Accountability and Culture of School Teachers and Principals

An Eight-country Comparative Study

Zehava Rosenblatt, Theo Wubbels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351024082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Accountability and Culture of School Teachers and Principals studies the degree to which teachers and principals in eight countries view themselves as taking responsibility, working by clear standards, reporting transparently, and accepting feedback at work.

The book focuses on cultural values that explain variation in accountability levels of school educators, drawing on data from Canada, China, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It addresses the question of whether cultural values, specifically collectivism and individualism, are related to teachers' and principals' external and internal accountability dispositions. It also explores the intriguing role of organizational support and key school personnel in school reforms across the world, providing a new way to understand school accountability.

The book will be of great interest for academics, post-graduate students, and scholars in the field of education policy and international and comparative studies in education.

1 Introduction

The quest for accountability is almost as old as work itself. In Hall et al.’s (2017, p. 204) words, “accountability is a fundamental element of all societies and the organizations that operate within them.” Accountability represents and defines basic social and economic relationships between participants to the point of representing social order. These relationships normally consist of one party taking responsibility for its own actions while the other party evaluates these actions and provides feedback. This basic accountability scheme is one of the foundations of human interaction, in particular in working scenes, and is the essence of the study offered in the present book.

This book is about the perceived facet of accountability in educational institutions, specifically schools. In educational institutions (as in many other organizations), accountability appears in two forms: the first is the system level, namely accountability that is attributed to organizations (schools) and is based on organizational structure and policy regulation, and the second form is the personal level, which is attributed to the individual (teacher, principal) and is based on individual characteristics. The focus of the current book is the second form, referred to by Hall et al. (2017) as “felt accountability.” Felt accountability, according to these authors, is a state of mind, a subjective interpretation of a structured accountability context. We do not use the word ‘felt’ because personal-level accountability includes, as we see it, not only feelings but also cognitive perceptions. We refer to this concept as ‘accountability disposition.’

As a subjective dispositional concept, accountability is likely to be influenced by myriad social forces that surround the individual. The present book focuses on cultural values as social forces that may explain differences in teachers’ and principals’ accountability dispositions in various contexts. In order to tap cultural effects, a multi-national study, consisting of eight countries from four continents, was launched in 2011, and its results are the basis for our book.

Two concerns drove the conception of this book. One was a steadily growing preoccupation among educational practitioners in recent decades with educational accountability as an answer to plummeting students’ academic achievements. The second was a lacuna in current academic and practical literature (mainly originating from the U.S.) on conceptualization of the subjective accountability aspect in education. This lacuna apparently led to an emerging need for rigorous global research on accountability antecedents on the individual level. The coming together of these concerns produced the present book on accountability and culture in education.

Preoccupation with educational accountability as a panacea for educational ills

Widespread preoccupation with educational accountability has often been an issue among educators in many countries around the world (e.g., Easley & Tulowitzki, 2016; Müller & Hernández, 2010). One of the purest forms of system-wide accountability seems to be the U.S. policy titled No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that was conceived as a response to ongoing dissatisfaction with American students’ poor academic outcomes (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The NCLB policy reflected the idea that educators’ accountability for academic results would enhance students’ grades and other academic outcomes through mechanisms such as evidence-based practice, standardized testing, imposition of performance standards, and feedback expressed by rewards as well as sanctions. The NCLB Act represented a pure accountability flagship model. It meant that schools had to report to the government about their performance based on clear standards. Schools that met these standards enjoyed governmental resources, while those that did not meet them faced sanctions such as principal dismissal and school closure. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) that followed the NCLB was more moderate in its rewards and sanctions, but the original essential accountability tenets remained intact.

At the same time, other countries around the world have adopted the accountability concept and developed various ways to embrace it in national educational systems. Easley and Tulowitzki (2016) showed, in a series of case studies, how accountability policy influenced school leadership in various countries. Their descriptions of accountability policies in 12 countries showed the great diversity of ways educators confront and cope with accountability demands, as well as similarities among countries. Müller and Hernández (2010) also underscored social processes that explained the nature of accountability policy in different countries. In a number of these country accounts, authors pointed to accountability policy that was based on bureaucratic regulations as problematic.

Along this line, soon after NCLB began the initial enthusiasm with accountability, theory and practice turned into widespread disenchantment with the policy results. Although some studies pointed to academic improvement in certain schools, as promised (Rosenblatt & Shimoni, 2002), others raised considerable concerns about neo-liberal currents that carried the drive toward accountability into questionable practices and pedagogic values (Ambrosio, 2013). Detrimental implications about educators’ work, such as reduction in scope of teaching, social injustice, and intense pressure on principals and teachers started to emerge. Changing the formal American policy from NCLB to ESSA, indeed, reflected relaxation of rigid regulatory principles but did not dramatically change the inherent pressure on educators that accountability policies entailed.

The perturbing reports about educators’ reactions to system accountability undoubtedly attested to the detrimental role the formal accountability approach and related mechanisms played in educators’ work life and welfare. However, they also reflected the view that while educational decision makers were active participants, educational practitioners were left with a passive role in the accountability school operation. There are relatively few reports on accountability being rooted in the professional make-up of school educators. This is perhaps a reason why the substantial literature on system-level accountability generally ignored input of teachers’ and principals’ genuine accountability.

