evaluating early childhood education and looking at ways to expand access to quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. We’re tracking everything you can track. For example, we are studying whether a student’s participation in 3- and 4-year-old pre-K improves that student’s kindergarten-readiness rate and then, in turn, their third-grade literacy rate.

Our [Accelerating Campus Excellence] program is another great example. We’re identifying our best-performing teachers and then paying them a stipend to go into our worst-performing schools. We’ve seen tremendous success in reducing the number of improvement-required campuses in DISD largely as a result of that program.

Those are tactical ways we’re using data and assessment and, broadly speaking, accountability to make decisions. Unfortunately, not every board member is interested in that decision-making philosophy. We’ve got a group of five that get most things passed 5 to 4. But we didn’t pass the Tax Ratification Election because we needed six votes.

Can you tell us about a time where you were advocating for something you really thought was in the best interest of the kids and families that you serve in your district that faced significant opposition?

The TRE is the most obvious example. It’s just it doesn’t make any sense. The state continues to underfund education in Texas, and the only tool that’s left to us to get the money we need to educate kids is the TRE.

We’ve got the second or third lowest tax rate in North Texas. We’ve got 90 percent poverty. Every school district around Dallas is passing a TRE, most of them unanimously. You could count on one hand the number of trustees in all the North Texas school districts that voted against it. We’ve got four people on our DISD board not supporting it.

Why do you think something that sparks so little controversy in surrounding communities is so controversial in Dallas?Ìı

I don’t know how broadly applicable this is to the statewide or national stage, but some DISD board members derive their power largely from being seen as oppositional. If you look at the number of items that are pulled off the consent agenda at our DISD board meetings, 99.9 percent are pulled by two people. And, if you look at the amount of time spent speaking at our board meetings, it’s 90-plus percent those same two people.

The great irony is that we often have unanimous votes on the items they pulled off the consent agenda and then spent 20 minutes talking about. In my opinion, those members need to be perceived by their constituents as yelling about something. And I literally do mean yelling, raising their voices, and banging the table.

Their constituents, unfortunately, don’t have — or don’t take — the time to be well-versed about the issues. Instead, they have the perception that their board members are down there fighting, so they must be fighting for us. The terrible reality is they’re actually voting to undermine their own constituents’ best interest.

Let’s go back to your mention of the role of teachers unions or associations at the school board level. How do they come into play, specifically around educator evaluation?

We have a three-level grievance process at DISD, and any dues-paying member of one of the associations is represented throughout by a union or association representative who will grieve a dismissal all the way up through the process. I think 100 percent of the ones that [the American Federation of Teachers] is involved with go all the way to the board. They continue to push it even when the fact pattern is very clear.

I think roughly 100 percent of the appeals are denied by the board because the fact pattern was clear. Nevertheless, they push forward and make it as difficult as possible for the district. We pay dozens of attorneys to manage this and spend many hours on the process.

The biggest impact that the teachers groups have in DISD elections is that most teachers live in the same districts as many of our struggling schools because the real estate is more affordable. We don’t, unfortunately, pay teachers enough to live in other parts of the district. There’s extreme voter apathy in DISD elections in those areas, so teachers make up a significant number of the people that vote. And they hear from their association whom they should vote for.

In fairness, the teachers would say business-related groups also invest in races.

There aren’t any voters in those business groups, though. They mostly live outside the district. The business groups invest money, but they don’t get voters.

How do we build greater support for accountability?

What Dallas Kids First is doing is really effective locally. First, they track the key issues that come in front of the DISD board, and they also track every trustee’s vote on every issue. They put that data into an easy-to-use graphic that highlights for people how their representative voted on core issues. They tally it up, and they give a scorecard grade presented in a very easy-to-understand fashion.

Second, they have got the new Camp Fellowship program. They get 20 people, mostly millennials, to go through a yearlong class where they spend one day a month learning about campaigning, politics, and how to be an effective door knocker and campaign volunteer. Then they give them a stipend of a couple thousand dollars in exchange for working 100 hours on a DISD campaign.

The fellows are taking the scorecard out in the field and explaining to people, “These are the votes that matter. This is the data of why those votes matter, and here’s what your incumbent representative did on those votes.�

What should we expect from school board members and other decision makers?

We should expect them to bring a thoughtful and organized decision-making process, consistently applied, to their work. That entails the ability to ask the right questions, to gather the right data, to assess that data, and to solicit community input to make sure they are getting anecdotes and color around that data. You must bring that together to make as informed a decision as possible.

For folks like me, who have no teaching experience, part of the input process is seeking the color that an educator would bring to a decision as well. I liken it to consulting. Consultants get really good at asking questions. If you ask enough of the right questions, and you can cut through the bull to know whether you’re getting the right answer, then you can bring all that together to make the best choice you can for kids.

You have to be governed by only thinking about the kids, because there’s a lot of noise.

Does asking the right questions in a deliberate way break up some of the politicizing and the focus on adult issues?Ìı

You can see that happen at the board table sometimes. I’ve started coaching myself to ask questions in a way, in front of everybody, that if the answer is given, normal, rational people will come to their own natural conclusion without being told what to think. I try to ask some leading questions and let it sit, and I’ve seen that start to break up some of the old mindset. It has the most impact on people in the audience and on the media covering DISD.

That can be a difficult strategy to deploy because it requires getting control of your emotions.

It requires more patience than naturally comes to me. I like to ask, “Can you tell me a little more about that?� That’s a great question, by the way. If you get a first answer that you know isn’t fully the whole picture, that’s the question to ask next.

What initiatives would you prioritize now?

The teacher pipeline is the biggest problem we’re confronting, and we’re dancing around it in a frustrating way. We ought to ban crummy, alternative-certification programs and never hire any teachers from them. We ought to grow our own teacher training process — like a scholarship program for DISD graduates where we pay for their college and then they come back and teach for four or five years.

We need to get creative in how we solve that teacher pipeline problem. No more of this stuff where you see “Want to teach?Ìı When can you start?â€� on billboards. Every time I see that, I swear I drive 30 miles per hour faster. It makes me angry.

I would also like to tackle a principal training program. Teaching Trust is a world-class program [in North Texas], and I would love to put every DISD principal through it. Teaching Trust is educating 10 or 20 of our principals per year, and the kids in their school perform 84 percent higher on tests every year. How can you argue that that doesn’t work?Ìı Of course it works.

The way we’re handling early childhood education is too politicized. We’re doing it but not in an authentic or ideal way. We ought to offer full-day, free pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, whether they’re covered by the state or not.

We also need to change the length of the school year and the length of the school day. Of course, lengthening the school year will make the tourism industry mad.

What about TEI, Dallas’s new Teacher Effectiveness Indices? Is that driving results for DISD?

TEI is where the rubber meets the road. In the last couple of years, DISD has gone from the 24th performance percentile amongst districts in the state to above the 80th. I credit that improvement — if not most of it — to the teacher evaluation system and managing out teachers that need to be in a different career.

How do you respond when TEI critics claim it is chasing teachers out of DISD?

People will ask whether it is true, and we say, “Well, yes, it’s true, but cut the data by performance band.� We’ve got nine educator performance bands. Last year we retained 100 percent of the teachers in the highest two bands of performance. Not a single teacher in the district in the top two bands left, and all the ones that are leaving are in the bottom couple of performance bands. That means the design is working.

To what do board members who are not fans of TEI attribute the DISD’s recent success?

They will talk about ACE as a positive thing, but of course, you can’t have ACE without TEI. You need to identify your higher-performing teachers in order to offer them spots in ACE. Sometimes my colleagues oppose something until it works, and then they’re all about it. That’s always fun.

What’s at stake for Dallas to get these education issues right?

The city’s whole economic future is at stake. By 2020, 60 percent to 65 percent of the jobs in the city will require some sort of post-secondary education. Right now, 30 percent of Dallas citizens have any post-secondary degree.

We simply don’t have the labor force to fill current jobs, let alone the jobs that are coming at the growth rate Dallas is seeing. The Texas and North Texas economic miracle of the last 20 years will dissipate quickly if we can’t fill those jobs. And we’re not on a trajectory to fill them.

It’s challenging to get people to care about three, four, five years out, let alone 20 years out, but the Commit! Partnership has done a good job showing the correlation between key indicators at different moments along the pipeline.

They’ve been able to extrapolate data to show that if we have 55 percent kindergarten-readiness level in this cohort of kids, their SAT scores are likely to be this, which is then a likely predictor of their graduation with a four-year degree within six years after finishing high school. We can track that in a way that doesn’t make us wait the 15 years to see student outcomes. That has been helpful.

Gerard Robinson, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has served as commissioner of education for Florida and secretary of education for Virginia. He also has been president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, where he sought to ensure that children in low-income and working-class black families had the opportunity to attend high-quality schools.

In these various roles, the Howard University graduate, who holds a masters of education degree from Harvard University, has evaluated how reform initiatives have impacted parental choice and student achievement. He also has advocated for laws to improve teaching and learning, and written widely about strategies and policies that provide all children a chance at a meaningful job and promising future. He began his career as a fifth-grade teacher.

In this ‘A’ Word interview, Robinson explains how accountability mattered to him as a school administrator and a policy advocate. He believes that financial results and post-secondary remediation rates must be included in new definitions of school accountability. What’s more, he says, the term “²¹³¦³¦´Ç³Ü²Ô³Ù²¹²ú¾±±ô¾±³Ù²ââ€� has become too toxic. He advocates that those who support raising standards, assessing whether students are meeting them, and assigning consequences to the results come up with a new way of explaining those important concepts.

How do you define accountability, and has that changed over time?

Wearing my advocate hat, I define accountability as empowering parents to have a stronger voice in where they choose to send their children to school. I consider accountability to be holding schools, public and private, accountable for results, academic and otherwise. And I consider accountability to mean being responsible for the amount of money that we spend on schools.Ìı

When I wear my administrator hat, accountability means something different. The first thing is adherence to statutes and regulations.ÌıI had to close a couple of private schools in Florida for financial malfeasance. I had to deny providing a charter to a number of schools. I had to close one charter school I authorized because,Ìıafter a number of years, the leaders did not get the metrics they needed to me.Ìı

As an administrator, I also had to be financially accountable. And I had to articulate to the public why we existed and how what we were doing is different than the neighboring school.ÌıÌı

What you didn’t hear from me in either set of answers was anything about test scores.Ìı

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What role, then, do test scores play in your definition of accountability?

Test scores are part of the accountability system, but the scores mean a lot more for me from year one to year five. Here’s an example:

In Florida in 2011, we had a law on the books that said if a charter school receives an F in its first year, the local school board could close it. In Florida we only have a single authorizer, and that’s the school board. The state law allowed a charter petitioner to appeal its denial to the State Board of Education for review at that level. If need be, the state board can override the local authorizer’s denial, which it did most of the time.

I took a look at the research. I also took a look at my own work as an authorizer and as a charter school founder. I spoke with one of the leaders in the Florida Senate and said, “You and I both know that the research is pretty clear, that it takes three to five years to see the benefits of a new program in place.â€� I told him that toÌırequire charter schools to close their first year is outside the aspects of research and not politically smart. Those schools are trying to educate children who did not do well in the traditional public school system in the first place. Ìı

We worked out a new accountability measure that said that if you get an F in year one, you do not close. If you get an F or D in year two, you do not close. If you find yourself in the same position by year three, the State Board of Education could weigh in and decide whether or not it would close the school.

Our purpose was to give a school time to show results, and because we want charter management organizations or education management organizationsÌıto come to the state to work with our hard-to-serve population.

I can guarantee you are going to have an F in the first year, maybe the second, too. When KIPP opened up a school in Jacksonville, the school earned an F. By year three, it earned a B. I’m for grades, but I’m for having a stair-step approach to when we should integrate sanctions.

Has your definition of accountability changed over time?

Yes. I am more concerned now that we have the appropriate regulations in place for a law, not just the statutory language. In my former life as an advocate, I would throw confetti once the governor signed an education law. I thought my work was over.

Once I got inside and began working with state agencies and saw the sausage-making, I realized that most state boards of education were making decisions every month about the scope and breadth of statutes we helped to put in place. Those decisions may have been outside of the reform reach that we on the advocacy side thought was going to occur.ÌıFrankly, we, the advocates, did not show up at state board of education meetings the way we had for legislative committee hearings.

