Synopsis
In order to define a successful school, a description is provided of the education paradigm shift from process-based to outcomes-based to evidence-based education. School success and school principal accountability is explored in the context of evidence-based practice.
The changing work of school leaders
Globalisation and rapid technological advancements are having dramatic effects on the lives of students and teachers and how we define success in schools. We have evolved from an agrarian society to an industrial age, to a post-industrial age, to a knowledge age. There has been a transition from a century in which manufacturing and transportation were the key to successful economies to one in which knowledge and communications have become paramount, from societies based upon rail, trucks and planes, to one dependent upon the internet and mobile technology. From paper-based to electronic and digital based markets. We are now living in a society where the majority of jobs in Australia exist in the knowledge sector or service industry and there are also clear signs of a growing need for knowledge workers in a rapidly expanding Bioterial’s Age (Oliver 2000). The world has changed and knowledge itself is now the key commodity. As Duderstadt (2002) notes, a new system for creating wealth has evolved that depends upon the creation and application of knowledge in which the key strategic resource for economic prosperity has become knowledge itself.
As knowledge can only be created, absorbed, and applied by the educated mind, successive Australian governments have realised that schools are playing an increasingly important role in society. Traditionally the role of schools has been to reproduce society, yet all societies are dynamic, they are culturally and structurally fluid. It stands to reason therefore that a successful school is one that is not only adaptable to change, but also responsible for preparing future citizens for creating and leading change in a knowledge age (Daggett, 2005).
As a result, there has been a push by the governments for increased school retention rates, for greater attainment of national benchmarks, for national curricula, and most of all, there has been an overall push for improved achievement in national learning goals. Accordingly State and Territory education systems have come into line and this has resulted in schools being under great pressure to define school success in terms of evidence of learning and to hold school leader’s accountable for demonstrating through evidence, the achievement of improved educational outcomes.
To understand how success is now defined in school education, it is useful to explore the change in educational paradigms that have led to evidence-based learning and the emergence of performance-based accountability.
Diagram 1. Changes in school education.
The diagram above (Diagram 1) summarises the shift over the last 15 - 20 years in Australia, from process-based to evidence-based education. In summary, there was a period approximately 15 years ago, where the success of schools was determined by the quality of the teaching process and inputs such as teaching resources, policies, and structures. This paradigm was replaced by Outcomes-Based Education, where the thinking shifted to determining the success of a school by the focus on student outcomes, not on the process of teaching. The key was on student attainment and student-centred learning pedagogies replaced teacher-centred approaches. Most recently, there has been a shift from outcomes-based education to evidence-based education (recent in Australian terms, not other countries such as the USA) where the paradigm shift in thinking is to determine success of schools by the evidence of improvement. In this view, a focus on student attainment of outcomes is itself not sufficient, but school leadership is now accountable for overall improvement in educational goals (this may focus on improvement in overall student learning outcomes such as can be determined by national assessment schemes). Interestingly, this has in turn given rise to a shift from student-centred pedagogies such as constructivist approaches, back to more explicit and directive practices (Rowe 2006).
Each of these paradigms is scaffolded on the previous, so we find in successful schools today, that principals continue to have to ensure that the processes of teaching meet quality standards (checklists of school policies, teachers programs, curriculum maps, and so on), while focusing on individual student outcomes, but now principals also have to ensure that there is overall improvement and that evidence is collected that can be used to measure it.
Process-based education, best practices and quality systems
Towards the end of the 20th century, school leadership was impacted by pressure to conform to ‘best practices’. This paradigm of leadership came from business management fields such as, for example, Quality Management Systems (QM).
QM systems have been widely adopted in both manufacturing and service industries with the aim of improving quality in order to ‘meet customer requirements’. In the 80’s and 90’s the same approach was adopted in many educational contexts across Europe, the US and to some extent in Australia. By adopting the QM approach, it was hoped that the goal of ‘continuous improvement’ would help to ensure that standards continued to rise and the requirements of the ‘customers’ would always be met. The adoption of a QM approach has the aim of establishing a workable procedures and program of improvement which ultimately will be able to guarantee minimum quality standards in schools. In other words, it is a process=based model that basically argues that if you ensure quality process then the outputs will also be of consistent quality.
