For this Course Project, you will complete the following:
Section 1: You will demonstrate how you will apply your philosophy of education and practice through a district newsletter presentation.
Section 2: You will outline a proposed research study. You will only outline the elements of the study. You are not to conduct any actual research for this response.
Section 3: A 2- to 3-paragraph reflective conclusion
Section 4: APA-formatted Reference Page. Cite all scholarly resources used to complete MA 5. All references, unless seminal, should be from the past 5 years.
Include the following:
Section 1: Theoretical Framework of Educational Philosophy
For Part A of Section 1: You have just been hired by a new school district as the Director of Special Education. The principal has asked you to outline your philosophy of education for the school newsletter. The newsletter is read by all teachers, staff, district leadership, parents, and guardians in the district. Complete a 2- to 3-page newsletter presentation that addresses your philosophy of education. All four categories (i.e., Professional Conduct, Professional Qualities, Communication, and Collaboration) of Walden’s dispositions must be infused into your philosophy of education presentation. Besides addressing each of the four categories, you should also address each of the following key questions.
Section 3: Write a 2 to 3-paragraph reflective summary regarding how your philosophy of education influenced you to select your possible study topic and how this process may influence your future practice.
Section 4: APA Reference List. Be sure to identify the references by the section in which they are used, i.e., Section 1 references, Section 2 references, and Section 3 references.
Submit this Assignment Day 7 of Week 10.
To submit your completed Assignment for review and grading, do the following:
To access your rubric:
Module 6 Assignment Rubri
For this Course Project, you will complete the following:
Section 1: You will demonstrate how you will apply your philosophy of education and practice through a district newsletter presentation.
Section 3: A 2- to 3-paragraph reflective conclusion
Section 4: APA-formatted Reference Page. Cite all scholarly resources used to complete MA 5. All references, unless seminal, should be from the past 5 years.
Include the following:
Section 1: Theoretical Framework of Educational Philosophy
For Part A of Section 1: You have just been hired by a new school district as the Director of Special Education. The principal has asked you to outline your philosophy of education for the school newsletter. The newsletter is read by all teachers, staff, district leadership, parents, and guardians in the district. Complete a 2- to 3-page newsletter presentation that addresses your philosophy of education. All four categories (i.e., Professional Conduct, Professional Qualities, Communication, and Collaboration) of Walden’s dispositions must be infused into your philosophy of education presentation. Besides addressing each of the four categories, you should also address each of the following key questions.
Section 2: In Section 2, you will apply your content knowledge and philosophy of education to create an outline for a proposed study that you would like to conduct at some point in the future.
You will include the following elements:
Problem Statement
Provide a 1- to 2-paragraph statement that is the result of a review of research findings and current practice and that contains the following information:
Purpose
Present a concise, 1-paragraph statement on the overall purpose or intention of the study, which serves as the connection between the problem being addressed and the focus of the study.
Significance
Provide 1 or 2 paragraphs, informed by the topic in the problem statement, that describe the following:
Background Literature
Provide a representative list of scholarship and findings that support and clarify the main assertions in the problem statement, highlighting their relationship to the topic—for example, “this variable was studied with a similar sample by Smith (2013) and Johnson (2014)” or “Jones’s (2012) examination of campus leaders showed similar trends.” Some of these resources may have already been mentioned in the first sections of the prospectus and can be included here, also. Citations provided within the prospectus document should include approximately 15 recent (within the past 5 years) peer-reviewed journal sources, presented in APA 6th-edition format, as well as any evidence provided to support the existence of the local problem.
Research Question(s)
List the question or a series of related questions (i.e., 1–3 maximum) that are informed by the study problem and purpose, which will lead to the development of what needs to be done in this study and how it will be accomplished.
Possible Types and Sources of Information or Data
Provide a list of possible types and sources of data that could be used to address the proposed research question(s), such as test scores from college students, employee surveys, observations of a phenomenon, interviews with practitioners, historical documents from state records, deidentified school records, or information from a federal database.
