D.C. are you listening?: A New Local, Community-Based Approach for Accountability
It turns out that a new local, community-based approach to accountability is happening… I first introduced the idea of Community-Based Accountability on October 12, 2012 in the post Accountability: Are you ready for a new idea?
Here is some background from the post I am giddy!!: Community-Based Accountability
I had writer’s block all summer. I owed Professor Rich Milner and two co-authors (Dr. Muhummed Khalifa and Dr. Linda Tillman) my portion of a chapter for the upcoming Handbook of Urban Education to be published by Routledge.We were asked to write on a “direction for future work (and needs) in the field of urban education.” My co-authors had already written the theoretical underpinning (post-colonial theory) and had specified the problem (persisting achievement gap in the midst of NCLB, high-stakes testing, and accountability). So what was the alternative to NCLB in its current conception!? I thought about the school reform course I took with David Tyack at Stanford a decade ago that focused on the community-based schooling in the 1960s. Then i considered that our datasets and their interconnectedness has advanced rapidly over the past two decades. In the vein of Dewey, I considered the measurement of a child’s success in conjunction with their heterogenous pursuits. In the political sphere, i pondered that Democrats often support community empowerment and Republicans espouse local control— which conflicts with the current conception of NCLB.I then considered….How can we blend these key ideas into a new form of accountability?My primary line of research is high-stakes testing and accountability… Yet I struggled all summer with re-thinking accountability. In fact, I put a stack of books on top of the manuscript… so that I didn’t have to see it…. then, I went to an accountability conference in Rome and I had a break through. I am came back from the meeting inspired. My portions of the manuscript that I had struggled to write for months came flowing out in three days… On October 17th I posted an excerpt from the Handbook of UrbanD.C. are you listening?: A New Local, Community-Based Approach for Accountability | Cloaking Inequity: