Account n & v 1 a. a record or statement of money, goods, or services received or expended, with the balance. b. (in pl) the practice of accounting (is good at accounts).
v tr. (foll. by to be or compl.) consider; regard as (account him/her wise, account him to be guilty). account for 1. serve as or provide an explanation or reason for ( that accounts for their misbehavior). 2a give a reckoning of or answer for (money, etc., entrusted).
b. answer for (one's conduct). by all accounts in everyone's opinion. call to account require an explanation from (a person). give a good (or bad) account of oneself make a favorable (or unfavorable) impression. keep account of keep a record of. Accountable adj. Responsible; required to account for one's conduct (accountable for one's actions). Accountability /-bilitee/ n. Accountably adv. (Dorling Kindersley/Oxford University Press, Inc. Illustrated Dictionary 1998).

We are not seeing sufficient compliance or transparency to re-establish a belief in private or public institutional honesty...yet.. Columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times, in his September 2, 2002 Op-Ed piece "Secrecy Is Our Enemy", praises Judge Damon J. Keith, US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for his statements that "Democracies die behind closed doors" and "When government begins closing doors...it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation."

Yet New York City politicians and education bureaucrats have not been interested in reform of a terribly segregated education system, and too often have not acted upon information given to them concerning abuses of the system by school personnel, racial inequities in services and resource allocation, special education and Title I fraud. As the Reverend David Brawley and Raymond Domanico wrote in the New York City Daily News on June 30, 2002, " 12. That's the number of months the mayor has to wipe the grins off the faces of the local political hustlers who benefited from the failed educational programs of the past and are busy posing as educational reformers today." Edward Cardinal Egan has also expressed his outrage at the political stranglehold over the New York City education system by politicians and Unions. The New York Post (CARDINAL IN HOLY WAR OVER SCHOOLS By CARL CAMPANILE September 2, 2002) reports that Egan and the bishops have written a 10-page pastoral letter titled "Every Parent, Every Child," which says that "poor kids get short shrift because state lawmakers are bought off or kept in line by powerful teachers unions that support the status quo. They influence legislators not only through millions of dollars of direct contributions to political campaigns each year, but also through their own political activities designed to elect legislators who will support them and defeat those who will not." There is no accountability for misinforming parents about services and resources available to their children, just as there is no accountability for ignoring the complaints brought to the educrats by parents who are able to discover facts about what is really going on within school walls. The politico-educational complex can only continue if people who speak out with facts of illegal activity are silenced.

In New York City we are now seeing candidates for political office winning or losing primaries and elections based upon what they did or did not do to help children in public school. Parents now are joining together political accountability and educational reform. We know that there is something very wrong with public school education, and we want someone to be accountable for this failure. Finding accountable action and who is doing what to whom is a very difficult if not impossible task, as the New York City public school system is alarmingly secret and thrives on misinformation, non-competitive contracts, payoffs, threats and retaliation. Members of the politico-educational complex have been heard saying that "no one is responsible except, perhaps, the children themselves and their parents who have allowed their children to watch TV". Yet when parents try to be involved in their child's education, following Board of Education directives for parent involvement, we are not able to find anyone who listens to our suggestions, requests, or complaints, or who reads what we send, fax, and email. We parents have been told that our elected and appointed education officials "could not do anything," were "not in office long enough to make a difference," or "had no funding available". Indeed, we have forty million reasons for failure and not a single excuse.