Possible Analysis
Offer some possible ways to organize and analyze the results obtained by the research strategies detailed previously. Your analysis may be generated by using quantitative, qualitative, or other types of formal analysis process. Please use the information from your research courses to aid you in completing this section. The key to this section is to match your possible analysis to the research questions and the data that you may obtain.
Other Information (Optional)
Include any other relevant information, such as challenges or barriers that may need to be addressed when conducting this study. You may provide any concerns related to feasibility or potential risks and burdens placed on research participants under this heading.
Section 3: Write a 2 to 3-paragraph reflective summary regarding how your philosophy of education influenced you to select your possible study topic and how this process may influence your future practice.
Section 4: APA Reference List. Be sure to identify the references by the section in which they are used, i.e., Section 1 references, Section 2 references, and Section 3 references.
Submit this Assignment Day 7 of Week 10.
To submit your completed Assignment for review and grading, do the following:
To access your rubric:
Module 6 Assignment Rubric
Securing Accountability
Internal Accountability Simply stated, accountability is taking responsibility for one’s actions. At the core of accountability in educational systems is student learning. As City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel (2009) argue, “the real accountability system is in the tasks that students are asked to do” (p. 23). Constantly improving and refining instructional practice so that students can engage in deep learning tasks is perhaps the single most important responsibility of the teaching profession and educational systems as a whole. In this sense, accountability as defined here is not limited to mere gains in test scores but on deeper and more meaningful learning for all students. Internal accountability occurs when individuals and groups willingly take on personal, professional, and collective responsibility for continuous improvement and success for all students (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009).
External accountability is when system leaders reassure the public through transparency, monitoring, and selective intervention that their system is performing in line with societal expectations and requirements. The priority for policymakers, we argue, should be to lead with creating the conditions for internal accountability, because they are more effective in achieving greater overall accountability, including external accountability. Policymakers also have direct responsibilities to address external accountability, but this latter function will be far more effective if they get the internal part right.
Existing research on school and system effectiveness and improvement (DuFour & Eaker, 1998; Marzano, 2003; Pil & Leana, 2006; Zavadsky, 2009) and our own work with educational systems in the United States and internationally (Fullan, 2010; Hargreaves & Fullan,). suggests that internal accountability must precede external accountability if lasting improvement in student achievement is the goal. Richard Elmore (2004) conducted a series of intensive case studies of individual schools—some that failed to improve and some that improved their performance. Relative to the former, schools that failed to improve were not able to achieve instructional coherence, despite being in systems with strong external accountability. A minority of schools did develop internal coherence together and showed progress on student achievement. The main feature of successful schools was that they built a collaborative culture that combined individual responsibility, collective expectations, and corrective action—that is, internal accountability. Transparent data on instructional practices and student achievement were a feature of these cultures. As these cultures developed, they were also able to more effectively engage the external assessment system. Highlighting the fundamental role of internal accountability on school improvement, Elmore (2004) pointed out the following: It seems unlikely to us that schools operating in the default mode—where all questions of accountability related to student learning are essentially questions of individual teacher responsibility—will be capable of responding to strong obtrusive accountability systems in ways that lead to systematic deliberate. improvement of instruction and student learning. The idea that a school will improve, and therefore, the overall performance of its students, implies a capacity for collective deliberation and action that schools in our sample did not exhibit. Where virtually all decisions about accountability are made by individual teachers, based on their individual conceptions of what they and their students can do, it seems unlikely that these decisions will somehow aggregate into overall improvement for the school. (p. 19). Internal accountability is based on the notion that individuals and the group in which they work can transparently hold themselves responsible for their performance. We already know that current external accountability schemes do not work because, at best, they tell us that the system is not performing but does not give a clue about how to fix the situation. As Elmore (2004) observes, if people do not know how to fix the problem and so cannot do so, then the following will occur: Schools will implement the requirements of the external accountability system in pro forma ways without ever internalizing the values of responsibility and efficacy that are the nominal objectives of those systems. (p. 134) Elmore (2004) then concludes this:
