A Refresher: What is Community-Based Accountability?
How can we banish No Child Left Behind’s top-down and narrow paradigm? Local control has been a bedrock principle of public schooling in America since its inception. NCLB sent us in the opposite direction of this traditional notion. A return to a traditional locally based educational policy can be again realized via a multiple measures approach to accountability that is democratically decided on the community level.
Community-Based Accountability (CBA) involves a process where superintendents, school boards, school staff, parents, students and community stakeholders create a plan based on set short-term and long-term goals based on their local priorities.
- CBA strategic plan developed at the local level would serve as alternatives to NCLB’s intense focus on a top-down, one-size-fits-all policy. It would enable local communities to focus on the outcomes that really matter in addition to test scores (i.e. career readiness, college readiness, safety).
- This new form of accountability would allow for communities to drive a locally based approach that focuses on a set of measures of educational quality for their one-year, five-year, and ten-year goals.
- State and federal government role would be to calculate baselines, growth, and yearly ratings (Recognized, Low-Performing etc.) for a set of goals that communities selected in a democratic process.
Policymakers from Texas to California are either taking notice of CBA, and/or they are thinking on the same wavelength. The first positive sign in Texas was that the High Performance Coalition of 20 districts in Texas A Refresher: What is Community-Based Accountability? | Cloaking Inequity:
