Accountability and School Performance: Implications from Restructuring Schools

Many politicians and policymakers today link school accountability and school performance. Drawing on evidence from the corporate world, they assume that strong external accountability will impel schools to improve student achievement. In this article, however, Fred Newmann, M. Bruce King, and Mark Rigdon argue that three issues keep this popular theory from working in practice: a) implementation controversies around standards, incentives, and constituencies; b) insufficient efforts to organize the human, technical, and social resources of a school into an effective collective enterprise — what the authors term