William J.Webster
Dallas Independent School District

This paper describes a three tier accountability system. District goals and desired outcomes are established through a districtwide planning process and operationalized through the District Improvement Plan. Each school’s role in helping the District to meet its goals is determined through an analysis of the District’s most effective schools. A great deal of emphasis is placed on providing information for decision-making at every level in the system. Accountability is operationalized in a criterion-referenced manner through an analysis of goal attainment through the District Improvement Plan and each school’s School Improvement Plan. School effectiveness indices are used to evaluate schools in a fair, value-added manner and to set meaningful objectives for the District and School Improvement Plans.

As the nation progresses through the decade of the nineties, there is increased pressure from many segments of society for better educational accountability. This desire for accountability is often accompanied by societal skepticism about educators and the quality of the job that they are perceived to be doing. Many State Education Agencies have initiated programs that have increased focus on educational outcomes (Council of Chief State School Officers, 1995: Duttweiler and Ramos, 1986; Southern Regional Education Board, 1990). At the national level there is serious talk of a national achievement test (America 2000, 1991). In Dallas, a group of citizens appointed by the Board of Education developed a comprehensive plan for the Improvement of Dallas Schools (Commission for Educational Excellence, 1991). This plan called for rapid conversion from a school system to a system of schools and highlighted accountability as the lynchpin for improvement.

Meanwhile, local schools are becoming more autonomous. Even if the pressure for accountability did not exist at the policy levels alluded to above, the need for accountability at the local level as schools move toward more autonomy and more control of thier resourses becomes crucial. Site-based management carries with it a heavy site-based responsibility for assuring that students receive an adequate education. Accountability is the cornerstone on which a system of site-managed schools is built. The school-level accountability system must provide adequate data for site-level and oversight decision-making as well as for accountability to the various clients of the school system

The accountability system that is being implemented in the Dallas Independent School District, and is the subject of this paper, is a three tier system. The first tier focuses at the school level. Under the District's plan to move from a school system to a system of schools, each school is held responsible and accountable for many aspects of its own operation. School Improvement Plans are the vehicles through which this is accomplished. The second tier of the system involves the District Improvement Plan. The District Improvement Plan sets the desired levels on District accountability objectives and specifies how Central Office Divisions support the schools. The third tier involves school effectiveness indices. These indices take into consideration important student background and school contextual variables and provide information on how effective schools are with the students that they serve. The School Improvement Plan and District Improvement Plan components of the system focus on the end products of schooling, while the indices add a value-added component to the system.

One of the major concerns related to most accountability systems should be that of fairness. Educators who are caught up in the accountability movement have a right to know that the standards by which they are judged are fair. The system outlined in this paper incorporates fairness as defined by the Program Evaluation Standards (Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1994) and the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 1985).

The District’s plan for school-centered education focuses control of most available resources as well as all instructional decisions at the school level (Edwards, 1993). The only decisions that school level committees are not empowered to make are those involving the nature and magnitude of outcomes for which they are being held accountable. An extremely important step in the school improvement process is that of determining the important performance indicators that will inform educators, parents, and community members whether or not students are making satisfactory progress in the key developmental pathways that are critical for academic learning. In Dallas, these performance indicators are determined by an Accountability Task Force and influenced by the State's Academic Excellence Indicator System. The accountability indicators are consistent across the three tiers of the accountability system.