Accountability can be defined in many ways, depending upon who is speaking or writing about it. School accountability defined by school Principals and Department of Education personnel includes the implementation of a program involving high stakes testing, lining up certified teachers to teach subjects they know how to teach, overseeing the immediate termination of those who are not doing "good" jobs, transferring the burden of proof from tests and testing to schools and school leaders, distributing available resources and providing transparent budgets to interested parties. This form of school accountability is based on numbers and includes monitoring the flow of Title I funds as well as other funds and grants; recording achievement; reporting data on how many students are in the school, how many students are in need of special services (therefore requiring paraprofessionals in the classroom), how many certified and uncertified teachers are on the payroll, how many students drop out on a yearly basis; and school-wide scores on standardized tests.
These numbers are important to Superintendents, Principals, and everyone working in the system because numbers bring in money and resources from Federal, State, and City agencies. Unfortunately these numbers are often not reported accurately to the BOE Division of Assessment and Accountability, (read the Moreland Commission report) and there are no mechanisms in place to correct errors. Then these numbers are picked up by the National Committee on Educational Statistics and the US Department of Education, and become part of the permanent record of school statistics for the City and State. Governor Pataki established the Moreland Commission with Executive Order 91 on January 23, 1999 and in a December 13, 1999 press release his office announced that his Moreland Act Commission's initial report revealed "systemic fraud in the taking of attendance in New York City public schools, highlighting once again the widespread lack of accountability in a city school system in immediate need of fundamental and sweeping reforms."
Another approach to accountability joins together numbers and systemic requirements with a personalized and more child-centered education process. Douglas B. Reeves, chairman and founder of the Center for Performance Assessment and the International Center for Educational Accountability, (www.makingstandardswork.com and www.edaccountability.com) includes 6 principles of effective school-based accountability systems which add system-wide responsiveness to the child, and not just to the numbers:
1. Congruence: alignment of objectives and strategies with accountability.
2. Specificity: investigation of specific strategies that work to bring about improved student performance; implementation of specific standards of achievement and behavior for the adults and children in the system.
3. Relevance: establishment of a direct relationship between the strategies schools employ and improvements in student learning.
4. Respect for Diversity: "All children can learn" does not mean "all children are the same"; a diversity of approaches, techniques, and teaching strategies are required in different schools, but all strategies must be reported, no matter what the result. Transparency is the price of freedom in choosing diverse strategies, since what works and what does not work must be analyzed.
5. Continuous Improvement: feedback to students, parents, teachers, leaders, and policymakers which is constant, timely, immediate and relevant, so that strategies which work can be built upon.
6. Focus on Achievement, not Norms: not asking "What are the numbers on the bell curve?" or "Who beat whom?" but "Do our students meet our standards?" and "What teaching and leadership strategies can we employ to have greater numbers of students achieving at high levels?"

Parents and children are the customers and consumers of the government-funded business we know as the Department of Education. Our tax dollars are spent on the employment of thousands, the purchasing of textbooks, supplies for classrooms, and materials for building construction. Therefore, the school leaders and the members of the politico-educational complex are accountable to us for the success, safety, and welfare of our children. Parents of children who attend New York City public schools want their children and their overall safety, achievement and well-being to be at the top of the list of criteria when determining accountability. We understand that numbers are important, but education is about people, young and very young people who are not products of assembly lines. The Freedom of Information Act gives the American public an opportunity to obtain information from the government and the Department of Education if the right questions are asked, but the New York City Board of Education has had no one accountable for non-compliance with oversight for the education accountability parents want.

Education Accountability includes: taking responsibility for children dumped into schools without services, supplies, and certified teachers and, in some cases, never placed onto the roster of the school; terminating guidance counselors, teachers, and other school personnel who know about but do not act to stop either drugging kids with behavioral problems, or sexually abusing children in the school building or nearby; acknowledging failure and quickly ending curricula or programs which do not work; stopping the harassment, abuse, intimidation and defamation of parents and school employees who want to expose wrong-doing; eliminating threats such as the undeserved "U" on performance reviews, and spontaneous suspensions for kids who need special services but who are not getting them; agreeing to establish a school-wide culture which empowers kids and teachers alike to work harder at every task, and simply working with integrity and choosing not to fail. We need and want to institutionalize honesty, transparency, and respect within the system, so that everyone understands that to act otherwise at any time will have serious consequences. We must be specific about what the consequences for each action will be, and make sure that "no one gets away". We must change the arbitration process for firing incompetent or abusive school personnel by replacing arbitrators hired by the Unions with impartial hearing officers hired because of their honesty and integrity, not political connections. Parents want a more individualized approach to education and accountability. We want our child's teacher to help our children learn the basics of reading, writing, and math, and we want a system which holds the teacher and school leader accountable to us for not making this happen if our child does not learn. We know that social promotions must end, because high school seniors who cannot read or write create shame for our society, personal low self-esteem, and a proclivity for unsuitable social behavior motivated by anger and frustration.
We want our schools to embrace an individualized plan for our children so that the minute they walk into the classroom the teacher knows who our child is, what our child can and cannot do, and how to help him or her create a challenging program tailored to what our child needs to know. We need to reject the factory "assembly line" characteristic upon which our education system is currently based, and replace "the product" - our children - with data on individual profiles and education histories. This data can empower teachers and students alike. The empowerment of our children will bring into the system more parents who will work alongside the teachers, Principals and Superintendents in assuring high achievement. Everyone benefits from this system-wide education accountability in which all stakeholders within it work together, as partners, all accountable to each other and for each other's actions.