Responsibility and School Governance

Abstract

The concept of responsibility is highly relevant to the organization of public schooling. Through public schools, adult citizens allow for the formal nurture and training of children to become full citizens, able to participate in our shared social, economic, and political life. With growing awareness of the importance of effective schooling to individual and collective well-being, wide-scale attempts have recently been made to reform school governance in the United States and internationally. The authors show how use of a responsibility framework can generate important insights into such reform efforts and their effects. Scholars and practitioners have done well incorporating accountability into the language of policy and practice. Little has been said about responsibility. The authors address this omission and apply their framework to interpret two distinctive reform strategies: (a) efforts to strengthen mayoral control over urban schools and (b) the creation of charter schools.