In this paradigm, it was important to identify the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders (which became the language of educational planning) and an appropriate balance was required between the need to guarantee professional standards and the need to take into account the differing organisational features of the schools and the contexts in which they work.
On this basis the aim of the school effectiveness movement and school improvement programs, became:
In some educational systems this gave rise to the accreditation of a school through assessments against a set of standards. Again, the focus was in the main not on the outcomes of learning, but on the processes of teaching, and the quality of the inputs (school structures). In effect, principals were responsible for ensuring the quality of the teaching process and the standard of resources, they were not held accountable for improved student performance.
Outcomes-based education
By the 90’s, concerns that education systems in Australia were not able to adequately prepare students for life and work in the new economy of the knowledge age, led educators and policy makers to change how schools determined the success of schools from an emphasis on processes, to a focus on outcomes.
The outcome-based education movement (as adopted in Australia) was principally associated with the work of William Spady (Spady 1988, 1993). It has been adopted by all States of Australia at different times over the last 20 years. The term ‘outcomes’, ‘standards’ and ‘benchmarks’ and ‘goals’ are frequently used interchangeably. Spady (1988) basically says that an ‘outcome’ is a culminating demonstration of learning, something a student can do or demonstrate in authentic context. The term 'outcome-based' implies that schools will design and organise everything they do around the final intended learning demonstration. Outcomes-based education assumes there are many ways to arrive at the same results: the important thing is that school students do, in fact, achieve them.
Outcomes-Based Education placed the learner and their learning needs at the 'hub' of curriculum planning and teaching methods used in classrooms- not the teacher or the teacher’s teaching. Pedagogy became focused on assisting students to achieve identified outcomes and utilising whatever strategies teachers believed best suited outcome attainment and Constructivist approaches became popular.
For school leaders, Outcomes-Based Education meant that there was a focus on:
Within this paradigm, the principal’s responsibility shifted from ensuring the effectiveness of teaching processes and quality of resources (‘best practices’), to ensuring that student’s are achieving outcomes. In effect, principals became responsible for ensuring that teachers focused on student outcome attainment and on providing the support needed to do so, but they were not held accountable for overall improved organisational performance. Put another way, the focus was on individual student outcomes, but not evidence of overall improvement over time.
Evidence-based practice and accountability
People – parents, school administrators or even governments – sometimes do not see the links between what teachers do on a day-by-day basis and how it enables improvement in overall standards of education. Ten years ago, this was not so important school leaders today, however, need to ensure that their day-by-day practice is evidence-based; a practice that is directed towards demonstrating the real tangible power of their contribution to the attainment of the school's desired outcomes (Rowe 2005, 2006).
Based on the belief that ‘You can't improve what you can't measure’, evidence-based practice focuses on the collection of data based on the priorities of the strategic plan. School leaders as decision-makers examine the outcomes of various measured processes and strategies and track the results to guide the teaching and learning process and provide feedback to teachers and parents, as well as various reporting bodies and agencies. The value of evidence lies in the ability to provide:
Evidence-based practice is the conscientious, explicit and appropriate use of current data or research evidence in making decisions about the role of teachers, and ensuring that their daily efforts put some focus on effectiveness in achieving outcomes. The evidence needs to be meaningful and systematic and meaningful within the context of the school and its community.
In terms of defining school success, what is important is that the students’ learning needs are identified, instructional strategies developed and consideration given to how this will be evaluated, with a view to understanding what differences the teacher’s program will make to student learning. It might be in the form of reference to data and statistics, to identifying student learning needs through application of standarised tests, through collecting narratives or stories, through documented case studies, or analyses of formative assessment items. It means that the school leader is required to collect and examine data, to look at student records and results over time, to look at scores and to look for patterns.
At the simplest level, it is what effective school leaders have always done, which is to examine the evidence of learning in order to ensure that every child in their class was able to improve their learning. At a more complex level, it is about school leaders today being asked to engage in Action Learning and Action Research in their schools to find evidence of ways of improving student outcomes.
A school leader engaged with evidence-based practice has to learn to manage:
Within this paradigm, a successful school is defined by performance, this is performance-based accountability. The school leader is held accountable to achieving improvements over time. These improvements are based on evidence of learning and evidence of other enhanced school goals (such as improved financial performance, improved wellbeing, improved attendance, improve professional learning, and so on).
