Why Should Teachers Want School Accountability? Lessons from a Comparative Approach to the Subject

Abstract

In the last decades, educational policies have been more and more engaged with the topic of school accountability, and they have required the development of alternative accountability models for monitoring students’ skills and knowledge. Yet, it is not always clear why teachers – who already have the guidance of legal and methodological principles – should be interested in a systemic analytical tool for investigating their pupils’ achievements. Only the teacher, each teacher, knows the social and cultural issues related to the development of his or her students’ intellectual capital; this information – obtained through years of class-work – is crucial for deciding the most effective way to present the curricular contents. The problem with this form of the equation is that it has a mere bi-dimensional character: the student on one side, and the teacher (or, at most, the school staff) on the other; there is no link between the individual – class-work – and the public dimension of education – student’s progress with respect to the other students. The teacher’s endeavor ends up being nothing more than one of many pieces of a figure-less puzzle; the creation of an accountability system tries to sort out this apparent disorder by introducing a third term of comparison that contextualizes each piece with respect to a wider design.JRC.G.9-Econometrics and statistical support to antifrau