Making smart regulations means we do not have to keep amending the same law every session because we didn’t get something right the first time.ÌıÌı

I still believe test scores matter. I support school choice, but I do not think we should give parents the right to opt out of taking tests.ÌıIf you decide to buy into a public school system, a charter school, or a private school voucher program where we have test requirements, you should take the tests. I support voucher students taking the state exam if they choose to and opening up the door for a menu of nationalÌınorm-referenced tests as well.ÌıÌı

Give us an example of a policy that you thought was in the best interest of kids but faced significant opposition.

I managed Florida’s application for No Child Left Behind waivers. I put together a commission focused on students with special needs and English language learners.ÌıÌı

It had come to my attention through research that the Florida accountability system did not include all the test scores for certain students with special needs and some English language learners. I put on the table that we’re going to include those students into our state formula.

I got major pushback from superintendents who said my idea was well-meaning, but not realistic. Those superintendents had some students with severe special needs who typically do not come to campus, or teachers go out to their homes, or the students are doing things through multiple learning methods. The superintendents questioned why they should be held accountable for those students’ test or achievement scores.

I understood what they were saying, because they would receive a sanction.ÌıBut I responded that by making them responsible for all students, this was not a punishment as much as an incentive to make sure they were on par to support all their students.Ìı

How do we re-engage the public to see that raising academic standards, testing students according to those standards, and having some consequences for the results, are important concepts?

That’s tough. People will go for standards and testing. The question is sanctions. People will say that you are going to close my school, which the state will not do unless there are other problems at play. And if the state tries to reconstitute the campus, school or local stakeholders will say you are trying to privatize it. WhateverÌıwe do to change a school somehow turns into privatization and a corporate takeover.ÌıÌı

That’s one of the tough problems, and I don’t have an answer for you.

I do think weÌıneed to get rid of the word “accountability.â€� It isÌıtoo loaded, for the same reason that those in the abortion movement moved from “²¹²ú´Ç°ù³Ù¾±´Ç²Ôâ€� to “choice.â€� OrÌıthose in the gun movement moved the discussion from “gun rightsâ€� to “Second Amendment °ù¾±²µ³ó³Ù²õ.â€� And in no way am I making a moral equivalency between school reform, abortion, and guns; rather, we cannot overlook how much language matters to a movement’s meaning.

I do not have a word to replace “²¹³¦³¦´Ç³Ü²Ô³Ù²¹²ú¾±±ô¾±³Ù²ââ€� today, but we have got to get rid of the term. It’s simply too toxic.

As you know, significant power is being shifted to states under the Every Student Succeeds Act. What should we now expect of our school board members, state legislators, state leaders, and district leaders when it comes to ensuring that all students have the opportunity to learn and succeed?

One thing is it is going to be harder for state departments of education to blame D.C. for holding them back from doing things. Now, they cannot say that. That is important.ÌıÌı

Number two, one of the most powerful groups in school reform is going to be lobbyists and activists. I do not see that as a bad thing. You have more school reform groups in place today who could help state departments of education and school boards.Ìı

ÌıThey could articulate to the public such points as the difference between a growth measure, a gain measure, and an assessment measure. They could help explain why havingÌıschool grades make a difference. Or they could help explain about the types of teachers we need. Advocacy groups that work in multiple states particularly can help there. They could come inÌıand testify and say, “Here’s what we found from five states. Some are similar; some are not. Here’s what you should do.â€�

ÌıThose groups are stronger now than they were in 2001 when we were looking at No Child Left Behind. The advocates are important. So are the consultants.ÌıÌıÌı

A secure school board chair and superintendent should welcome the advocates and consultants because they have got a lot more in-depth knowledge about how this works. They can help [board chairs and superintendents] define accountability. That’s something good coming out of this shift of power. It could help school boards, state boards, and state chiefs.

What would your perfect accountability system look like?

It would have a statistically justifiable link between what teachers are teaching and the state’s actual standards. We would provide that to students, and take a look at student results over a three-year period to see the impact.

I also would support a value-added model to take into consideration teachers who are working in certain areas. Since most teachers who are going to leave the profession do so by year four, I would say by year five to look at how well those students have progressed. We should be able to walk backwards to say, “If you’re in the eighth grade and unable to read, where did we drop the ball? Was it grade five? Was it grade six?�

I support third-grade retention for reading. An accountability system would have that in place as well.Ìı And itÌıwould have mandatory summer school for math or reading, if necessary. It would not be for the entire summer, but intensive work for maybe a couple of weeks.Ìı

On the teacher side, I would start off with 30 percent of the evaluation linked to test scores. By year five, for those who stayed, 50 percent of the evaluation would be linked to test scores. I would have a stair-step. Ìı

I would want to see the accountability system show how much money we spent per student over a five-year period. We do not know how much it costs to educate them. In my ideal accountability system, we would know how much it costs to educate a student in algebra, chemistry, physics, music, and other subjects. We would not just know how much we’re paying overall, but for individual subjects.

Are you asking for a breakdown of all the cost centers across a district?

Yes. I became much more aware of that need when I moved to Milwaukee to work at Marquette University. Part of my fellowship was to look at how a big urban school system tries to make sense of reform. I realized that 66 cents on every dollar was already accounted for by the union contract, some of which went to pensions. That meant the $0.34 left over was for everything else — books, transportation, etc. I don’t believe the public has any idea how much it costs to educate students.Ìı

A perfect system also would mean that less than 15 percent of our high school graduates need remediation in college.

A lot of what you’re talking about involves data. How did you use data in your role in Florida and Virginia?

In Florida I found out that we spent $185 million annually on remediation. This was money spent in colleges for people whom we had told, “You’re college-ready.â€� Guess what? They were not.ÌıÌı

So I put together another commission. I involved both K-12 and higher-education stakeholders — many of whom said they never had been invited to the table with their K-12 peers. I thought that was astonishing.Ìı

I took a look at a number of data points, from data for younger kids to SAT and ACT scores. We looked broadly to see what you would need to be college- or career-ready. OurÌıresearch team linked data together to determine that, if you had a certain score, you could enroll in one of Florida’s colleges without the need for remediation.Ìı

That is one way we used data that had not been done before. A lot of people had been comfortable spending $185 million for non-credit-bearing college courses. We weren’t. Ìı

What uncomfortable truth in education have we been unwilling to address?

One uncomfortable truth is that we believe that every student should go to college in order to prove that we, as a nation, have overcome our past when we said some kids should not go to college.ÌıI certainly think every child should not go to college to earn a four-year degree. Some should go to a postsecondary institution to earn a certificate, an associate degree, or licensure.

I think going to a postsecondary institution should be a choice, not a mandate.ÌıAt the same time, some students should go directly from high school to the workforce or elsewhere. As I have stated before, my job is to work hard to make sure our students are college- and career-ready, but I am OK if a student decides not to go to college.

The second uncomfortable truth is that we do have a school-to-prison pipeline. Our society just calls it by different names.

Kevin Huffman served as Tennessee’s education commissioner from 2011 to 2015. The New York University Law School graduate now serves as a chief-in-residence at Chiefs for Change and a fellow with New America. He started his education career as a Houston elementary school bilingual teacher. Later, Huffman represented school districts, state education departments, and universities in his law practice. He then joined the senior leadership of Teach For America, serving as general counsel and executive vice president of public affairs.

In this ‘A’ Word interview, he describes how his state tried to change the education conversation from being about money and conditions (adult concerns) to instruction, learning, and academic outcomes (student priorities). He makes the point that accountability alone cannot improve student outcomes — it can only point out the need for strategies and supports that help students learn.

To Huffman, helping get those supports and strategies to classrooms must become part of the next generation of the accountability movement. So must getting rid of so much test preparation, which he believes is what most irritates parents about the testing component of accountability. He also contends that school accountability must include more elements that parents care about, such as access to quality courses and a good school environment.

How do you define accountability, and has that changed over time?

Accountability isÌıthe use of transparent information and results to differentiate what happens to adults in a system, what happens to the schools in a system, and what happens to the governance of those schools.

My definition probably has changed a bit. From my time in Tennessee, I came to have broader appreciation for how people responded or didn’t respond to public reporting of information about schools and public pressure about that information. I also have a broader appreciation for how people responded or didn’t respond to the weighting of some factor in an educator’s evaluation or in the ratings of schools.Ìı

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How didÌıthis shift come about?

Sometimes we have too much of a rational-actor theory around education accountability. We assume that people are able to rationally calculate which things are more important and which are less important, based on how we’re weighting them or the likelihood of a potential outcome. But people are not as rational as we assume. Ìı

People would have intellectual arguments about whether student growth should count 50 percent, 35 percent, or 25 percent in the evaluation of a teacher or principal. In fact, people’s behavior doesn’t change at all based on the percentage that you put on something. You can spend all sorts of time arguing about 50 percent, 35 percent, or 25 percent, and the actual impact on the adult behavior is nothing.

People respond to the low likelihood of high-impact events more than you’d think they would. For example, the probability of an educator actually being fired because their students got a bad result on tests in a particular year is extremely low. Yet the level of mass hysteria that would rise up over teacher evaluations and the use of student test scores was extremely high relative to the probability of anything happening to an individual. Ìı

What does changeÌıthe behavior of adults in the system?

When something counts as a rating for your job, it changes behavior. These things are important to change behavior, and it’s why accountability is incredibly important. Individual teachers and principals do respond to accountability metrics. They sometimesÌıover-respond, so figuring out how you’re going to take that into account is important.

Tennessee has the largest growth of any state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress over a four-year period.ÌıI believe the biggest driver of that was our accountability for teachers, principals, schools, and districts. As a result of accountability, people respond. They do different things, and focus on different things. Accountability puts the impetus on making sure you’ve got the right things on the list.

How did you use accountability principles as a state leader?

​We pushed policies that ensured some level of accountability for everybody who worked in the system. We pushed teacher evaluations and the implementation of teacher evaluations. We pushed the use of data in differentiated compensation so that every district had to create a differentiated compensation plan for teachers. And we pushed the use of accountability to determine which schools would be eligible for state takeover through the Achievement School District, which obviously was a big deal. We also used accountability to determine which schools and districts we held up based on their high level of performance.Ìı

We tried to make sure that, up and down, we evaluated everyone who was working in the state. We included a discussion of the state’s academic results as part of performance conversations. We could credibly say to schools in the districts, “We are evaluating our people just as you are evaluating your people, with the same level of seriousness, and with real accountability for people who work here.�

What did these principles help you accomplish?

The most important thing is advancing student outcomes. This meant creating a world where the focus of adults in the system was to advance student outcomes, and where the conversations with district and school leaders shifted from a focus on money and conditions to instruction, learning, and academic outcomes.

As a result, the level of focus on academic results shifted pretty significantly.ÌıIt also shifted the kind of people who work in the system.

AsÌıwe implemented teacher evaluations, we heard the mythology that teachers were leaving and quitting the system. We would hear from superintendents and legislators that teachers are so upset, they’re all quittingÌıand leaving.

But an interesting thing happened when we looked at the data. Teachers were leaving the system at exactly the same rate as before we started doing evaluations, except for teachers who were at the lowest level of student growth. The ones who were leaving had the lowest impact on improving student outcomes. They were leaving the system at twice the rate as teachers who had the highest impact on student growth.

Interestingly, before we did teacher evaluations, those with the lowest impact left at the same rate as other teachers. So, the overall number of teachers leaving the field was the same, but we saw a shift to underperforming teachers leaving the system. They were doing so at double the rate of high-performing teachers.

That was not accidental. And that was not teachers being fired. That was peopleÌıself-selecting out of the system as the understanding of what it means to be successful changed.

Could you talkÌıabout a time when you were able to see an over-response coming and then managed around it or solved it?

AtÌısome level you’re rowing against a culture challenge in education, which is a culture ofÌınon-differentiation.Ìı

I spent a lot of time on the road during the first year of teacher evaluations. A teacher came up to me in the hall, which was fairly common. ÌıI had visited her classroom, and she seemed like a really good teacher. But she was crying, and said, “You know, I had my first observation. I’m just so upset.â€� I thought, “Oh, no, this is not good.â€� I said, “Well, so you had your first observation. What was your score, if you don’t mind my asking?â€� And she said it was a 4, on a 5-point scale.ÌıShe had the second-highest score.

