Studey On Standards-Based School Educational Accountability

The school quality has been given more and more attention. To meet the needs of the development of the times, it's inexorable to introduce accountability to the field of education, and to strengthen the government accountability to school quality.There are multiple choices for the government to account school. Traditionally, Chinese accountability focus on accounting school facilities conditions, rules' observing and students scores. However, there's no perfect method. It's government's responsibility to ensure the school's facilities conditions, it's unreasonable to account school. Observing the rules leads to conformist, it'll make school ignore educational quality. As scores are the sign of school quality, the accounting to scores always leads to examination-oriented education.Because of lacking consistent quality standards, the traditional government educational accountability can't bring into effect, therefore, it's hard for the educational accountability to collect scientific data about the school quality, and hard to promote school development. The developed countries are widely implementing standards-based educational reform, meanwhile, China is carrying out new curriculum. Under this background, as the intended result of students studying, the curriculum standards represent the government's quality expectations. Moreover, the well-defined result makes it possible for government to account school quality.Establishing accountability on the base of the curriculum standards and carrying out standards-based educational accountability, these measures meet the demand of the new public management time to administrate school quality. Furthermore, it means a new kind of educational accountability emerges.Standards-based educational accountability neither means simple responsibility investigation, nor simple rewards and punishments. Standards-based educational accountability means to make the information play the roles of monitoring and improving by collecting the overall information of school, meanwhile it means to make school take the responsibility of the students'performing and promote the school quality by offering information to school, communicating to school and helping school resolve realistic problems.The specific connotation of standards-based educational accountability determines the content of the process model constructing. Any accountability construction must concern following five factors, principle-agent relations, empowerment, evaluation to the agent, analysis to the responsibility, and taking measures. And a good accounting system has such characteristics, including clear standards(or expectation), qualified evaluation in line with the standards, the supporting and participation of the related people, and designing rewards and punishments mechanism on the base of correspondences between right and responsibility. It shows that a process model construction consist of following factors, collecting data completely, writing and publishing accounting report, and taking some steps to help schools forward according to the report.To collect information completely, it's essential to make the information collection keep balance. The information not only involves result, but also input and process. Collecting information is not only by paper-based test, but also by performance-based assessment. The assessment information comes not only from schools'internal, but also from external.The accounting report will reflect assessment information completely, moreover, the design and presentation should be easy to read and understand for the readers.After that, the report should be analyzed according to the result, and a reasonable responsibility shares mechanism should be established, avoiding attributing all the responsibility to school. The assessment information should give a feedback to school to improve the school's self perfection. Government should help the low performing schools(some of them have applied for helping), and offer necessary professional support. If government has intervened the low-performing school actively, but the school failed to improve, government needs to take heavy-handed action, such as restructuring or take-over.As a frame of government accountability to school, the process model which is established by standards-based educational accountability to a certain degree is idealizing. If we want to make it well operable, more complete and detailed research on improving curriculum standards, training professional staff, and making accounting procedure will be needed.