investments in internal accountability must logically precede [emphasis added] any expectation that schools will respond productively to external pressure for performance. (p. 134) “Logically precede,” yes, but more to the point of our framework, internal accountability must strategically precede engagement with external accountability. This is why focusing direction, cultivating collaborative cultures, and deepening learning precedes accountability in our Coherence Framework. There are two messages here: One is that policymakers and other leaders are well advised to establish conditions for developing cultures of internal accountability. The second is that there are things other people can do when the hierarchy is not inclined to move. The answer is to “help make it happen in your own situation”—that is, develop collaborative work with your peers and push upward for this work to be supported. The history of the teaching profession is laced with assumptions of and conditions for isolated, individual responsibility. But atomistic responsibility, detached from any group, can never work. In a nutshell, the cultural shift needed is to shift to collaborative cultures that honor and align individual responsibility with collective expectations and actions. Elmore discusses several schools that he and his team studied. Most of them exemplify the individualistic model. Teachers work away on their own and periodically grapple or clash with external accountability requirements. But Elmore also discusses two cases where the schools have developed more or less “collaborative” cultures. The first case is St. Aloysius Elementary School Without exception, teachers described an atmosphere of high expectations. Some stressed a high priority on “reaching every child” and “making sure that no one is left behind” while others referred to a serious and supportive environment where everyone is expected to put forth excellent work. (Elmore, 2004, p. 164) It sounds ideal, but what happens when things don’t go as expected? At another school, Turtle Haven, Elmore (2004) asked teachers, “What happens when teachers do not meet the collective expectations?” He reports that “most teachers believed that a person who did not meet . . . expectations, or conform to a culture created by those expectations would first receive a great deal of support from the principal and other colleagues” (p. 183). If this approach failed to produce results, most Turtle Haven teachers said that the teacher in question would not be happy at the school and eventually would either “weed themselves out [or]. . . if there was a sense in the community that a certain number of children were not able to get the kind of education that we say we’re committed to providing . . . we would have to think whether the somebody belongs here or not” (Elmore, 2004, p. 183). This kind of culture is not foolproof, but we would say it stacks up well against the external accountability thinking that creates demands that go unheeded or can’t be acted on. In the collaborative cultures, the internal accountability system is based on visible expectations combined with consequences for failure to meet set expectations.
Such cultures, says Elmore (2004), are much better equipped to deal with external accountability requirements, adding that a school with a strong internal accountability culture might respond to external assessments in a number of ways, “including accepting and internalizing it; rejecting it and developing defenses against it, or incorporating just those elements of the system that the school or the individuals deem relevant” (p. 145). What is coming through in this discussion is that collaborative cultures with an eye to continuous improvement establish internal processes that allow them to sort out differences and to make effective decisions. At the level of the microdynamics of school improvement, Elmore (2004) draws the same conclusion we do at the system level: investing in the conditions that develop internal accountability is more critical than beefing up external accountability. The Ontario Reform Strategy, which we discussed in previous chapters, offers an illustrative example of the importance of internal accountability preceding external accountability systemwide. The Canadian province of Ontario, with 4,900 schools in 72 districts serving some two million students, started in 2004 to invest in building capacity and internal accountability at the school and district levels. The initial impulse for the reform came from leadership at the top of the education system—Dalton McGuinty, the premier of the province at the time—through the establishment of a small number of ambitious goals related to improvements in literacy, numeracy, and high school retention. However, the major investments focused on strengthening the collective capacity of teachers, school principals, and district leaders to create the conditions for improved instructional practice and student achievement (Glaze, Mattingley, & Andrews, 2013). There was little overt external accountability in the early stages of the Ontario Reform Strategy. External accountability measures were gradually introduced in the form of assessment results in grades 3 and 6 in literacy and numeracy, and in high school, retention numbers, transparency