Naturally, teachers and principals are at the heart of the significant debate about and practice of accountability. Teachers are expected to be accountable for their students’ achievements. Accordingly, teachers’ work is closely monitored, and their performance is often rigorously recorded and evaluated. Erroneously and often paradoxically, these measures tend to affect teachers with work stress and resentment (Valli & Buese, 2007), reducing their autonomy, and furthering a tendency to teach only what is being evaluated (Ambrosio, 2013; Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Darling-Hammond, 2007; Knapp & Feldman, 2012; Lee & Wong, 2004; Seashore-Louis et al., 2005). Similarly, principals, as heads of their respective schools, are individually targeted when their school’s performance is challenged. They are held accountable for their school’s academic success and failure (Firestone & Shipps, 2005). Principal failure may result in personal consequences, such as probation and dismissal, as specified in the NCLB and ESSA.

Surprisingly, despite the proliferation of literature on school accountability in general, and the effect of accountability on educators’ work in particular, little attention has been paid to date to educators’ individual accountability, namely, their inclination to feel accountable for their work in connection with accountability policy and professional codes. The present book is an effort to fill this void. Because of the importance of understanding the factors leading to a disposition for accountability vis-à-vis the relatively little academic knowledge on individual-level accountability, we set out in this book to specifically explore the relationship of cultural values with educators’ accountability disposition.

Development of accountability theory

The theory of accountability as a subjective – perceived – concept is slowly growing. Early studies used labs or field experiments to investigate the effect of accountability on human behavior and cognition (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999; Tetlock, 1983). Studies generally found that the behavior of accountable employees was aimed at producing favorable outcomes among their audiences (Frink & Klimoski, 1998). It was also found that audience background, such as gender, affected employees’ accountability behavior (Brandts & Garofalo, 2012). In education, a field-experiment study on the effect of teacher accountability showed that accountable teachers (measured by report/feedback relations with their superintendent) were more favorably evaluated by their respective principals than non-accountable teachers (Rosenblatt & Shimoni, 2002). Results of these studies showed consistently that accountability behavior and consequences were contingent on individuals’ differences.

In the present study, we took these studies one step further to explore social antecedents of accountability. We leaned on Gelfand et al. (2004), who drew attention to the cultural perspective of accountability in organizations. These authors argued that accountability was expressed more strongly in individualist than collectivist societies. Similarly, Velayutham and Perera (2004) showed how the societal values of individualism and collectivism led to different levels of accountability based on emotional states (guilt and shame). Drawing from the vast body of knowledge on the effect of cultural values generally and individualism and collectivism specifically on organizational behavior (Gelfand et al., 2007), we set out to explore the relations of these two cultural values to accountability in education using a comparative cross-cultural approach.

This book is the result of a collaborative effort of researchers in the Consortium for Cross-Cultural Research in Education. They met each other through participating in international conferences and represent eight countries: Canada, China, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and Zimbabwe. Based on the theoretical background (Chapter 2), we outline our research methods (Chapter 3) and describe our cross-country findings (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, we discuss and interpret our results and then conclude with our thoughts and observations about the theoretical and practical implications of our study (Chapter 6).

2 Teachers’ and principals’ accountability

Theoretical background

The social and psychological theories on which the present study is based range across topics that seem to be basic to the understanding of perceived accountability in education. Our research model is focused on cultural values (collectivism and individualism) as major predictors of accountability. In addition, we have also investigated the added contribution of perceived organizational support. Surprisingly, unlike the rich bibliographical background on cultural values and organizational support, literature on accountability as a personal disposition is relatively scant. In this chapter, we start with conceptualizing perceived accountability in education, focusing on accountability dimensionality and selected accountability audiences and describing the way accountability was measured in the present study. Then we proceed to present the predictors advanced by this study – collectivism, individualism on both individual and country levels, and perceived organizational support.

Conceptualizing accountability

Accountability: definition and foundations

Applied to work behavior, accountability has been the focus of a relatively small but persistent body of research, including early studies that tried to capture the essence of this particular phenomenon. For example, Frink and Ferris (1998, p. 1260) viewed accountability as “a system of review of behavior by some constituency, with substantial rewards or punishments being contingent on the review.” Another early definition stated that accountability is the “implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, and actions to others” (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999, p. 255). A decade later, Hall et al. (2009, p. 381) defined accountability as “holding people answerable for their decisions and actions.” Soon after, Hall and Ferris (2011, p. 134) defined accountability as a “perceived expectation that one’s decisions or actions will be evaluated by a salient audience and that rewards or sanctions are believed to be contingent on this expected evaluation.”

These definitions focused on accountability as a concrete organizational phenomenon, characterized by the interaction of two parties that are often referred to as agent and audience. The agent is expected to report on his/her work conduct and to justify it, whereas the audience responds with a performance evaluation, direct feedback, and sometimes rewards or sanctions. These relations are based on clear formal and informal work standards that are shared an...