The culture we have built over time in education is such that telling somebody they weren’t perfect was like a major slap in the face. You can only battle this challenge by going forward and going through. Ìı

At the state level, your tools are limited. But you can put people in front of their peers and have them talk about what they have done to lead at the local level.ÌıIt’s fascinating how you go to one county, and no teachers were upset or freaking out about evaluation. You go to the next county, and everyone was freaking out. Ìı

The differentiating factor was local leadership. Was it stoking anger, or was it saying, “This is going to be fine. We’re going to do this together. We’re going to do this well. We’re going to do this together.�

Where have we gone wrong in building strong broad support for accountability?Ìı

WeÌıhave not done a good enough job elevating a broad range of voices at all levels, starting with parents. You wind up with white upper-middle-class parents and the teachers union, which is predominately white middleÌıclass and obviously educated, dominating the conversation around accountability.

We have not done enough to elevate the voices of parents who want better options for their kids, who want transparent information and who get frustrated with being stonewalled by the system. On the side of the teacher, principal, and superintendent, whose associations and organizations tend to be anti-accountability, we haven’t done a good enough job elevating the voices of people who have a different perspective.

​ItÌısimply was not the case in Tennessee that teachers hated accountability. The union did not like teacher evaluations, but if you surveyed teachers as we did, there was a broad range of opinion. A vast majority of people thought evaluations were improving instruction. Ìı

I don’t think we always have done a great jobÌıtaking into account other things that parents and the public care about. Sometimes in the reform world we’ve sort of acted like these are soft things, and that you’re being soft if you care about school culture and access to particular kinds of classes, such as the arts. We should have had the perspective of “What do parents want? And how can we be responsive to what they want?â€� Parents want more things than reading and math. Ìı

We also let people get away at the school level with doing way too much test prep. Parents don’t dislike testing as much as people think they do. They hate test prep. That is a uniform reaction when I will drill down with parents.ÌıIt’s not the sitting down for the standardized test. It’s the classroom time when all the kids are doing is practicing for the test. Ìı

That’s just bad academic practice. It’s not good instruction. Data and analysis shows it doesn’t work. Even if you’re just doing it to try to drive up scores on the test, it’s not even effective at that. Ìı

States are assuming greater power under the Every Student Succeeds Act. What should we expect of state leaders, school board members,Ìıand districtÌıleaders when it comes to revising accountability?

Some states will do a really good job in having pretty sophisticated accountability systems that are focused on improving student outcomes, closing gaps, and taking in additional meaningful factors. Some states will have accountability plans that are fairly weak. They won’t call for that much growth or improvement, so they’ll be able to declare victory without actually accomplishing as much as they need to accomplish. And then, you will see everything in between. ÌıÌı

I am less troubled by the push to states than some of my colleagues. The old federal system was fairly prescriptive in terms of what counted and what didn’t count. But you had a wide range of states in terms of their execution. So, you can have federal accountability and some states will do it incredibly poorly. Ìı

This will take a lot of watchdogging. Outside groups really need to watch results. But I hope that we understand the important place to hold their feet to the fire is actually on whether kids learn.

​WhatÌıwould be your perfect accountability system?Ìı

​I don’t think there is a perfect accountability system but a few things are important. Ìı

One is a significant focus on growth, as opposed to just raw results. There is a standard that we want people to meet, but growth is critically important. We want people to be focused on the kid who is scoring below basic at the bottom of the barrel. We want them focused on advancing that kid as far as they can, even if they’re not going to get to the grade-level bar that you’re setting. Ìı

A second thing is a concerted focus on closing gaps between groups of kids in a meaningful way over time. And the more subjects that you can include, the better.Ìı

In terms of non-academic outcomes, figure out the things that are actually meaningful to parents, measure them, and use them in accountability. For example, access to courses is important to people. Parent and student parent surveys about school climate are good, too. Even if you don’t have a baseline to use them in accountability right away,Ìıgetting on a path to where you can use themÌıis important. Ìı

Another that I would highlight is teacher absenteeism. When a student is absent, he hurts himself; when teachers are absent, they hurt every kid in the class. I would include reduction of chronic teacher and student absenteeism in an accountability system. There’s a direct tie to academic outcomes that’s been measured over time.Ìı

​Are accountability systems doing a good enough job of getting supports to students and classrooms?ÌıOr does this need improvement?

​It needs a lot of improvement. Accountability on its own is not sufficient to drive improvement. AccountabilityÌıjust creates a world in which there’s opportunity to identify the things that work and don’t work, reward people doing the best work, and designate people who are doing the worst work for improvement and support. ÌıAll accountability does is create the conditions where additional support and resources can make a difference. Ìı

But it’s pretty clear we do a bad job. For all the dollars we spend on professional development, it has literally zero impact. That’s terrible. A lot of times we don’t have professional development tied to accountability. We have professional development that operates independently of accountability.

​What worries you asÌıstates assume new authority under ESSA?

MyÌıworry is not that different than before. I worry some states and districts will not improve. I worry some states and districts will improve for some kids without improving for others, and that that will be deemed good enough. ÌıÌı

Probably the most appalling thing I saw in my time in Tennessee was that improved student outcomes did not change the public conversation. The way the media often covered education, the way politicians discussed education, and therefore the way the general public experienced education was to lump student outcomes as equals in a bucket with how adults working in the system are feeling at the moment about policies. Ìı

Do we care if a state is making real gains and real growth for all kids? Are we going to hold that up? Or instead, are we going to care mainly about whether the adults who work in the system are happy because there haven’t been any changes? This is a genuine question.

​What uncomfortable truth in education have we been unwilling to address?

I don’t know whether we’ve been unwilling to address uncomfortable truths as much as we have struggled to address those truths. For example, we’re working really hard across the country to increase the percentage of kids that graduate from a two-year or four-yearÌıcollege. But let’s say we succeed in driving up the percentage of kids who are getting degrees to 60 percent.ÌıFor the 40 percent who don’t get a postsecondary degree, we are not giving them good options right now. Ìı

Career education across the country is not well structured. It doesn’t drive against outcomes like employment opportunity and income, and it’s embedded in a system that doesn’t make sense. If you were going to invent career education from scratch, you would never stick it inside a school with tenured faculty, many of whom haven’t been on the job for the skill they’re teaching in a very long time. You would never invent it that way. Ìı

At the opposite end of the scale, we have not figured out a good enough plan to grapple with brain development, trauma, and other factors that impact kids from [ages] 0 to 4. This challenge has the highest impact on the lowest-performing schools. Ìı

If you peel back the bottom 1 or 2 percent of schools in performance in any state, there are a lot of things that are not well done in those schools, but we also haven’t done enough to wrestle with the massive challenges and developmental issues that impact these kids before they walk through the school door. If we don’t take that on, we’re probably never going to make a genuine stride for the lowest-performing schools in the country. Ìı

The good thing is some people in the reform community are talking about this. Educators and unions have been talking about it; so have people in the early childhood community. There’s alignment about the need to take it on, but I don’t think the game plan really exists. Ìı

​What’s at stake for the country as well as a state to get all these issues right?

We’ve seen in Tennessee the way the global economy plays out. Many plants and factories that opened here are foreign companies. It’s not just a question of whether a plant is going to be in Tennessee or Alabama. It’s a question of whether the plant is going to be in Tennessee compared to any of a number of countries around the world. YouÌıcould see the global economy in real time play out in jobs here.

We’re either going to get to a place where many more people are getting college degrees, and where we’ve got real training to put people on a path to the middle class if they don’t get a college degree, or we’re going to have massive challenges in this country. Ìı

The stakes couldn’t be higher. I just continue to believe that we can actually make a difference.

I am a huge believer that we can take our existing systems and significantly improve them, but there’s got to be leadership and the desire to do it. I’m a little worried that we’re at a moment where the left is going way to the left, and the right is going way to the right, and we’re losing the sensible middle in education.

What didn’tÌıwe ask you that we should have?

Here’s one last thing: TheÌıhighest-performing teachers, principals, and superintendents want feedback. They don’t want to be patted on the back and told, “You’re perfect.â€� They want toÌıbe told the things they can do to get to an even higher level.ÌıIt’s just a misunderstanding of accountability that it is just about punishing the laggards. People don’t understand that there is a craving among the highest performers to continue to improve.

Felicia Cumings Smith is the assistant superintendent of academic services at Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. Previously, she was a senior program officer of K-12 education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and served as Kentucky’s chief academic officer and associate commissioner of education. She has deep experience as a teacher, teacher-leader, and administrator. Smith started her career as an elementary and reading resource teacher in Jefferson County Public Schools, where she helped design and lead curriculum work in literacy and formative assessment benchmarks.

In this ‘A’ Word interview, she draws upon her experiences to discuss how school accountability has been applied in a largely rural state. As she explains, being transparent about goals and communicating well about those goals is essential, especially when difficult conversations are required.

She also contends that the new Every Student Succeeds Act gives states the opportunity to have a different conversation about accountability. That would include using a broader range of metrics, such as how many teachers in a school are certified to teach in a subject like math. She believes that accountability systems should lead to greater support systems for school districts so that students can become readers, writers, and problem-solvers — the skills they need for a prosperous future.

How do you define accountability?

I define accountability as taking responsibility for whatever I am providing insight. For example, at theÌıKentucky Department of Education, I had accountability for all things teaching and learning. I had to ensure that students across the Commonwealth of Kentucky were achieving certain standards. And I was accountable for leaders and teachers exposing children to learning opportunities that would accelerate their achievement and performance against those standards.

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How would you explain the basic elements of school accountability to parents?

One way accountability can be defined is through aÌıhigh-stakes lens, which is when the school and district are held accountable for educating children, creating equity, and ensuring that students achieve. High-stakes accountability typically relies on state-level assessment data that carries consequences for performance.

Accountability also can be defined in a lower-stakes manner that is more focused on meeting goals and expectations through locally defined measures. The goals and vision of the district and school are typically responsive to the community’s needs.

Has your definition changed over time?

I grew up in the education system in Kentucky, where standards-based reform started in 1990 as a result of the Kentucky Education Reform Act. There was a lot of emphasis on high-stakes accountability. At the time, I was going through my teacher preparation program and beginning to make sense of what this would mean for me and what it meant for my students. As a result, I always assumed a high level of accountability for what my students learned and how that would impact my decisions as a teacher for student progress and school-wide improvement.ÌıÌı

As I have moved throughout my career, and most recently thought about accountability from a state level, I have seen accountability hit peaks and valleys.ÌıAt its height, the state has communicated expectations in a transparent way. It also has coupled that with a system of support for districts and schools.Ìı

I have also seen accountability incent some pretty perverse behaviors. Typically, this occurs when a high-stakes system leads with a punitive approach. Systems like that don’t create environments where districts and schools work together to reach goals for improved student learning outcomes. Ìı

Today, I’m more convinced that there should be a balance of local and state-level accountability. An accountability system needs to be able to communicate how well a school, district, or state is meeting desired outcomes for student learning.ÌıAnd, it should do so in a very transparent way, using multiple data that make sense to educators, parents, and the community.Ìı

How did you use the concepts of accountability as a teacher and as a state leader? What did they help you accomplish?

As a teacher and a district leader, accountability allowed me to look at the state-level assessment in a way that helped bring improvement. We didn’t use the phrase “continuous improvementâ€�Ìıat the time, but that is how I viewed accountability as a teacher. I looked at state-level assessment data and data from my classroom with my colleagues in the building, and then made decisions about curriculum and school-wide improvement.ÌıThe same occurred at the district level.ÌıUnderstanding what state-level data could and could not tell me was very important as I made decisions about steps to improve student outcomes.

I worked for a superintendent who believed in the use of data to drive improvement. We were asked to look at statewide assessment data primarily in comparison to other districts. That was difficult to do since we were the largest district in Kentucky and other districts didn’t have the sameÌıdemographics as Jefferson County. Still, we all knew that we were working towards the same standard. The focus was on ensuring that the district was performing at a high level. ÌıÌı

At the state level, I worked to provide systems of support. Rather than identifying districts to penalize for underperforming, the push was to think more clearly around systems of support.ÌıWe would analyze data from a fairly sophisticated accountability model that included several metrics, and we used the data to help design systems of support alongside districts and schools. Our decisions at the state level were data-informed and policies were crafted based on “what the data told us.â€�

Districts that were typically underperforming needed more high-touch support. We were able to pinpoint how to provide intensive support to districts in a systematic way through networks. WeÌılooked at data to verify with educators what was occurring or not occurring, to determine a plan of action for assistance.

My team was also responsible for implementing a new educator evaluation system in 2011–2012 which aimed to evaluate and improve teaching and learning for teachers across the state. Before 2011, Kentucky had 173 different evaluation systems that were holding teachers accountable against very different standards and with very different protocols. Our team’s orientation was to bring about greater equity and fairness in the system with a more meaningful approach to providing support to improve teaching.ÌıEquity and accountability go hand-in-hand.

