Special issue on accountability and school leadership

Citation

(2012), "Special issue on accountability and school leadership", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 50 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2012.07450eaa.001

Special issue on accountability and school leadership

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 50, Issue 5.

This special issue consists of a collection of seven papers that deal with the increasing pressures for school accountability and its effects. The special issue grew out of a roundtable at the American Educational Research Association in 2011, in which three of the paper authors (Mintrop; Knapp and Feldman; and Louis and Robinson) interacted with approximately 40 participants whose enthusiasm for the topic required us to move into a hall and steal chairs from less well-attended sessions. When we raised the possibility of a special issue to the editors of the Journal of Educational Administration, they noted that another paper on the same topic (Spillane and Kenney) had been presented at the 2nd Asian Leadership Roundtable in Bangkok, and that they had recently accepted two related papers (Elstad, Christophersen and Turmo; and Vasquez Heilig, Young and Williams). As we looked at the accumulating manuscripts, the editors and I felt that it was insufficiently international in its focus, and we solicited an additional manuscript (Lee, Walker and Yuk). The final line-up thus consists of an overview essay, four empirical papers from USA, and two from other countries. Three of these papers are multi-method, two are predominantly survey-based and one is based entirely on case study data.

Although the papers do not reflect an integrated framework, together they address critical but unanswered questions:

1. 1.

   How do external accountability policies affect the development of school-based initiatives for change and improvement?

2. 2.

   How do leaders influence teacher responses to external accountabilities?

3. 3.

   How do schools develop consensus around norms and values that sustain their efforts at improvement under conditions of increasing external pressure?

4. 4.

   In what ways (if at all) do school leaders reconcile external accountability demands with the school's internal accountability system and improvement goals?

5. 5.

   What are some of the intended and unintended consequences of the growing emphasis on accountability for professional behaviors and the achievement of educational goals?

All of the papers examine both formal leaders (administrators) and the social and professional context in which they work. In particular, the emphasis is on the role of school leaders in interpreting external mandates, including the extent to which they are able to integrate them with their internal priorities and values in ways that affect teachers and students. Given the investment in standards-based accountability-driven reform (and the public faith placed in this strategy for improving the quality of public education) the field deserves better answers to questions about the school-level responses to these policies. The collection thus adds insights into a central set of variables that affect the impact of local leadership on schools’ responses to emerging policy definitions of the common good.

Each paper focusses on tensions or dilemmas in the accountability movement. Spillane and Kenney set the stage, and address all the questions posed above through a review of the literature. Most of the research on the effects of the accountability movement has, until recently, emphasized its impact on classroom practices, instruction and student achievement, but they point out that “While these foci make sense, they often ignore other aspects of the school organization, potentially critical to understanding the implementation process of this new genre of education policy” (p. 543). Spillane and Kenney's essay emphasizes the need to examine how accountability has changed the dynamic of how schools must manage their need to maintain external legitimacy in the eyes of the public (and particularly in the political arena), while at the same time maintaining an internal focus on integrity and value-driven practices.

This issue of how the tensions implicit in the questions outlined above are perceived and managed emerges in the six empirical papers as well:

• •

  Vasquez Heilig, Young and Williams (“At-risk student averse: risk management and accountability”) use a “risk management” framework to analyze how administrators and teachers in low-performing and high-poverty high schools in Texas respond to several decades of high-stakes accountability. The authors suggest that the risk of “failure” on the state tests were real because they undermined legitimacy, and risk is managed by explicitly undermining perceived integrity objectives (teaching all students well, providing support for immigrant students who may not be “legal”) in order to “game” the system and increase test performance.

• •

  Lee, Walker and Yuk (“Contrasting effects of instructional leadership practices on student learning in a high accountability context”) show that when school leaders in Hong Kong do what is asked (closely monitor the classroom work of teachers), their role as positive instructional leaders is undermined. In addition, the use of close supervision of teachers (which is increasingly emphasized as a policy in a number of countries) has a negative impact on students’ engagement with school, presumably because teachers own engagement and sense of professionalism is undermined.

• •

  Elstad, Christophersen and Turmo's investigation of three different accountability systems in Norway (“The strength of accountability and teachers’ organizational citizenship behaviour”) suggests a different problem in managing external legitimacy and internal integrity. In this setting, adults in school settings are expected to engage in a wide variety of citizenship behaviors, which are largely voluntary efforts directed toward improving the culture and performance of the school. Their findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between higher-stakes accountability and stronger leadership among the formal leaders/higher levels of organizational citizenship behavior. Thus, their finding is that external legitimacy/accountability and internal integrity may be, at least in their setting, less problematic than either the Hong Kong or Texas data suggest.