of data, and a school turnaround support-focused policy called Ontario Focused Intervention Program (OFIP) for schools that were underperforming. This system has yielded positive and measurable results in literacy that has improved dramatically across the 4,000 elementary schools and in high school graduation rates that have climbed from 68 percent to 84 percent. across the 900 high schools. The number of OFIP schools, formerly at over 800, has been reduced to 69 schools even after the criteria to identify a school as in need of intervention had widened to include many more schools (Glaze et al., 2013; Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010). An evaluation of the reform strategy in 10 of Ontario’s 72 school districts that concentrated particularly on the special education aspects of the reform pointed to a significant narrowing of the achievement gap in writing scores for students with learning disabilities (Hargreaves & Braun, 2012). Concerns were expressed among teachers who were surveyed about some of the deleterious consequences of standardized testing in grades 3 and 6— that the tests came at the end of the year at a point that was too late to serve a diagnostic function, that they were not sufficiently differentiated in order to match differentiated instructional strategies, and that principals in some
The most intriguing finding though was that special education resource teachers, whose role was moving increasingly to providing in-class support, welcomed the presence of transparent objective data. They saw it as a way of drawing the attention of regular classroom teachers to the fact and the finding that students with learning disabilities could, with the right support, register valid and viable gains in measurable student achievement. Together, these findings point to the need to review the nature and form of high-stakes assessments—more differentiated, more just-in-time, and more directed at the needs of all students, perhaps—but also to the value of having transparent data that concentrate everyone’s attention on supporting all students’ success along with diagnostic data and collaborative professional responsibility for all students’ learning, development, and success A similar approach to whole system improvement can be found in U.S. districts that have been awarded the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education, granted to urban school districts that demonstrate the great- est overall performance and improvement while reducing achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, and income. In her in-depth study of five such districts, Zavadsky (2009) finds that, while diverse in context and strategies, these districts have addressed the challenge of improving student performance systemwide following remarkably similar approaches: investing in, growing, and circulating the professional capital of schools (what they term building capacity) to improve instructional practice by fostering teacher collaboration and collective accountability. These successful schools set high instructional targets, attracting and developing talent, aligning resources to key improvement priorities, constantly monitoring progress, and providing timely targeted support when needed.
The solid and mounting evidence on the fundamental impact of internal accountability on the effectiveness and improvement of schools and school systems contrasts sharply with the scarce or null evidence that external accountability, by itself or as the prime driver, can bring about lasting and sustained improvements in student and school performance. There is, indeed, a growing realization that external accountability is not a capable driver of school and system effectiveness. At best, external accountability does not get its intended results. At worst, it produces undesirable and sometimes unconscionable consequences, such as the cheating scandal in Atlanta (Hill, 2015). We frequently ask successful practitioners that we work with how they themselves handle the “accountability dilemma” (direct accountability doesn’t work; indirect may be too soft). What follows are a few responses that we have personally received to this question: What is effective accountability? Not surprisingly, these views are entirely consistent with Elmore (2004): Accountability is now primarily described as an accountability for student learning. It is less about some test result and more about accepting ownership of the moral imperative of having every student learn. Teachers talk about “monitoring” differently. As they engage in greater sharing of the work, they talk about being accountable as people in the school community know what they are doing and looking to see what is changing for students as a result. And as they continue to deprivatize teaching, they talk about their principal and peers coming into their classrooms and expecting to see the work [of agreed-upon practices] reflected in their teaching, their classroom walls, and student work. (Anonymous, personal communication, November 2014).
Teachers and administrators talk about accountability by deprive- sizing their practice. If everyone knows what the other teacher or administrator is working on and how they are working on it with students, it becomes a lot easier to talk about accountability. When everyone has an understanding of accountability, creating clear goals and steps to reach those goals, it makes it easier for every- one to talk and work in accountable environments. (Elementary principal, personal communication, November 2014).