What did you encounter when you were trying to get buy-in from educators?Ìı

Because I took a nontraditional path to leadership, I had to earn the trust of my colleagues statewide. I had the trust of teachers, and I knew I needed to gain buy-in from superintendents and principals across the state. Because I had worked as a teacher and teacher-leader, at the district level in curriculum, and then at the state agency, I had already established some relationships I could draw upon.Ìı

I built trust with our teachers union. That trust, along withÌıworking collaboratively with many state organizations, allowed me to lead and support reform strategies alongside districts and schools.ÌıI would use data to ask, “What are theÌıchallenges we are facing together?â€� Data can be a powerful way of entering into conversations that help everyone gain a better understanding of a situation.

When you are working collaboratively to build an accountability system, whether an evaluation system or a statewide accountability system, you have to make major investments of time with partners. You have to lean into the messiness and have honest conversations, knowing that sometimes when you go public, you might be surprised by those very people that you had much different conversations with before.Ìı

You referenced private conversations that change once they become public.ÌıCould you tell us more about that?

I realized quickly that when you’re embarking on change initiatives of the scope that we were trying to accomplish, that organizations, especially state-level membership organizations, have to be responsive to their members. I learned that I needed to get smart about the narrative they wanted to create for their constituents, and I learned how to find our points of agreement for the common good.ÌıÌı

As an example: I worked closely with our statewide education association and a union in Jefferson County.ÌıThere were some things that we could fully support together and there were areas where we had full disagreement. In those places, we would seek additional information and try to come to a conclusion.ÌıÌı

We would always drive towards what the research said on a topic, how we could modify that for Kentucky if necessary, and what we could all live with once a decision was made. ThatÌıseemed to be the most acceptable strategy for getting to a better place around key policies, specifically around our educator effectiveness system. This required me to do some homework and stay abreast of how the national affiliate approached topics of interest to our local association. Ìı

In a lot of circles, accountability is still seen as “blame and shame� or a game of “gotcha.� How do you change that perception to see that it is something different?

The punitive aspect is typically associated with high-stakes accountability that, in the past, often came without supportÌıfor improvement.ÌıIt was aboutÌıcompliance.

I hope we are shifting as a nation. If we canÌıwork in partnership with districts and schools to build capacity where there might be deficiencies, or lack of expertise, and complement that with supports for what the districts and communities value as well as standards for excellence, you can begin to flip the conversation.Ìı

I’m not naive enough to believe that everyone enters into accountability with this same orientation. WeÌıwouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in today, where we have gross numbers of students who are underserved.

If a district or school has demonstrated that they are just unable to deliver on the promise of educating all children, specifically children who have been underserved for years, decisive action should be taken. That’s notÌıany different from how we would view accountability if we were trying to lose weight or get better at a sport.ÌıWe should focus on getting to a plan that can reverse negative trends and create different results.

As we think about accountability, we should be thinking about having an accountability partner district or school. Could we partner up districts who are doing well with districts who are not and have the state agency provide support? Could we find ways to incent behaviors for districts and schools, within the same state, to support one another? Could we begin to think about all meaning all and desire better outcomes for all of our children? Collaboration and learning together are keys to success. Ìı

What should we expect of school district leaders, school board members, state legislators, andÌıstate education leaders under the Every Student Succeeds Act when it comes to ensuring all students learn and succeed?

I would expect school board members to represent their community well, come with a spirit of collaboration with the superintendents as opposed to being steeped in specific agendas. Superintendents need the buy-in of their local board members.Ìı

It also is the right ofÌıschool board members to question what the district is doing to bring about excellent outcomes for students. They need to do so with good intent, and they should get the information needed to help make better policies and decisions.ÌıÌı

The role of state and district leaders is to be transparent about what data tells the community, and then work in partnership with the district and communities to help traditionally underperforming students. Those leaders should work with parents to help them better understand what the system should be doing for their children. StateÌıleaders should also helpÌıdistricts and schools understand what it means to continually improve and hold them accountable for doing that.

What would your perfect accountability system look like?

I would advocate for a 60/40 match for accountability, with 60 percent of the accountability coming from state metrics and 40 percent from local metrics. Ìı

For example, we should know how many national board-certified teachers are in your district. How many teachers have received advanced degrees or certifications? And what is their impact on student learning, especially of those students most in need? If you’re in a community where teachers are teaching outside of their certification area, the public should know that. That’s an important accountability metric.

Metrics affiliated with social-emotional learning should be considered, too. While these metrics are not yet as sophisticated as we would like, this is a place where we can begin to innovate.

What uncomfortable truth or truths in education have we as a society been unwilling to address?

How we take on systemic racism in our system, specifically examining the structures, policies, and practices that prevent us from realizing an excellent education for all students, particularly black and brown students. No Child Left Behind was refreshing because it elevated some aspects of this conversation. It required states to be honest and transparent in a way they had not been before. NCLB defined some clear expectations around educating children of color that raised awareness to reporting on their performance. I’d love to see a closer examination of our practices highlighting the types of opportunities students of color receive or not. If we believe all means all then we should make sure our actions line up to our words.

We also need to talk about the types of supports that are necessary for a changing student population. I am deeplyÌıconcerned about accountability for transient populations, homeless children, undocumented children, and students with special needs.

What’s at stake for the country and Kentucky to get these issues right?Ìı

What’s at stake for us as a country is our economic growth, innovation, and security.ÌıIf we don’t figure out a way to better hold systems accountable for educating all learners, we will continue to lose a population of students whom we need to add value to our collective future.Ìı

Getting these issues right is ultimately an issue of keeping our country united, as well as having an educated populace. This has huge implications for our growth and prosperity as a nation.Ìı

I am from a rural, poor state. With 57 percent of children across the nation living in rural contexts, we have to meet the needs of children in this context as well. For my state, accountability means ensuring children have a pathway to a future that will help them be informed, productive, and active citizens. It also means positioning them to have a livable wage where they can contribute to their community accordingly.

I would hope that we could create a system that is innovative enough for children in Eastern Kentucky — as well as the rest of my state — to contribute to a national or worldwide economy without leaving the place they call home.

Hanna Skandera brings the perspectives of a state chief, federal policymaker, and education researcher to The ‘A’ Word. She served as the New Mexico secretary of education from 2010 to 2017, where she was heralded for lifting student scores. She was also a deputy education commissioner in Florida, a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Education during President George W. Bush’s administration, and an education research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She serves as the chair of the George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Advisory Council.

In this ‘A’ Word interview, which was conducted shortly before she left New Mexico, Skandera explains not only how she has used the principles of accountability in her various roles — but also how she would improve upon them. Two ideas stand out on that list. She supports empowering schools and districts to intervene more quickly to help students stay on track in reading and math. Second, she believes that accountability must be explained in ways that parents can understand and find meaningful. As she says, parents don’t throw around education buzzwords like “proficiency.� They want to know one simple thing: Is my child being set up for success?

How do you define accountability, and has that changed over time for you?

Accountability is both a simple and big wordÌıand at times can be very controversial.Ìı But too often we get wrapped up in the politics of the word when it’s really about making sure we have theÌınecessaryÌıinformation to meet the needs of our kids and set them up for success.ÌıÌı

Over the last several decades, there has been a heavy focus on accountability, but that doesn’t frame the entire picture. In order to ensure we are best serving our students, we must partner accountability with support.ÌıÌıAs we measure our students, teachers, and schools, we should also make sure we are helping them in areas where they are struggling and then not forgetting to champion their successes as well.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

As a state leader, how have you used the principles of accountability?

The first question we should ask as educators is: How well are we serving our students? We need to ensure that when a child finishes out the school year, they are fully prepared to move on to the next grade. As a state leader, I understood the important role that accountability played in making that happen. We needed to start with setting clear expectations and then measure which students were closing achievement gaps and which students were not on grade level.

We knew we needed to create robust opportunities to measure student outcomes.ÌıIn fact, my state has ranked fourth in the nation for being a truth-teller and closing honesty gaps. Knowing where our kids stand has allowed us to raise the bar so that our high school diploma actually means something.Ìı

What do you mean when you say you want your diplomas to mean something?

When I arrived in New Mexico, I learned that our high school diploma was at the eighth-grade equivalent andÌınearly half of our kids entering college still needed remediation. That was completely unacceptable. We knew that we needed to raise that bar so thatÌıwhen our students walked acrossÌıthat stage, it genuinely meant they’re ready for collegeÌıand career.Ìı

We did that by making sureÌıour students are demonstrating competency, on grade level, in key content areas — English, language arts, math, science, social studies, and history. Then,Ìıwe provided the support to help our kids get there. It’s been incredible to see our students rise to the challenge as the bar has been raised. One example is that our graduation rate grew 8 percentage points in the last six years. ÌıÌı

An honesty gap is an interesting way to talk about transparency. How important was that in bringing attention to deficits?Ìı

Accountability really started in New Mexico when Gov. Susana Martinez took office in 2011.ÌıIt was important for us to first establish high expectations and change the game. That allowed us to create a sense of urgency. ÌıÌı

When I first arrived in New Mexico, many people would tell me our kids didn’t have a chance at succeeding because they came from tough backgrounds. But we refused to believe that demographics equal destiny.

Over the years — as we placed education at the center of every conversation, closed the honesty gap, and raised the bar — we created a culture shift in pointing out the gaps and the possibilities for our kids. We have reignited the belief that every child can learn and be set up for success. ÌıÌı

Our kids are just as special as everyone else’s. They are just as unique, just as capable of being successful.

What’s limited your ability to implement accountability?

We have an institutionalized status quo that is holding on to what is, instead of believing what’s possible for our kids. The biggest pushback has come from there. That is unfortunate, but there’s been a slow rumble over the last six years that has grown to a happy thunder around the belief that we are going to own success for our kids.ÌıÌı

What do you mean by an “institutionalized status quo�?

The year I came in, 99 percent of our schools were failing under No Child Left Behind and people just disregarded accountability.ÌıAccording to our old teacher evaluation, 99 percent of our teachers “met competency.â€� There was no differentiation; all were theÌısame. It was uncomfortable for folks to be told they need to improve. In a system like that, there is no way to know how to support those who need to improveÌıor how to raise up leaders who are knocking it out of the park.ÌıÌı

The same is true with our students.ÌıNot knowing how they are doing is like living in a bubble and goes against believing that our kids should be prepared for success in their lives.

In our state, the status quo has consistently been led by our union. I always say I am not anti-union until they don’t put kids first. Unfortunately, my experience in New Mexico is that they’veÌıplaced the interests of adults ahead of what’s right for our children.

You could say that’s the union’s job.ÌıBut the problem is, when that membership becomes the number one stakeholder, you get a tug-of-war between the comfort zones of the adults versus the success of our kids.

What was the opposition like when you were pushing higher expectations for high school graduation?Ìı

I want to be really clear. Our business and higher education leaders knew full well that kids were coming to them not prepared. I consistently heard from community leaders that kids were graduating high school not prepared with basic skills. They lacked the critical thinking skills to be a part of the workforce.ÌıÌı

The data tells the story. You’ve got a big gap when 50 percent of your kids need to redo high school instead of being prepared for college. Ìı

There are definitely leaders who have fought for a new paradigm to deliver on the promises we make in education. On the flip side, there are those who have not. Legislative committees, for example, get funding for their election from people opposed to change or who march at their offices. The sheer opposition to change makes it harder.Ìı

There’s a bit of a human nature piece in this. It’s uncomfortable to go through a big change, especially when you are used to doing things in a certain way.ÌıIt is absolutely uncomfortable and hard.Ìı

We certainly experienced a lot of pushback. It took me four years to be confirmed — and not because our confirmation process was busy.

Where have we gone wrong in building support for accountability? What would help us do it better now?

Remember when I said accountability is really a simple word? Sometimes we use big words when we need to just be clear about what matters. I am a culprit of forgetting this, so I say this humbly.

Accountability is about learning how to best serve our children.

We have accountability so that we can take action in supporting students, teachers, and schools. We do this so we can close achievement gaps and champion those that are doing well.ÌıÌı

About three years ago, we launched Principals Pursuing Excellence in New Mexico with the sole intent of helping educators close the achievement gap. The program matches schools that are closing achievement gaps above the state average with those that are struggling to close gaps. The program is rigorous, but those who have participated, which is about 10 percent of our schools, doubled and tripled their improvement.

