Accountability
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011I was talking to my graduate students about the literacy standards last night, and predictably got pulled off on a tangent about accountability. I found myself making a point that I’ve alluded to before, but it’s worth making explicit now.
Robert Benchley famously said “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” I will put myself in the former category when I say that, generally, there are two kinds of people who talk about standards and accountability.
The first believes that anything worth doing is worth doing well. In order to make sure we’re doing the best job we can, it’s important to measure our results, so we can identify areas for potential improvement and apply strategies for intervention where they will do the most good.
The second believes that taxpayer-funded education is one of the evils of socialism and must be eradicated. In order to make the necessary changes, evidence must be gathered that the public education system is a failure, so that arguments to turn education over to the free market will be more persuasive.
And my point was that, when you hear someone talking about standards and accountability, it’s important to know which of these two groups that person is in.