I spoke with my staff about accountability versus responsibility in brainstorming, about what is our purpose and who is responsible for what . . . being explicit and letting teachers collectively determine what our responsibilities are. (Secondary school principal, personal communication, November 2014) We are moving to define accountability as responsibility. My district has been engaged in some important work that speaks to intrinsic motivation, efficacy, perseverance, etc., and accountability is seen as doing what is best for students . . . working together to tackle any challenge and being motivated by our commitment as opposed to some external direction. (Superintendent, personal communication, November 2014).
When you blow down the doors and walls, you can’t help but be evermore accountable. (Superintendent, personal communication, November 2014) I do believe that a lot of work remains to be done on building common understanding on the notion of accountability. Many people still believe that someone above them in the hierarchy is accountable. Very few take personal accountability for student learning and achievement. There are still those who blame parents and students’ background for achievement. (Consultant, personal communication, November 2014) In one school, the talk about accountability was pervasive as the school became designated as underperforming. The morale of the school went down significantly, and the tension was omnipresent at every meeting. The team switched the conversation to motivation, innovation, and teamwork and the culture changed. The school is energized and the test scores went up in one year. The team is now committed to results and continuous improvement. (Consultant, personal communication, November 2014) In short, internal accountability is far more effective than external accountability. The bottom line is that it produces forceful accountability in a way that no hierarchy can possibly match. We have shown this to be the case for teachers, and we can make a parallel argument for students. If we want students to be more accountable, we need to change instruction toward methods that increase individual students’ responsibility for assessing their methods that increase individual students’ responsibility for assessing their own learning and for students to work in peer groups to assess and provide feedback to each other under the guidance of the teacher. We still need external accountability, and we can now position it more effectively.
External Accountability
External accountability concerns any entity that has authority over you. Its presence is still essential, but we need to reposition external accountability so that it becomes more influential in the performance of individuals, groups, and the system as a whole. We first take the perspective of external authorities and then flip back to local entities. External Authorities The first thing to note is that if the external body invests in building widespread internal accountability they will be furthering their own goals of greater organization or system accountability. The more that internal accountability thrives, the greater the responsiveness to external requirements and the less the externals have to do. When this happens, the center has less need to resort to carrots and sticks to incite the system to act responsibly. Dislodging top-down accountability from its increasingly miscast role has turned out to be exceedingly difficult. People at the top do not like to give up control. They cling to it despite obvious evidence that it does not work. And attacks on the inadequacy of top-down accountability have failed because they have only focused on the “from” side of freedom. Critics seem to be saying that accountability requirements do not work, so remove them. That is not the complete solution because it takes us back to nothing. The answer is found in our argument in this chapter—rely on developing the conditions for internal accountability and reinforce them with certain aspects of external accountability. In particular, central authorities should focus their efforts on two interrelated activities:
1. Investing in internal accountability
2. Projecting and protecting the system
By the first, I mean investing in the conditions that cause internal accountability to get stronger. The beauty of this approach, as we have seen, is that people throughout the system start doing the work of accountability. Though indirect, this form of accountability is more explicit, more present, and, of course, more effective. We have already suggested its components:
• A small number of ambitious goals, processes that foster shared goals (and even targets if jointly shaped)
• Good data that are used primarily for developmental purposes
• Implementation strategies that are transparent, whereby people and organizations are grouped to learn from each other (using the group to change the group)
• Examination of progress in order to problem solve for greater performance
The center needs to invest in these very conditions that result in greater focus, capacity, and commitment at the level of day-to-day practice. They invest, in other words, in establishing conditions for greater local responsibility. In this process, the center will still want goals, standards, assessment, proof of implementation, and evidence of progress. This means investment in resources and mechanisms of internal accountability that people can use to collaborate within their units and across them.