TheÌıschool leader is so important, and we can never underestimate that, but we have not changed the leaders in the strugglingÌıschools. Instead, we have changed their paradigm. We’ve equipped them and given them the opportunity to close achievement gaps by learning from peers.

As a result, we recently launched Teachers Pursuing Excellence — a mentoring program for and by teachers.ÌıIt’s rigorous. You can get kicked out if you’re not interested in owning the challenge, but we’re seeing tremendous results.Ìı

We have a long way to go, but this partnership is about knowing where you stand so that you can do something about it. We often have focused only on knowing where we stand and forgotten that we’ve got to equip folks to lead and deliver on the promise on the other side of the data that accountability systems produce.Ìı

What would your perfect accountability system look like now that states have increased authority under the Every Student Succeeds Act? What do you worry about in terms of creating that perfect system?

New Mexico is fortunate. We worked with higher education leaders to raise our standards, adopt new assessments to measure those standards, create a meaningful diploma, develop meaningful school accountability, and implement a new teacher evaluation system.

We firmly believe in capturing the growth of students and their proficiency in subjects at grade level. At the high school level, for example, we capture graduation rates as well as use metrics that capture the growth in the number of students ready for college or a career.

On the career readiness side, it’s not justÌıabout takingÌıa career technical-education course;ÌıthatÌıcourse has to be aligned to a pathway to get you a certificate as you graduate. We not only measure whether someone is participating in AP classes,Ìıdual credit, and career courses, but we actually want to make sure students are getting those certificates and passing those courses with high scores.Ìı

To me, the nextÌıstep in our high school accountability system is including remediation rates. We need to know how well prepared our students are once they get to college. In fact, in two years, we will include college remediation rates linked back to students’ high school of record into the school grade.

In addition, with the new ESSA law, we also will be adding English language proficiency and science as components of our school accountability system. We already include teacher, student, and parent surveys, as well as parent engagement.Ìı

How do you make this data, as well as your accountability system, understandable to parents, school board members, and the media?

One of the early mistakes we made was always talking about “the system.â€� Most of the time, a parent doesn’t walk in and ask, “What’s the level of growth in so-and-so grade? And what about that proficiency?â€�ÌıThey ask one seminal question: “Are you serving my child, and are they set up for success?â€�Ìı

We have done focus groups with both English-speaking parents and Spanish-speaking parents, asking, “What do you really want to know?â€� The school’s grade answered almost all the questions they wanted to know, but we realized we did a terrible job translating it into meaningful information for them.ÌıÌı

Many times we talk about X percent of students being proficient across the state. If I’m a parent, that may or may not matter. They mostly want to know whether their child is on grade level.

We have started working hard on this. Teachers areÌıthe number one communicator to parents, so we’ve got to be equipping them with meaningful information for parents.ÌıÌı

It’s also how we talk about success. For us, looking from last year to this year, 15,000 more kids went to school on grade level in English, language arts, and math. If you are a parent dropping your child off at school every day, there is confidence and excitement knowing you’re taking your child to school and they’re ready to learn at that grade, in that subject, and they weren’t a year before.Ìı

What do you tell parents about whether this achievement gap may be solvable or what it will take to solve it?

There are lots of strategies and teaching methods, but number one is great teachers. Research shows an effective teacher is able to close the achievement gap in two to three years.ÌıAndÌıcorrespondingly,ÌıthatÌıgap widens when we don’t have great teachers in classrooms.

This is why the conversation around teachers is so important. Holding our teachers accountable is not about a punitive system that makes people feel bad. It’s about making sure all teachers are set up for successÌıwhen teaching our children.

The biggest issue in our state is communication.ÌıWe have made a huge effort in the last two years to reach our teachers.ÌıI made a terrible assumption when I started that if I tell superintendents, superintendents will tell principals, principals will tell teachers, and teachers will tell parents. That is not the case, and that’s not to point fingers. By the time the message gets to parents, we’ve definitely slaughtered it, and that’s if you actually believe in the message.

If you don’t like the message, you deliver your own message. So, we’ve made a huge effort to now communicate directly with teachers — to equip, empower, and champion teacher voice and impact.

Our goal is to have a teacher in every single school with a direct pipeline to us at the Public Education Department, giving us feedback and information. At the same time, we have a direct pipeline to them, and they’re committed and have the responsibility as a teacher-leader to share the information they receive. Ìı

What uncomfortable truth have we been unwilling to address in education?

Two or three things come to mind, although it’s probably several, in all candor. We have not shifted our paradigm to a 21stÌıcentury mindset, which means we have all these archaic systems that reward all the wrong things. They establish what’s important in all the wrong ways.Ìı

Let me give some examples. We have not successfully changed how we pay teachers. WeÌıdoÌıhave a pay-for-performance pilot in New Mexico that is based on a teacher’s effectiveness. But as a general rule, we have not successfully changed the paradigm about how we pay.ÌıAt this point, pay is still basedÌıon how long you’ve been in the system and your credentials,Ìıeven thoughÌıthere’s no evidenceÌıthat more time in the classroom determines success and excellence.

Teacher preparation is another example. No disrespect to our professors,Ìıbut professors are too often teaching old pedagogical approaches instead of exploring new up-to-date approaches and providing candidates with more time in the classroom prior to actually becoming a licensed teacher.

We also have a school year that’s based on the agrarian model. And we have a whole system of seat time versus competency-based learning.

These are four or five examples of how we have systems that areÌıoutdated. We’ve got to address those systems so we truly putÌıtoday’sÌıkids first in every decisionÌıto help drive themÌıtowards success.Ìı

What’s at stake for us as a country to get this discussion right? What’s at stake for New Mexico?Ìı

What’s at stake for New Mexico is our state’s future.ÌıWe have chronically been at the bottom when it comes to economic and educational outcomes. If we want economics to change, educational outcomes have to change.

We’re making progress, but we have work to do. We’ve reached a tipping point. What matters most is believing that all kids can learn and then never giving up until we deliver on that promise for every single child.

If we do deliver on that promise, our educational outcomes will continue to rise, as will our economy and the future of our state.ÌıAnd it’s really no different for the country.ÌıWe need to address the failed systems, and create systems that acknowledge students and parents are stakeholders. If we don’t do this, we fail the kids.

We need to be tough on accountability but marry it with equipping and championing those who deliver education to our kids. Otherwise, we miss an opportunity. It can be done, but it is no easy task.Ìı

John King, the son of two New York City public school teachers, has served as a high school teacher, middle school principal, the co-founder of a Massachusetts charter school, New York’s education commissioner, and U.S. education secretary under President Barack Obama. King now is president and CEO of the Education Trust, where he leads an organization dedicated to the academic achievement of all students, particularly those of color or living in poverty.Ìı

His vast professional experience allows the graduate of Harvard University, Yale Law School, and Teachers College at Columbia University to see education debates from a wide range of angles. Personally, King points to the influence of the teachers he had as a child in New York City’s public schools. He credits them with saving his life after both of his parents passed away before he turned 12.Ìı

In this ‘A’ Word conversation, he defends the importance of setting high expectations for all students, measuring to make sure that students are on track, and preparing educators with actions and interventions designed to support the success of all children. King also contends that the next phase of school accountability must go beyond rating schools and lead to better strategies for improvement.

Anne Wicks & William McKenzie: HowÌıhave you defined accountability in your various roles? AndÌıhas that changed over time?

John King: Accountability is about a system of policies and practices that help the federal government, states, districts, schools, parents, and communities hold campuses responsible for serving their students well. One of the challenges is that just rating schools, identifying who is doing well or not, is not enough for a strong accountability system. A strong accountability system also has to have a strategy for improvement. Ìı

I think of accountability as setting high expectations for all students, clearly communicating them, having a way to measure how students are progressing towards those expectations, providing feedback to all the policymakers and stakeholders, and then having a set of actions that are based on that feedback to improve outcomes.

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

Has that definition changed over time?

Over my career, going from being a teacher to being in the administration, I am ever more conscious of the importance of the improvement part of the accountability system, and making sure that folks are paying good attention there.Ìı

As a teacher or principal, you’re always eager for information about how your kids are doing, whether they’re making progress, and how they’re doing relative to other kids in the state and in the country.ÌıAnd you have your own strategies for how to respond to the gaps. But too often districts, states, and the federal government don’t have adequate strategies and supports when schools are identified as struggling. My attention on that school-improvement component certainly has increased.

You started as a teacher. How did accountability affect your decisions when you were in the classroom?

I taught in Massachusetts when the Massachusetts system of higher standards and accountability was first being put into place. I saw it as a tool to better understand where kids were and what they needed to be prepared to graduate from high school and be ready for what’s next. I saw assessment as a tool for instruction, but also as a way to help the state identify gaps and direct resources to where kids needed more support.

How did accountability principles or practices shape your decisions as a charter school leader?

One thing that appealed to me about charters was that charters were going to have more autonomy in exchange for greater accountability. One of my concerns as an educator was that in too many places there was not necessarily clarity about the ends, but thereÌıwere a lot of prescriptive requirements about the means. TheÌıtargetÌıwas sort of vague, but there were lots of requirements around how the school day would work and what kinds of experiences kids and teachers were having at school.Ìı

ÌıThatÌıis actually backwards. There should be a much clearer consensus around theÌıtarget, and then much more flexibility for educators at the school level to innovate towards better outcomes. I became a charter principal, started at a charter in Boston, with the goal of trying to improve outcomes for low-income students of color in particular.

The school was in Roxbury in Boston. In Roxbury, less than 10 percent of adults have college degrees, and the academic outcomes for students are very low relative to Boston or Massachusetts. Our goal in creating Roxbury Prep was to radically improve those outcomes.Ìı

As a charter, we had a performance agreement with the state. We were going to ensure that our students were on the trajectory to college success, or we would lose our charter.ÌıI liked that high degree of accountability with the freedom to hire the staff we wanted, create the schedule we wanted, structure the courses and school year the way we wanted, and to create the school culture we wanted. Ìı

I thought of that as the right exchange, and we got great outcomes and became one of the highest performers among schools in the state. My involvement in developing more charters like Roxbury Prep grew out of the fact that theÌıautonomy-for-accountability exchange could be a lever to create better outcomes for kids.

How did accountability principles or practice influence your decisions as secretary of education?

In the Obama administration, we were very focused on identifying and investing in evidence-based strategies to improve outcomes. In many ways we were able to build on the foundation of No Child Left Behind, where we could see where the gaps were for low-income students, for students of color, for English learners, and for students with disabilities.Ìı

We worked with Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That turned into the Every Student Succeeds Act, where we tried to strike the right balance between a high degree of state flexibility and clear civil rights guardrails.

The guardrails included annual assessments imposed through each grade, transparent reporting of the results, and disaggregation of data — which was a really important feature of No Child Left Behind that we wanted to protect. And we wanted a responsibility for states to act when schools are struggling, or when schools are struggling in serving particular groups of students.Ìı

To flip this around, what limited your ability to implement accountability practices and policies in your work, either as a teacher, charter-school operator, or education secretary?

Two things. One is there are a seriesÌıof adult arrangements that are, to my mind, disconnects from the interests of students. WhetherÌıit’s at the district level, the state level, or the federal level, a lot of energy and time is consumed negotiating the terms of those adult arrangements that ought to be spent on helping students get better outcomes.Ìı

In many places you could identify that English learners were struggling, but there was not the flexibility to direct the right level of resources to those English learners to ensure that they had teachers who were well-trained and effective in working with English learners.

The second challenge is those of us who care about educational equity have not yet been successful in building a strong amount of movement around educational equity. In too many places underperformance is not only tolerated, but assumed. I can think of a district in New York, where I was theÌıstate chief, where the percentage of kids who were proficient was in the single digits. There ought to be outrage about that; folks ought to be marching in the streets.Ìı

Yet in a lot of places people say, “Well, the kids are poor, or there’s challenges in the community, or they’re from single-parent households, so what could you expect?� That added to the assumption that kids who have challenges outside of school can’t learn.

It’s present in too many places, and I don’t think those of us who care about education have done enough to get a strong coalition of the business community, civil rights community, parent groups, educator groups, and — leaders who are willing to stand up and say, “No, that’s not true. Schools can save lives. Schools could be the difference for kids. Schools can be places that help students overcome the challenges that they face outside of the classroom.�

What should parents, taxpayers, and the general public know about those “adult arrangements�?

