Rethinking teacher education: The trouble with accountability

In many developed countries over the past two decades, there have been new standards, new monitoring systems, new course and fieldwork requirements for teacher candidates, new accreditation criteria, and/or new auditing procedures for colleges and universities that offer initial teacher preparation programmes. However there has also been enormous variation among accountability policies, initiatives, and approaches as well as an array of competing claims about their efficacy and impact in teacher education. This article suggests that accountability, on its own, is neither good nor bad, but rather depends on the larger policy and political agendas to which it is attached, how it is used, the goals, values, and purposes it serves, and the assumptions it makes about who should be accountable for what, to whom, and for what purposes. The article introduces the concept of intelligent professional responsibility as part of an alternative to dominant, audit-based accountability models in teacher education. Then the article explores the meaning and instantiation of this concept with examples of recent accountability developments in two interesting, but different policy, professional, and geopolitical contexts – the United States and Norway.