With strong internal accountability as the context, the external accountability role of the system includes the following:
1. Establishing and promoting professional standards and practices, including performance appraisal, undertaken by professionally respected peers and leaders in teams wherever possible and developing the expertise of teachers and teacher-leaders so that they can undertake these responsibilities. With the robust judgments of respected leaders and peers, then getting rid of teachers and administrators who should not be in the profession will become a transparent collective responsibility.
2. Ongoing monitoring of the performance of the system, including direct intervention with schools and districts in cases of persistent underperformance.
3. Insisting on reciprocal accountability that manages “up” as well as down so that systems are held accountable for providing the resources and supports that are essential in enabling schools and teachers to fulfill expectations (e.g., “failing” schools should not be closed when they have been insufficiently resourced, or individual teachers should be evaluated in the context of whether they have been forced into different grade assignments every year or have experienced constant leadership instability).
tors of student performance and well-being. These would include measures of social capital in the teaching profession such as extent of collaboration and levels of collegial trust. Outcome measures for students should also, as previously stated, include multiple measures including well-being, students’ sense of control over their own destiny (locus of control), levels of engagement in learning, and so forth. The Perspective of locals
4. Adoptingandapplyingindicatorsoforganizationalhealthasacontext for individual teacher and leader performance, such as staff retention rates, leadership turnover rates, teacher absenteeism levels, numbers of crisis-related incidents, and so on, in addition to outcome indicators of student performance and well-being. These would include measures of social capital in the teaching profession such as extent of collaboration and levels of collegial trust. Outcome measures for students should also, as previously stated, include multiple measures including well-being, students’ sense of control over their destiny (locus of control), levels of engagement in learning, and so forth.
The Perspective of locals
We have drawn on numerous relatively successful examples in this book. They all established strong degrees of internal accountability (people being self and group responsible) that served them well in the external ).
accountability arena. Such systems strengthened accountability by increasing focus, connecting dots and otherwise working on coherence, building capacity (so people could perform more efficaciously), being transparent about progress and practices, and engaging the external accountability system. As districts increase their capacity, they become stronger in the face of ill-advised external accountability demands as the following two extended examples reveal from Laura Schwalm, former superintendent of Garden Grove).
Example One: garden grove Handles External Pressure In the words of Laura Schwalm: Shortly after we completed our audit and instituted a district-wide mandate and system to place students in college prep (a–g) courses, Ed Trust and several other advocacy groups, with support from the California Department of Education (CDE), began “calling out” the low college readiness statistics in large urban districts in California. Every large urban district, including Garden Grove, was called out (rightfully so) with one exception of a district in the north, which was held as a model solution because they had made the age requirement mandatory for every student and claiming they had eliminated all other courses with absolutely no effect on their graduation rate. Based on this example, the advocacy groups started a very public campaign and got a majority of school boards, including LAUSD, to adopt the policies of this northern district with the pledge that they would achieve 100 percent a–g achievement with no increase in dropout rate within four to five years. When Garden Grove refused to comply (Long Beach did as well), we were more strongly targeted and pressured (the approach we had adopted was to not eliminate all support courses that were not college prep but rather to eliminate a few and to align the rest in a way to provide an “on ramp” to college prep courses while at the same time using individual student-by-student achievement data, rather than the former practice of “teacher recommendation” for placement in college prep courses) (one of the shameful things our audit revealed, which did not surprise me, was that if you were an Asian student with mean achievement on the California Standards Tests, you had about a 95 percent chance of being “recommended for placement in a-g courses”—conversely, if you were a Latino male with the exact same scores, you had less than 30 percent chance of being recommended for placement in these courses). As the pressure continued to adopt a policy of mandating an exclusive a–g curriculum, I met with a few of the key advocates and explained that while we shared the same goal of increasing our unacceptably low a–g completion rate, we strongly felt the approach they were suggesting was ill advised. Putting students in a course for which they were absolutely not prepared, based on very objective data, and then expecting them to pass the course with a grade of C or better was unfair to both students and teachers. They kept focusing on the district up north, which led me to point out to them that the data from that district did not support what they were claiming. If their approach was truly working, then their achievement scores, as measured by the state, should be outperforming ours, and in fact, they fell far short of ours, for all subgroups. Additionally, a neighboring district that had adopted the same policy now claimed a 90 percent a–g completion rate, yet 65 percent of their high school students scored below the mean on the state standards test. It clearly pointed out that all was not as it looked on the surface, and while I had no desire to criticize another district’s approach, I was not about to follow it. That caused the advocates to pause and finally to leave us alone. Our rate, both in terms of a–g completion and student achievement data by subgroup, continued to climb. Within a few years, we surpassed all the others, and over time, the policy the CDE and advocates had pushed into districts quietly vanished.