It’s a whole variety of things.Ìı It’s the fact that in many schools around the country teachers come back to school the day before kids come back. If you think about the planning that you want educators to be doing, the analysis of their incoming students’ prior work and learning needs, it’s really hard to imagine how that all happens in one day before the school year starts. But that’s a result of decisions that have been made by management about how to organize the school calendar.Ìı

When I was in the charter sector at Roxbury Prep, we had teachers come back three weeks before the start of school so we could use that time to plan, focus on what our students would need, and make sure that we were as ready as possible for a great school year. We were only able to do that because of the flexibility to do so.ÌıÌı

In many schools that serve ourÌıhighest-need students, they get less. They get less effective teachers. They get less access to advanced coursework. They get less access to school counselors who will help them make the postsecondary decision.Ìı

And those are all decisions that are made in school board meetings and district offices about what’s convenient for adults, what adults need, whatever the folks feel like is the way they’ve always done things. It is that way rather than starting with what students need and making sure that the highest-need students actually get the strongest teachers and access to a full range of opportunities.Ìı

Let’s circle back to using accountability to lead to strategies for improvement. Would focusing on that help us build stronger support for accountability?

I think so. Part of the political problem around accountability is that it sometimes feels to educators and the community that the message from the state or from the federal government is, “We’re going to use this accountability system to tell you you’re bad or that your school is inadequate, and tell you that you’re a D or an F.â€� And somehow knowing that is going to be so motivating that outcomes are going to change.ÌıÌı

That builds a lot of resentment, as opposed to saying, “We’re going to use the fact that we’ve identified this underperformance to do a real needs assessment and figure out what needs to change, and we’re going to invest in capacity-building to change it.�

Now, that may mean that there needs to be a change in the behavior of the adults in the school. It may mean there needs to be a change in some of the adults in the school. It may mean there needs to be a leadership change in the school. It may mean new programs are needed that are more responsive to the needs of the students in the school.Ìı But if folks understood that with the labeling would come support and intervention, I think that would help build credibility for accountability systems.

What else do you think would help build credibility?

People have to know that assessments are good. Accountability systems are highly reliant on state tests. They have to know that the state tests are good and reflect the kinds of skills that students will need for success in college and careers. We’ve made progress on that front over the last decade. Many more states are focused on college and career-ready standards.Ìı

They’re building into their state tests more opportunities for students to write, more opportunities for students to do problem-solving, more opportunities for students to demonstrate the ability to critically analyze text, which is an essential skill for success in postsecondary education.ÌıÌı

We’ve made progress, but there is still this gap. People don’t trust that the assessments are giving the right information. I think most people would say, “Yes, it matters how to do an annual assessment, but other things matter too.” The Every Student Succeeds Act gives states the opportunity to look at what those other things might be, like chronic absenteeism. Those additional elements will help build the credibility of the accountability system. They will build confidence that we’re looking at more than just test scores, that as a society we are also looking at the other hard questions that affect life outcomes for kids.Ìı

If you were king for a day, what would your perfect accountability system look like?

I don’t know that there’s one perfect system. But some of the features of a strong system are: high standards that reflect college and career readiness; high-quality assessments that build in real-world tasks that reflect the kinds of things students will need to do for college and career success; annual indicators of students’ progress; attention to both whether or not students are proficient, because we have to understand that; and whether or not they’re making progress. The precise details may vary.Ìı

I don’t know that there’s one perfect way to weigh those things, but we want parents, communities, and educators to understand whether or not kids are genuinely on track to college and career success. But you also want them to understand if they’ve made progress in the last year.

There needs to be attention to how all groups of students are doing, so we can’t just look at averages, which sometimes mask how African-American students are doing, or Latino students, or English learners, or students with disabilities.Ìı

There’s got to be a requirement that once you’ve identified gaps in performance, there’s going to be meaningful action on the part of the school, the district, the state to try to address those gaps in performance. If those meaningful actions are not successful, then even more ambitious interventions will be deployed.ÌıÌı

There has got to be a sense that the accountability system leads into progressively more ambitious interventions to ensure good outcomes. There’s got to be a backdrop of adequate resources, so that folks feel like the system is fair, and that their school and classroom have a fair shot if they do well.

In this era of local and state control, what should we expect of state leaders, district leaders, even school board members when it comes to ensuring all students have the opportunity to learn and succeed?

At the federal level, I would like the federal government to provide meaningful civil rights guard rails if states submit their Every Student Succeeds Act plans. The federal government should require states to change their plans if they aren’t holding schools accountable for how groups of students do. And they should hold them accountable if they aren’t proposing meaningful interventions that ramp up in ambition, depending on whether or not the school makes progress.Ìı

At the state level, leaders have a tremendous opportunity under ESSA to set ambitious targets for the progress that groups of students will make. Then, they should build evidence-based strategies to address areas of underperformance. And they need to be creative and ambitious in how they think about using teacher professional development dollars to help make sure that teachers have the skills and supports to close opportunity and achievement gaps. StateÌıleaders are in an incredible position to make a huge difference for kids. Ìı

At the district level, there needs to be a commitment to work urgently to close achievement gaps. There needs to be a commitment to make sure that the resources are getting to the highest-need students. In too many districts, more affluent students get more resources in their schools. The goal really should be that the highest-need students get more resources, so that they have an opportunity to succeed. Ìı

And then at the school and classroom level, people have to see data about student performance as a tool for continuous improvement, and not as a “gotcha� exercise. They should see data as a resource to use to help students improve.

What is at stake for us as a country to get these issues right?

The majority of kids in our public schools are kids of color. The majority of kids in our public schools are participating in a free- and reduced-price lunch program. We have no future as a country if we fail to educate African-American students, Latino students, English learners, low-income students, students with disabilities. The future of our economy and our democracy depends on providing an equitable education to all of our kids.

Is there anything that you want to say about this topic that we didn’t ask?

There are fair critiques of No Child Left Behind, but we have to remember what the landscape looked like before No Child Left Behind. There were states where English learners were essentially invisible. Their performance wasn’t included at all in how states and districts thought about student performance. There were places where people were in complete denial about achievement gaps and didn’t recognize and grapple with the fact that low-income students, students of color were performing at a very different level. There was a sense in many places that there was a lack of urgency about improving performance.Ìı

No Child Left Behind was imperfect, as all laws created by men and women are, but the law created a very different landscape, where now we are attending to achievement gaps in a very different way. We are making sure that all kids and the performance of all groups of kids now can be visible. We can act on that information to make improvements and, hopefully, give states an opportunity to build on the strengths of No Child Left Behind, even as they address some of the weaknesses and gaps.

The conversationÌıis part ofÌıThe ‘A’ WordÌıseries, produced in partnership with theÌıÌıto examine how “²¹³¦³¦´Ç³Ü²Ô³Ù²¹²ú¾±±ô¾±³Ù²ââ€� became a “dirty word,â€� and what can and should be done going forward to ensure accountability withstands the test of a bad reputation. The interviews were conducted over the telephone, transcribed, and edited for clarity and length. The same questions, or types of questions, were put to each participantÌıto see what they thought independently and collectively about accountability. Their answers will take the reader intoÌıthe inner workings of schools, the intricacies of the politics of education, and the ways in which campuses can better serve students.ÌıClick through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations.

John King: Education equity means three things. One is that it means we are doing everything we can to ensure that education in America helps reduce inequality of opportunity. That means low-income students, students of color, and English learners have to be getting high-quality educational opportunities. They have to have the same ability to compete as their more affluent peers.

Second, we need to consider that kids who have significant challenges in their life outside of school will need more support, more access to after-school and summer programs, and more assistance in navigating the transition between high school and college. They may be the first generation in their family to go to college. So equity means more than just getting the same. It means getting what they need to be able to take advantage of opportunity.

The third piece for me, maybe the most personal, is that schools literally saved my life. I grew up in New York City and went to New York City public schools. In October of my fourth-grade year I was at PS 276 in Canarsie, and my mom passed away. I lived with my dad for the next four years. He was struggling with undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, so home was this place that was scary, and unpredictable, and unstable. I didn’t know what my dad would be like from one night to the next, and I didn’t know why.

As he got more and more sick, I took on more and more responsibility at home to get food, pay the bills, and keep the household going. My father passed when I was 12, and my life could’ve gone in a lot of different directions. I could’ve very easily been dead, or I could be in prison today. The thing that made the difference was that I had great New York City public school teachers. They made school a place that was interesting, challenging, engaging, compelling, safe, and supportive.

For me, the work on educational equity is about trying to make sure that every kid has the opportunity that I got to go to a great public school that will help them be the best they could be. Even after my dad passed, I moved around between family members and schools. It was always teachers who created an environment where I was able to make progress, even though lots of people would’ve looked at me and said, “African American, Latino, male student, family in crisis. What chance does he have?� I’m blessed that I had these teachers who just kept believing in me and seeing the hope and the possibilities.

“I don’t think you can solve a problem if you can’t diagnose it, and I don’t think it is fair for parents of students not to be informed of how their schools perform relative to other schools and how their children perform relative to other children.â€�Ìı— President George W. Bush (2014)

Accountability. On its surface, the word simply means a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s actions. Accountability as applied to schools, however, has become so twisted and polarizing that it is now the equivalent of a dirty word. To mention it is to risk being met with stern, disapproving looks and accusations of being anti-teacher and a corporate raider looking to profit off the backs of kids. What? How did we get here?

As with all polarizing issues, the truth is much more nuanced and requires us to look beyond the sound bites. The “Aâ€� Word seeks to do that through conversations withÌırecognized education leaders.

Accountability’s Origins

It is worth remembering that the origins of school accountability are found in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The landmark legislation prompted American leadersÌıto examineÌıhow schools across the country could move beyond the separate-but-equal educational approach thatÌıBrown v. Board of EducationÌıhadÌırightly condemnedÌıa decade before.ÌıAs long ago as Abraham Lincoln,ÌıAmericanÌıleaders had warnedÌıthat theÌınation could not progress if the United StatesÌıremained a house divided.Ìı

After Congress passed the historic law, educating all of America’s children well gained momentum as a moral imperative. AÌıfledglingÌıeducation movementÌıemergedÌıin the 1960s to confront the largely racial divisions that existed across the country. The reformers insisted upon raisingÌıacademicÌıstandards forÌıallÌıstudents and ensuring that studentsÌıofÌıall backgroundsÌımeet them.ÌıNot only was thisÌınew pathÌıseen as moral and right, it was understood as a necessity for an economy that,Ìıpost-Sputnik, was taking onÌıa sophisticated technological dimension.

TheÌıaccountability movementÌısoonÌıspawnedÌıtheÌıNational Assessment of Education Progress, with the first exams being taken in 1969. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP would help the nation answer Sen. Kennedy’s question and compare the success of students across communities and states. Some community leaders and elected officialsÌıunderstood that measuringÌıthe academic progress ofÌıallÌıstudentsÌıwould help ensure that poor or minority students were notÌıbypassed. Efforts to desegregate schools picked up momentum.

In the 1980s,Ìıthe nation becameÌımore aware that academicÌıstandards must improve for the U.S.Ìıto maintain its advantage in an economy increasingly driven by technologies.ÌıSome states responded in theÌı1990s with independent examsÌıto focus more on the “outputsâ€� of schools,Ìısuch as student achievement rates,Ìınot solelyÌıonÌıthe “inputs,â€� such as school spending.

But not all states used a common, comparable assessment. That meant no “apples to apples� comparison of student progress across district or state lines for parents and stakeholders. Districts and states were also not required to report student performance by such categories as race, ethnicity, and income, known today as sub-group student data.

Instead, averages were commonly accepted, masking the gaps in performance —Ìıand supports — for students who were black, Latino, or poor, as well as students who were challenged by learning disabilities or who were English language learners. The smooth edges of averages made two assumptions palatable: First, most of our schools were doing just fine; and second, some students were just not able to achieve at high levels.Ìı

(Click through the grid below to read each leader’s take on accountability)

Bipartisan Support

In 2001,ÌıPresidentÌıGeorge W. BushÌıled a bipartisan group ofÌıpolicymakers, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, to address this phenomenon, what he termed theÌı“soft bigotry of low expectations.â€�ÌıThe bipartisan leadersÌıunderstood thatÌıschools and students would benefit from independent exams being given annually in key subjectsÌılike reading and math. They also believed that holding schools and districts responsible for the results would lead to progress for every student, regardless of their personal circumstances.