The emergence of performance-based accountability in defining the success of a school has followed a pathway from schools under centralised control, to devolved self-managed schools where principals have been given greater autonomy, to greater accountability.
Figure 2: Shift to performance-based accountability
The move to performance-based accountability in Australia is a ‘natural’ progression from the move to self-managed schools, and reflects a growth of professionalism for school teachers (Mulford 2005). As Kwong (2003) notes in his national report Australia’s Teachers Australia’s Future, ‘A new form of teacher professionalism must also incorporate strong ethical standards, forms of public accountability, and conduct that is appropriate for a culturally diverse society’ (p.20).
Performance-based accountability
As noted above, over the first 10 years of the 21st century, scrutiny of public education has changed from the quantification of inputs to a focus on student learning outcomes and evidence based practices and performance-based accountability.
While the shift to accountability is just happening Australia – for instance; in the Northern Territory, Accountability Performance Improvement Framework (2008), in Victoria, School Accountability and Improvement Framework (2007), in South Australia, the South Australian Curriculum, Standards and Accountability (SACSA) Framework (2001) - it has been a part of the education landscape in the USA for the past 25 years (Fetler, 1994).
As noted by Elmore (2002) performance-based accountability was introduced in the USA in the mid-1980s by the National Governors Association (led by Bill Clinton). Since that time the accountability paradigm has grown until today in the US, ‘The federal government is mandating a single definition of adequate yearly progress, the amount by which schools must increase their test scores in order to avoid some sort of sanction’ (Elmore 2002, p.1.) Driven in part by the No Child Left Behind Act, the US Department of Education’s (2006) Strategic Plan for 2002-2007 calls for the transformation of education into ‘an evidence-based field’ resulting in all federal funding programs being tied to accountability practices tied directly to student performance data (Centre for Education Policy, 2004). Government pressures for evidence-based accountability can be seen in education systems in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia (Mulford 2005). As Mawhinney, Hass, Wood (2005) note, ‘Policy makers justify accountability systems as intended to serve the goal of increasing the capacity of students to productively transition into an increasingly competitive global economy’ (p.14).
In simple terms, where once school leaders were accountable for quality processes and inputs, now there has been a major shift, and school principals are now held accountable for achieving improved school outcomes. Accountability is defined as ‘taking responsibility to demonstrate and review performance and the results achieved, including the means used’. (DEET APIF 2008, p.4). These include managing accountability with regards to such concerns as (DEET APIF 2008): Teaching and Learning; Student Wellbeing and Engagement; Student Pathways & Transitions; Organisational Health & Learning; Community Engagement; and Financial Health.
Based on the work of Barker (2000), of the Association of Washington School Principals, in order for a performance-based system to be success, principals need:
Many observers (Mawhinney, Hass, Wood 2005, p.37) claim that the pressures of accountability create exactly the kind of shock that leads to reassessment by school leaders of the need to engage with their professional learning communities. Accountability has given rise to a greater need for school leaders to enable teachers to work in partnerships with other teachers and in communities of practice.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in this paper it has been argued that over the last 20 years in Australia there has been three paradigm shifts; from process-based education, to outcomes based education, to evidence-based practice. Along side these changes, has been a shift from centralised to devolved management, and the advent of great autonomy in school leadership, that has in turn led to greater accountability.
It has been argued that in our knowledge age, school leaders and teachers must do more than just trying to keep pace with rapid technology, research, and societal changes, if they are to ensure that students will be ready to thrive in today’s global society (Burkhardt 2003). In order to stay competitive in a knowledge-based economy successive Australian governments have emphasised the need for an overall improvement in levels of basic education such as numeracy and literacy - which is seen as necessary to enable lifelong learning (Lamb, S., et al. 2004). This has given rise to performance-based accountability.
The role of school principals is no longer to monitor the quality of the teaching process or to select ‘best practice’ models or packages to be taught in their school by teachers to students. Nor is success in schools defined by student centred approaches and the attainment of individual student outcomes. What does define successful schools is evidence of improved performance and school principals are now held accountable to achieving this success.
17 March 2008
Discuss presentationReferences
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Terry Quong is Principal of Millner Primary School, in Northern Territory, Australia.