Analysis On The US Educational Accountability System

Western countries, especially US, apply the "accountability system" into almost every field in their society, including Government office, company and Education units. In the field of education, educational accountability has always been the hottest topic among US scholars, government officials and legislators. Recently, China has also enacted a policy of teacher's performance related pay, which means China government also pays great attention on the problem of educational performance. My research focus on the relatively mature topic "Educational Accountability System" in western countries, hope it could bring some new ideas to China's educational policy.The core idea of educational accountability system is let everyone who related to the educational activities take their accountability. Thus, my research begin by ask the question what is accountability. As an introduction, I compare its concept with many confusing expression which we use more frequently in daily life, and I retrospect the development of the idea of educational accountability in history to understand it meaning in a better way.In the Chapter Two and Three, my research focuses on the two level of educational accountability system. The first level is its function mechanism, though the explanation, comparison and analysis, we find out the differences in bureaucratic accountability, professional accountability, market accountability and combined accountability.Although on the first level, every kind of accountability functions differently, but whatever the model they use, they use the same decision making tool on the second level, that is the Data Driving Decision Making. Most data the government and schools use are from the tests, since they are standard and scientific. In this research, I introduce the some channels of data and discuss some drawbacks of relying too much on data. What's more, a new tools was introduced:the Value-added mode.Finally, I summon all points of previous research in this paper and use them to make some advices to China's education.