School Accountability

Abstract

School accountability, the notion that K–12 schools and educators should be held responsible for the education students receive, continues to shape the education policy landscape. This chapter reviews the conceptual framework that motivates school accountability and the different dimensions involved in designing accountability regimes, focusing on government-administered accountability in the United States. The development of, and research on, school accountability from its emergence in the early 1990s through the present is organized into three generations of policies. Each generation of accountability is discussed in terms of the relevant policy developments that spawned it, its defining characteristics, and relevant research on the impact of that generation’s school accountability policies on students, schools, and educators. This chapter then concludes by discussing the themes that emerge from the extant research on school accountability along with avenues for future research in this domain.