Their shared commitment led to the creation ofÌıNo Child Left Behind in 2002. The law required states to determine whetherÌıtheir students were meeting state academic standards and held schools accountable for the results.Ìı

NCLBÌıensured the results were transparentÌıso parents, schools, and taxpayers couldÌısee how well each group of students performed in a district and on a campus.ÌıThis focus on student subgroup data was powerful. Not so long ago, some students were intentionally excluded from measurement;Ìıfor example,ÌıDallas only started giving the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to minority students in the early 1970s.

Throughout the 2000s, scores on NAEP exams rose for many students, including poor and minority youth.ÌıThe progress built upon the success of the accountability systems thatÌıstates createdÌıboth beforeÌıand after NCLB.

In granting waivers from NCLB’s requirements, the Obama administration further pushed a federal agenda that included Common Core standards and more reliable teacher evaluations. The Every Student Succeeds Act now places the responsibility back on the states to meaningfully measure the progress of all students. The law, which Congress passed in 2015, forces states to articulate what matters to them, how they will measure it, and how they will support schools falling short.

The Pushback

Over time, though, a resistance to accountability has emerged. Opponents questionÌıthe emphasis on raising academic standards, independently assessing students against those high standards, and holding educators responsibleÌıfor the results.Ìı

The gaps in student achievement across various groups of students were plainly revealed through accountability systems. Yet not enough research-based, proven interventions were available to educators who were trying to change policy and practice in order to better serve students. At the same time, knowledge of how to implement and sustain interventions in complex school environments was lacking. Political will began to wane and resistance grew.

The pushback intensified as the performance of some districts and schools on independent state exams did not track the self-congratulatory tone of local districts and their leaders. It is difficult to claim that all of a district’s students are successful and that all of its educators are exemplary if student achievement data tell a more sobering story. In short, accountability started to pinch. The interests of adults in the system and children in the system — sadly and strangely — became at odds.

Today,Ìıvoices resisting the push for accountability have become louder and more powerful. Frequently, messages resisting or disparaging testing, standards, teacher evaluations, and school and district report cards areÌıfound in op-eds,Ìısound bites, and school board meetings.

This swing in sentiment is not a total surprise; the work of educating children is complex, as many talented educators working hard each day on behalf of their students can attest. This complexity is magnified for our most vulnerable students. That complexity, however, does not justify a retreat. Implementing meaningful accountability systems requires thoughtful and diligent persistence — and it requires challenging long-held assumptions, practices, and power structures.

The Missing Voices

What is missingÌıfrom today’s debate are the voices of the many education leaders who have embraced accountability as a wayÌıto change outcomes forÌıthe students and familiesÌıthey serve. These leaders actively seek and use reliable data to measure progress andÌıto determine which research-based interventions are likely to increase student success. They operate transparently inÌıdrawing public attention to the challenges schools face and the achievements they make.ÌıThey openly address the complexity of getting accountability systems right while maintaining their focus on measuring the progress of all students.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these leadersÌıfaceÌıopposition. Yet they persist inÌı“doingâ€� the work of accountability each day and are learning along the way; it is their perspective that needs amplification in policy discussions.Ìı

This seriesÌıof conversations aims to do just that — to give voice to such leadersÌıso that theirÌıexperiencesÌıand perspectives can inform and influence accountability policy and practice at the local, state, and federal levels.ÌıOver the next several weeks, you will hear from:

– John King and Margaret Spellings, two former U.S. education secretaries;

–ÌıHanna Skandera, Kevin Huffman, Gerard Robinson, Lizzette Reynolds, and Felicia Cumings Smith, each of whom has served as a state education chief or a top-ranking state education official;

–ÌıDaniel King and Tom Boasberg, the superintendents of the Pharr–San Juan–Alamo school district in Texas and Denver Public Schools, respectively; and

–ÌıDiane Tavenner, the founder of the Summit charter school network.

As you read these conversations, which we conducted this year, you will findÌıa strong explanation for why accountability practices matterÌıandÌıan honest analysis of how states, school districts, andÌılocal campuses can improve those practices. Accountability is not a static concept; it is a dynamic one thatÌıshould be modernized and strengthenedÌıfor the benefit of America’s students.

The interviews were conducted over the telephone, transcribed, and edited for clarity and length. The same questions, or types of questions, were put to each participantÌıto see what they thought independently and collectively about accountability. Their answers will take the reader intoÌıthe inner workings of schools, the intricacies of the politics of education, and the ways in which campuses can better serve students.

Anne Wicks is director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute. William McKenzie is editorial director at the George W. Bush Institute.

Lizzette Gonzalez Reynolds, vice president of policy for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, has nearly three decades of experience in education policy. She previously served as deputy legislative director for then-Gov. George W. Bush and as chief deputy commissioner for the Texas Education Agency. She also was the U.S. Department of Education’s regional representative in Texas for Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and she served as special assistant in the Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs under Secretary Rod Paige. Reynolds currently sits on the board of theÌı KnowledgeWorks Foundation and is a member of the advisory boards of IDEA Public Schools in Austin and UTeach.

In this ‘A’ Word conversation, Reynolds draws upon her experiences to explain the benefits of school accountability, starting with the fact that it squarely puts the responsibility for improving student outcomes on adults. She also offers practical suggestions for improving accountability, including breaking down complex testing data so parents can understand — and act upon — their students’ results.

She also explains why educators and school leaders need better training in using data in order to make decisions to support student success. And she believes that supporters of school accountability must do a far better job explaining to middle-class and wealthy parents why accountability matters to all kids, including their own.

Anne Wicks & William McKenzie: How do you define accountability, and has that definition changed over time?Ìı

Lizzette Reynolds: Accountability in schools is a way of measuring student outcomes, particularly student achievement. It is the foundation by which schools are held accountable for their students. For me, that is the bottom line.

Accountability hasn’t necessarily evolved in and of itself. The conversations around accountability have evolved, but not in the best interest of kids. The voices of some of the adults in the system are have been empowered to the detriment of students learning.

At the national level, accountability was elevated by No Child Left Behind, but initiated in Texas by then-Governor Bush in 1995. That’s when the focus became making sure all students were accounted for in their academic learning and that each group of students were measured against their peers. We could then truly understand both the gaps in learning and the gaps in access to a quality education.Ìı

Today, the conversation has stagnated and students have plateaued in their learning. We’re seeing National Assessment of Educational Progress scores leveling off with no significant achievement gains or gaps closing. That is disappointing.Ìı

At the same time, the demographics in this country have changed. The perception is that because poverty is growing within the student population, caveats are being placed on student learning. That’s wrong.Ìı

(Click through the grid below to read other ‘A’ Word conversations)

In the early days of NCLB, you helped sell a bigger sense of accountability. Has that conversation changed?

Before George W. Bush brought accountability to Texas as governor, people felt like the schools were just fine. In the aggregate, that was true, but when you dug down into who was learning, a whole new picture was starting to emerge.ÌıPoor kids couldn’t read!ÌıWhat was going on?Ìı

That was the initial foray into the conversation. The system said it was being held accountable, but it wasn’t. The system was not identifying and measuring the progress of each child. It was not getting down to the student level and having conversations where parents understood how and what their kids were doing.

Accountability scared people when it first came in, but then, itÌıwas somewhat embraced. The Texas business community also made accountability its top priority under Governor Bush. And other people thought, “OK, I guess we need to know this.â€�

Back then, tests were seen as helping kids.ÌıToday, that conversation has changed to an emphasis on the tests themselves and how they are hurting kids. That’s unfortunate.

How did you use accountability in your role as a state education leader?Ìı

We used it to measure our schools and to give parents information about how their schools were doing with their kids.

Unfortunately, states struggle to do a good job communicating what those results mean. Some people say that in order to have a fair system you need a complex system.ÌıWell, the complexity just confuses parents, and then parents don’t understand why we need accountability.

States use accountability to identify areas of success, but we don’t make that connection for parents.ÌıAll they see is their kids taking a lot of tests and hear their teachers complaining about teaching to the tests and not having the flexibility to teach their students the way they know best.

People also complain that they don’t know what’s in the tests, that they don’t see the exams, and that they don’t know who makes up the tests. How do you counter those complaints?

StatesÌıtend to release the tests after the fact. How that really informs parents, I don’t know.Ìı

The results also can come back in edu-speak, with reports like “your child is proficient in quantitative reasoning, but borderline on X, Y, and Z.� When I worked at the agency, I even had to call the state’s assessment director and ask her whether the questions my daughter missed on her fifth-grade math test would hinder her as she went along. Did she miss on critical standards? The director brought me her scores and said, specifically, she missed it here, but she got it here, so she’s fine.

Parents don’t have that kind of access, so they don’t know what the data means. What does it mean if your child is approaching proficiency? Is that good? Is that bad?

Since then, [Texas Education Commissioner] Mike Morath and [Texas Deputy Education Commissioner] Penny Schwinn have worked hard to create confidential student report cards to make the test results more accessible and understandable. They should be applauded for this tremendous accomplishment. I was never able to accomplish that myself at the agency.

ExcelinEd’s also working to help states adopt better policies. Our Fewer, Better Tests project includes providing more easily understood information about a student’s scores on their state assessments.

How do you make the information understandable for parents?Ìı

A good example is right here in Texas. The report card not only shows how your student did on the state test but explains it in a very accessible way. You can understand the elements the student has accomplished and/or where he or she needs support. The report also provides the measurements of the student’s reading history and provides suggested reading. It is no longer black and white with language only education insiders would understand.

Our organization also supports bringing “softerâ€� characteristics into the student report card, such as including suggestions on the report card for how a parent can increase their child’s chances to master key subjects.Ìı

We also advocate for sharing the results of each student’s state assessment with the incoming teacher of record. That way, the teacher or teachers and can understand where the student stands academically. They also can use that information during parent-teacher conferences. The results are then more relevant and less of a mystery.Ìı

Some say that making the summative exams more relevant to parents is just a way to continue to make sure the test vendors profit off our kids’ knowledge or lack thereof. But we need to bring this information to the level of the parents.

And how do you bring it to the level of parents?Ìı What do you say to them?

One thing is to let them know it is OK to bring supplemental support to your kids at home. For example, parents worry about making sure their children have art and PE, so let them supplement that at home.ÌıWe also need to open the schoolhouse doors to parents, particularly parents who have felt disenfranchised or intimidated by the system itself.Ìı

Similarly, we need to demonstrate to parents of higher-achieving kids that accountability is also for their kid. Some parents of high-achieving students feel like nobody cares and that the focus for accountability is on the kids that are way below level or right on the bubble.

The accountability system is much more than that. It’s about ensuring all students get the same level of support regardless of where they are academically.ÌıIt’s the system that is being held accountable … not the kids.Ìı

We just need to keep reaching parents of all levels of income so they can see why accountabilityÌıis good for them as well. We’ve tried that with college readiness, explaining how assessments are aligned so that their kids can be ready to enter the postsecondary institutions of their choice. We just need to make this relevant, and that state assessments aren’t the devil.

We’reÌımoving into the era where states are going to have more authority over accountability systems.ÌıIf you could design a perfect accountability system, what would it look like?

That’s not easy. As I mentioned earlier, there is the notion that to make an accountability system fairer, it’s got to be complex. But with that complexity needs to come some functionality.

If results from state assessments are a significant part of a school’s score, there needs to be an opportunity to think about what other elements a school brings to the table for each of their kids. There needs to be additional measures of success, like the so-called career readiness indicators. That may be a credential students earn or a certificate that is directly aligned to the needs of the labor market. That would address parents who think the system is only for college readiness.

The point is, there are elements that can make accountability more holistic. Some states are doing a good job with that, or are moving towards doing a good job. But it takes a lot of stakeholder input.

All of what we are talking aboutÌıhas to do with data. What is it you wish that state leaders, school trustees, or parents knew about the importance of data?Ìı

I have a love/hate relationship with data because I have witnessed folks who read data sheets all day long but don’t actually do anything with it or put it towards some actionable outcome.

We need to teach teachers and administrators in their preparation programs how to use data in their daily interactions with students. Data about achievable outcomes should drive academic decision-making. It should penetrate into the classroom as a non-negotiable, but it is not.

The effective use of data also is a leadership issue. There are district and charter leaders here in Texas that are using data to make decisions about their schools. Dr. Danny King of Pharr–San Juan–Alamo is a great example ,as are Pedro Martinez in San Antonio and Tom Torkelson of IDEA Public Schools.Ìı

Leadership is just as big a part of the equation.

Data and accountability are somewhat similar in that regard. They’re not the end; they’re the means to get to a better education and better student outcomes.