Example Two: garden grove Deals With the bureaucracy Again in Schwalm’s words:
Another example occurred during one of the CDE’s three-year systemwide compliance reviews. While I accepted the state’s responsibility to oversee that we were not using specially designated funding for inappropriate uses, as well as to assure we were following laws around equity and access for all students, the process they had was unnecessarily burdensome, requiring us to dedicate significant staff to collecting, cataloging, and preparing documentation that filled dozens and dozens of boxes. When the state team came—usually about 10 to 12 people, each looking at different programs with one person loosely designated as team lead—the expectation was that you treat them like royalty and that they had enormous authority. My view was somewhat different. I respected that they had a job to do, but just because they did not like the way we displayed something did not mean we needed to do it differently or because they would have used another approach—our approach if appropriately supported with data—was not out of bounds. At one of the first reviews early on in my superintendency, we drew a particularly weak but officious team with a very weak lead. They came up with some particularly lame findings (i.e., one team member commended us on how we used data to identify areas of focus for targeted groups of students, while another team member marked us as noncompliant in this area because we did not put it on a form that she had developed—and other equally ludicrous examples). At the end of the process, the superintendent was required to sign an agreement validating the team’s findings as well as a plan and timeline to bring things into “compliance.” I very professionally told them that I did not agree with their findings and thus could not sign either document—I was not going to pretend to fix something that I had no intention of doing because there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. What I did do was sign a document, which we drafted, acknowledging that the team had, in fact, been there and that we agreed to a couple of specific areas where we needed to and would make some changes, but I did not agree with the majority of the report and would not agree to take any action other than what was previously specified. This seemed pretty fair to me, but apparently it shocked them and the system, which was the beginning of my unpopularity with many in CDE. Probably this was made worse when the story got out (not by my telling), and other superintendents realized that they could do the same thing (although I advised those who contacted me—and a number did—that their life would not be particularly easy for a while and also that they should have the data and results to back their stand) (L. Schwalm, personal communication, 2014). You can see why in another book (where I cited an even more egregious example of defiance), I referred to Laura as a “rebel with a cause” (Fullan, 2015). There are two lessons here with what I have called both the freedom-from problem and the freedom-to problem. You need to attend to both. The freedom-from problem is what Laura did—refusing to comply with ridiculous demands. But she was backed up by her freedom- to actions in which she built a culture of coherence, capacity, and internal accountability. If you do the latter, you are in good shape to contend with the external accountability system, including acting on external performance data that do show that you need to improve,
In California as a whole, they currently face the freedom-to problem. The wrong drivers are on the way out the door. Jerry Brown, the governor, has suspended all statewide student tests for at least two years on the grounds that it is better to have no tests than to have the wrong test. So far so good, but getting rid of bad tests is not enough for securing accountability. New tests—Smarter Balanced Assessment Curriculum (SBAC)— are being piloted relative to CCSS. Districts would be well advised to use our Coherence Framework to build their focused accountability. They will then perform better and be in a better position to secure their own accountability as they relate to the ups and downs of external accountability. External accountability as wrong as it can get sometimes is a phenomenon that keeps you honest. Leaders need to be skilled at both internal and external accountability and their interrelationship.