Baseball and education are a lot alike, Mr. Doyle points out. Both are awash in data. And it is the wise managers, maintains, who make judicious use of all that information. WHILE ACCOUNTABILITY is the watchword of overseers, too often it is the bane of the overseen. At its best, it reflects a prudent concern for good stewardship and responsible management of necessarily scarce resources; at its worst, it becomes a form of mindless hector-ing, in which careful oversight gives way to invective and finger pointing. How is it that the same word has such divergent connotations? According to Webster, the word first appears in 1714, and it means, as one would assume, to be held to account. But its modern usage -- also according to Webster -- is disproportionately connected to education. In particular, it is linked to the idea that the executive and legislative branches of government must keep a baleful eye on school performance, reward the successful, and punish the wicked to ensure high student achievement levels. Although it pays lip service to objective measures, too often accountability has been subjective -- its invocation and implementation in the eye of the beholder. The movement's epigram might be he who pays the piper calls the tune. Indeed, for educators on the receiving end, accountability has often appeared to be all stick and no carrot, an oversimplified process in which much is expected and little of the complex nuances of schooling acknowledged. This point of view, stereotypical to be sure, is nonetheless familiar to anyone who follows public education. It arises from the tension between the need to account for public expenditures (and public activity) and the intrinsic difficulty of measuring academic performance in ways that make sense. Accountability in this context -- where hard measures meet soft outcomes -- invites suspicion, discord, and cynicism. More's the pity because accountability is as necessary as accounting, from which it arose in the first place. (It is worth remembering that accounting, now viewed with skepticism and some contempt after scandals like Enron and Tyco, was once a respected profession.) Accounting grew organically from the time of temple scribes, who needed to keep track of tithes and harvests, to the staggering complexity of modern government, the high-tech firm, and global financial markets. In the public sector, accounting first appeared in the form of the now- familiar fidelity audit, a process in which independent third parties - - accountants -- review spending to see that it conforms to original intentions (budgeted funds) and meets commonly accepted principles of prudent (and legal) management. Typically performed annually, fidelity audits are a straightforward device used to assess fiscal probity. However, they provide no insight into intellectual appropriateness or organizational thoughtfulness; so long as expenditures conform to the budgeted amount (as approved by a competent authority) and are putatively legal, they get a clean bill of health. Enter the more nuanced concept of accountability. A generation of accountants -- after fidelity auditors -- began to understand that there were other, more interesting, aspects to accounting than auditing: like Athena sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus, management audits and then academic audits sprang full-blown from fidelity audits. While it may seem a small step in retrospect, it was a large step indeed. Among other things, it elevates the auditor to the position of management and policy analyst, a transition that raises issues of conflict of interest (a practice which in its extreme form caused the collapse of Arthur Andersen, one of the giants of the accounting world). What has changed in the accountability equation? IT. Advances in information technology have brought with them an extravagant promise. Pray tell, what is IT's promise? The capacity -- in real time -- to collect, assemble, manage, and make sense of large aggregations of data; to turn data into information; to turn information into knowledge; to turn knowledge into wisdom; and to turn wisdom into wise and considered action. …