Accountability

Information on state accountability for Alabama can be found at the following link:  http://www.alsde.edu/sec/acct/Pages/home.aspx

Accountability—the idea of holding schools, districts, educators, and students responsible for results—has become the most-recent watchword in education. In more and more states and districts, policymakers are moving to reward achievement and punish failure in schools, in an effort to ensure that children are getting a good education and that tax dollars aren't being wasted. "Accountability for student performance is one of the two or three -if not the most- prominent issues in policy at the state and local levels right now," says Richard F. Elmore, a professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education (Quality Counts, 1999)

The push for accountability has grown out of a common perception that states traditionally monitored the "inputs" in public education—such as the number of books in the school library or the number of computers in the classroom—but paid too little attention to performance. In the 1980s, the nation's governors proposed a kind of "horse trade": The state would provide more flexibility in how schools operated, as well as more money for schools, if educators would agree to be held more accountable for student achievement.

The "new" accountability, enshrined in federal law since the mid-1990s and a major emphasis of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, focuses on student performance, schools as the unit of improvement, public reporting of achievement results, continuous improvement, and consequences for schools attached to student performance (Fuhrman, 1999). Each state is required, under No Child Left Behind, to submit an accountability plan to the U.S. Department of Education.