• •

  Louis and Robinson's analysis of US elementary schools (“External mandates and instructional leadership: principals as mediating agents”) focusses on the way in which accountability may affect the legitimacy of the formal school leader. Their data suggest that administrators who have more questions about the legitimacy and value of external accountability initiatives from either the state or district are less likely to be viewed as instructional leaders by their staff. High instructional leadership, in their qualitative data, is associated with the capacity of school leaders to negotiate perceived tensions between external legitimacy demands and the need for internal autonomy in ways that balance the two.

• •

  Knapp and Feldman (“Managing the intersection of internal and external accountability: challenge for urban school leadership in the United States”) also examine the role of principals in mediating policy messages and integrating them into an internal school agenda. Their analysis of 15 urban schools suggests that principals in these settings were generally successful in creating an environment that focusses on professional responsibilities while establishing structures that reflected external accountability demands. Principals and staff members created more reciprocal school cultures and mutual accountability that seemed to increase both leaders’ and staff capacities to pursue high expectations.

• •

  The issue of legitimacy and integrity is central to Mintrop's contribution (“Bridging accountability obligations, professional values, and (perceived) student needs with integrity”). Using in-depth data from nine California schools, he is able to show that where goal integrity is high, responsiveness to external accountability (and success in meeting accountability standards) was also higher. In schools where principals operated as conduits of accountability pressures without integrative narratives that included integrity, defensiveness and an adversarial climate tended to ensue.

While these papers emerge from studies in different accountability contexts (even within the USA there is considerable variation in accountability policies between states), there are thus, common themes in response to the questions outlined above. First, external accountability policies have an effect on internal school leadership in all of the contexts, but have both positive and negative effects on the development of a coherent internal story about improvement. Second, where positive effects on internal cohesiveness and a focus on improving outcomes for students are observed, there is evidence of an active role for school leaders in creating coherence. Third, but less conclusively, the papers point to a variety of ways in which leadership effects occur, but in general they point to coherence around goals, a sense of an internal “story” about school improvement, and integrity in addressing both external demands and internal conditions. The story of how this is done differs between the papers, suggesting an additional need to study how leadership, both from individuals and that which is more broadly distributed among the professional staff, contribute to managing the tension outlined in Spillane and Kenney's initial paper.

One additional cross-cutting theme in the papers is the degree to which external accountability policies have both the anticipated effect of increasing student learning and unintended effects of various kinds. The issue of unintended effects is raised most explicitly by Vasquez Heilig, Young and Williams (At-risk student averse: risk management and accountability), who point to many unintended negative effects of the Texas accountability system on schools with large numbers of at-risk older adolescent students. However, scattered less explicitly through the other empirical papers is evidence that external accountability policies have a wide variety of unanticipated effects, some that are harmful to students or the school's internal adult culture, but others that have unanticipated positive effects. Without intervention by school leaders, the papers suggest that the anticipated positive consequences may be less likely to occur (or occur only in some places), while the opportunities for unintended negative consequences to emerge are increased. Table I is not intended to be comprehensive, but only to draw the reader's attention to the fact that the empirical papers consistently pay attention to the issue of intended and unintended policy consequences. A careful read will find additional implications for the effects of policy on leadership and schools which, collectively, point to the need for more information about the types, range and incidence of policy effects.

In sum, this special issue sheds some light on the often debated but still ambiguous question of how school-based leaders affect the implementation of accountability systems “on the ground.” Even though accountability systems are intended to issue clear, simple, authoritative and incontrovertible performance demands for schools, the studies show that local leaders’ interpretations of these demands strongly shape schools’ internal responses. The alternatives mechanisms explored in these papers include:

• •

  perceiving the system as enabling or, alternatively, constraining;

• •

  exploring vs ignoring contradictions between professional values and external equity expectations; and

• •

  forging a sense of value integrity that merges internal standards of good practice with external system tools (e.g. use of performance data).

While this special issue, like most, raises as many questions as it answers, as a group the papers shed considerable light on these issues, particularly on how schools are able to manage a tension between internal and external accountabilities that continue to trouble the profession.