Absolutely.

So, training in the use of data needs to happen early in somebody’s career?Ìı

Yes, so you can go to a parent-teacher conference and know whether your child is succeeding and know whether there are things that we as parents can do to support that learning.

There seems to be a lack of patience for the systemic, big shifts that we need in education. What advice would you give to an incoming principal or superintendent who knows that the ship needs to move when it comes to changing reading, math, or instruction, but who knows there is not much patience for the change?Ìı

We’veÌıseen examples of that bear out here in Austin, such as when they shut down the old Johnston High School. Over the years, Johnston was continuing to fail cohorts of students. The district had thrown a bunch of money at it, and that still didn’t do anything.

Some local activists wanted the school to just be left alone. But the school finally got a leader, Bruce Miller, who as principal advocated for bringing in outside help. A contract with Johns Hopkins University was secured by the district to bring intensive whole-campus support that included a focus on reading, math, career pathways, and dropout prevention. Student outcomes began to improve.

The school is now called Eastside Memorial, and the great work continues under the leadership of Miguel Garcia.Ìı

Sometimes discussion around education reminds me of the old saying “out of sight, out of mind.� If you don’t see things firsthand, you are not likely to take an action to change things. Education can be the same, and that disconnect can’t continue.

From 2005 to 2009, Margaret Spellings served as the U.S. secretary of education, where she had responsibility for implementing No Child Left Behind. The bipartisan initiative, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002, provided greater accountability for the education of 50 million U.S. public school students.ÌıFrom 2001 to 2005, the University of Houston graduate was chief domestic policy advisor for President Bush.Ìı

Spellings worked for President Bush both before and after his time in the White House. She served as a senior advisor to President Bush when he was governor of Texas, and she was named president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in 2013. In 2016, Spellings was appointed president of the University of North Carolina System.

In this ‘A’ Word interview,ÌıSpellings recalls that before school accountability gained traction in No Child Left Behind, it was all too easy for schools to hide the performances of low-achieving students, many of whom came from disadvantaged homes and minority families. Today, she emphasizes, we need to remember why it is so important that all students achieve their potential. Nothing less than the health of our democracy is at stake.

Spellings also frankly discusses the do-overs she would have liked with NCLB, which include getting data to teachers in a more timely way. And, as she points out, resources need to be expanded and aligned to meet the challenges facing America’s schools.

Anne Wicks & William McKenzie: Let’s start with these basic questions: How do you define accountability, and has that changed over time?

Margaret Spellings: I define accountability as the process by which we tell ourselves the truth about achievement for all students and hold those actors in the system — adults, parents, all stakeholders — to some level of responsibility around those results.

Has that definition changed over time?

I think there’s emphasis — and this is an observation; this isn’t my preference necessarily — to make those accountable broader than in times past. Previously, we thought of the school as the primary focal point of accountability — the teacher, the campus, the principal, the superintendent, the district. Now we have spread it out, where accountability includes parents and others. Part of that is because accountability’s gotten so anemic.

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We will get to the anemic part in a minute, but how did you use accountability principles or concepts at the Education Department, in a policymaker role at the White House, or even when you were working with George W. Bush as governor?

I used them to make fact-based decisions about needs, investments, urgencies, and personnel changes. I used them as a primary driver of change that could be defended and was fact-based. That is accountability’s primary utility. You can’t solve a problem that you don’t diagnose correctly, fairly, accurately, and comparably.

Were these concepts applicable when Texas was rewriting its education code while George W. Bush was governor?

Definitely, and they still are. I famously said that the tenets of No Child Left Behind were like Ivory soap. They are 99 percent pure. That’s still true in the sense that these are tried and true management principles that are good for any organization. They stand the test of time.

The fact that the mandate of accountability is now more decentralized, and the aperture is open on all manner of things that can count and don’t count, the wheels are off. But the idea that you measure something, you diagnose it, and you invest resources around it, is tried and true. That’s 99 percent pure.

You toured the country a lot as education secretary. How did you see these principles making a difference in the lives of students and their schools?

Accountability principles allowed us to put a bright light on the underachievement and under-resourcing of poor, minority, and first-generation students, those who had been, quote-unquote, left behind, including special education students.

Accountability allowed us to expose and shame. I probably shouldn’t use that harsh of language, but that’s what motivated people. I used to say we tried the “put the money out and hope for the best� approach for a long time. It’s not that people were full of ill will. It’s just that it didn’t matter. The performance of low socioeconomic kids just didn’t matter that much.

The News & Observer did a three-day series this year that described how gifted high-performing minority students in Raleigh and Charlotte are often channeled into low-level courses. The reason they can do a report like that is because there’s some level of measurement and accountability. But when it’s a “hope for the bestâ€� strategy, poor and minority kids will get left behind. Even people who hate No Child Left Behind and have strong reservations about accountability recognize that it forced us to focus on low-income, poor, and minority kids like we never had before.

You were saying earlier that accountability has become anemic. How so?

The whole framework around what accountability is at a federal level is gone. There is this crazy quilt of accountability systems across the country, with lots of local latitude to maneuver the fine print. This is harsh language, but there is no central authority to monitor any of that and keep them honest. Left to their own devices, they’re going to go easy on themselves. That’s human nature.

Beyond the human nature part, what worries you about states getting this type of responsibility?

Lots of superintendents and state chiefs would say this: They love to blame that federal government, that Margaret Spellings for making them do something, for keeping them honest. It’s the “devil made me do itâ€� kind of thing because the politics are vigorous at the local level to say everybody’s doing great and all is well. That is so for a variety of reasons.

That is why having that stopper at the federal level is important. When that is absent, it’s easy for the boulder to drift down the hill.

Were you fighting all the time for these principles while passing accountability reforms in Texas or No Child Left Behind in Washington? Or was it easier to develop a consensus then?

There was more consensus because people didn’t know how stark the finding accountability was going to be. On its face people would say, “OK, that makes sense. Let’s measure the kids. Let’s see how they’re doing. Let’s resource around the issues, and the tide will turn.â€�

It did, but then accountability started to pinch. We started to expose things like, the best teachers were in the easiest places. The exposure made people uncomfortable.

In the early days it was pretty easy to do accountability because nobody had done it before. That was definitely true at the enactment of No Child Left Behind.

I’ll never forget the day [then–GOP House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman] John Boehner and [then–ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee] George Miller, neither of whom had ever had any experience with accountability like we had in Texas, put special-education kids in the bill. They wanted everybody in the system. When George Bush was the one pushing accountability, and people were trying to raise the bar for you, we obviously bought in.Ìı

The bar was high, and that made the system hard to sustain. Even Jeb Bush, the president’s own brother, railed against it.

At what point did the pushback start growing and lead to a different consensus?

I would say this to his face: It happened when the Obama administration started making it more personal to teachers and pay systems. Opponents hated it when it was just kids and it was school labeling. But when it got time to educators’ own pay — particularly when we had such limited experience with pay-for-performance — that’s when the wheels came off.Ìı

You all might disagree with that, but I think that’s when it really frayed.

Where else do you think we may have gone wrong in building broad support for accountability?

The information did not have the necessary utility for managers. The data was too slow, so it didn’t help them improve the enterprise enough. If we had a do-over, we would somehow make the information more readily available to teachers and principals in real time so they could do something with it.

The number two thing I would do over is a better job training school leaders on how to use accountability data to be their friend.

The too-much-testing complaints that then ended up getting into the local mix also helped derail accountability. As you all know, No Child Left Behind requires a test in two subjects once a year in grades three through eight, and once in high school. Of course, schools and states and localities went far beyond that, and I think it’s come to no good end.

So we would have done a better job thinking about right-sizing the assessment, and how much is too much.

As we go forward, how do we reclaim this ground?

We need leadership. Whatever you want to say about it, George Bush and Ted Kennedy led on this — period, paragraph. And they talked about it a lot.

Frankly, President Bush brought his fellow Republicans into a place that they didn’t want to go and frankly have not stayed in. We had a coalition of the civil rights and business communities that is not as robust as it once was.ÌıThe unions and the far right are ascendant and for their own reasons are not for this kind of approach.

If we’re going to regain this ground, we have to regain some of the moral imperative. People cared that black and brown children were being undereducated. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. So, what is the narrative that will sell this go-around? Is it about economic development? Human capital? Doing this because it’s the right thing, I think, has fallen to the end of the list.

You were talking about doing a better job getting information to principals and teachers. Technologies are obviously changing very fast. How do you see these developments getting data to people in a more real-time way than when No Child Left Behind was rolled out 15 years ago?

Yes, that is helpful. And Common Core is helpful because you can make comparisons that we couldn’t before. The territory is more fertile than it was.

One of the major contributions of No Child Left Behind was that we created a whole infrastructure that was literally nonexistent. If I remember correctly, something like seven states, if that, had annual assessment when we got into office in 2001.

We’re going into a new era where states have more authority over accountability systems. What should we expect of state leaders, district leaders, and school board members when it comes to ensuring all students have the opportunity to learn at the right grade level?

What we should expect and what we might expect might be different things. We should expect them to be very technically attuned to the details of all the wonkery: the definition of the school year and size, exemptions, confidence intervals, etc. It’s a fool’s errand to expect that level of understanding is in place, but that’s what it will take for this to work.

Now that you are in higher education, what should universities do to prepare teachers and principals?

We are about to start doing some things here in North Carolina. One is making sure our colleges of education are teaching teachers to do the best work possible, using what we know about reading and research, for example.

Number two, we need to make sure there’s alignment between the K-12 curriculum and what’s happening in colleges of education. We do a very poor job of that. We also need to build in some consequences for the colleges of education to do that. Right now, other than doing the right thing, there’s no incentive whatsoever for colleges of education to do any of that.

Somebody with a 98.6 temperature is particularly going to get hired in growing states like North Carolina and Texas. The fact that they’re not set up to be effective when they get into the classroom is sort of immaterial. Growing states just need more teachers to fill their classrooms.

What do you look for in terms of states having a solid accountability system?

A checklist of what good accountability looks like includes high standards; measurement systems that are valid and reliable; exemption rates that are not excessive; professional development that is aligned; and timely data. And then do a yardstick that shows how state accountability systems match up to it.

We need to make this as simple as possible, like giving people a grade. I’d like to see a report card on who has real and meaningful accountability. We need to pull back the veil on accountability.

Along these lines, what do you worry about most with states having this new authority under ESSA?

I worry that we see a real retreat in achievement for poor and minority kids, that they get lost in the shuffle. We’re already seeing that. We’re seeing that in Texas.

What uncomfortable truths in education have we been unwilling to address?

Resourcing around the problems. The worst teachers are in the hardest schools, the best teachers are in the easy schools. We have college-ready curriculum going on in big-time ways in well-resourced suburban schools, and hardly any college-ready curriculum in our disadvantaged communities.

I used to tell the story in my D.C. days that if you were at Langley [High School in McLean, Virginia], you could have 27 AP classes, but if you were at an inner-city D.C. high school, maybe there were 2 or 3 AP classes. And then we complained that the kids were not college-ready. We have not put our money where our mouths are on resourcing the problems.

What is at stake for us as a country to get this right?

Everything. Our economic viability, our civic democracy — not to be too hyperbolic, but our way of life.

If that much is at stake, why do you think it’s so hard to translate the principles of accountability into a greater public understanding?

Because it’s kind of a slow burn, easy-to-mask problem, and the soft bigotry of low expectations are alive and well. People don’t expect poor and minority kids to achieve at high levels. It’s just not the standard.

If half the school lunches served in the cafeteria were tainted, people would be on fire. If they had trans fats, they’d be on fire. The fact that half the kids can’t read, nobody gives a damn.

Are the achievement gaps, and the resource gaps, solvable? What will it take?

It is absolutely solvable. But we are not really serious about solving this problem. If we were, we could do it.

What will it take?

It would take all the obvious things, such as sending your best people to do the hardest work, and paying them for doing it.

Is there anything that we haven’t asked you that you want to capture?

This may seem gratuitous, and he would hate it if I was doing this, but President Bush deserves a lot of credit for engendering support around and enacting a law that affected more than 50 million schoolchildren for more than a decade.

The key principles of it are still in place, which are annual assessments and disaggregated data. If I’m hopeful about anything, I’m glad that [Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman] Lamar Alexander was able to keep those things in place in the Every Student Succeeds Act, along with the inclusion of special education students and English language learners in a real way in accountability systems. These give us the tools to reinvent this for a new era when we’re ready.