To Fully Realize Horizon Three, We Need New Accountability Systems

Key Points

  • Current accountability models, focused on compliance and standardized testing, must be replaced with systems that encourage innovation and local community participation, aligning with learners’ needs and strengths.

  • Reciprocal accountability ensures all stakeholders, including students, educators, and governments, share responsibility for educational outcomes, promoting continuous improvement and equitable resource distribution.

America’s education system was a groundbreaking effort to help a growing nation thrive in the 19th century. Now, 200 years later, the world has changed; the horizon looks drastically different. Collectively, we need to redesign our education system to enable all of our children — and, by extension, our nation — to thrive today and tomorrow. “Horizon Three” or “H3” names the future-ready system we need, one that is grounded in equity serving learners’ individual strengths and needs as well as the common good. This series provides a glimpse of where H3 is already being designed and built. It also includes provocations about how we might fundamentally reimagine learning for the future ahead. You can learn more about the horizons framing here.

By: Laurie Gagnon and Virgel Hammonds

Our current accountability systems are driven by compliance, fear, and shame. They measure narrow outcomes that do not fully capture what learners need to thrive. Then, they rank and sort students and schools to penalize systems that perform the lowest. 

The current accountability models are entrenched in the factory approach to education: more interested in assessing students on a single path based on age, rather than interest, ability, or growth. With an over-reliance on standardized tests, accountability systems fly in the face of the science of learning. And, this top-down model misses the vital input of community and local control by placing all power in the hands of the federal and state governments. 

Actualizing Horizon Three requires turning this frame on its head. In Horizon Three, accountability systems encourage innovative teaching, learning, and assessment to build true learning communities—not disconnected school systems. Such systems are rooted in the local context, driven by educators, families, learners, and the broader community, and focused on continuous improvement. 

Reciprocal accountability – the practice of mutual responsibility within a system – provides a framework for achieving this goal. It’s based on the idea that everyone involved in a given relationship must take responsibility for their roles and actions. Consider, for example, how this might play out in a pediatric healthcare setting. Direct providers–nurses and doctors– are responsible for administering routine childhood vaccinations in the correct dosage and time frame. To support direct providers, state and local health agencies are responsible for buying and delivering the correct dosage of the vaccines to doctors’ offices and healthcare clinics. At the federal level, the CDC is responsible for buying and distributing these vaccines to state and local agencies. Taking a step back even further, manufacturers and scientists are responsible for developing and testing effective vaccines. 

Each person and system involved in the process has a responsibility to carry out their work at the highest level of care and professionalism. Similarly, schools and systems should be responsible for a meaningful set of inputs and outcomes for learning, while states and federal agencies should be accountable for providing the resources they need to achieve those goals. 

Photo Credit: Aurora Institute, Photography by Molly Haley

Reciprocal Accountability

In Horizon Three, reciprocal accountability is everywhere; all parties – students, teachers, principals, central office administrators, parents, and community members – are all accountable to each other for outcomes and goals, as well as their individual actions. In Bridging the Gap Between Standards and Achievement, the late Harvard Professor Richard Elmore explains: “Accountability must be a reciprocal process. For every increment of performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I have a reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in performance.”

As discussed in previous posts in this series, local communities across the country and at least nineteen states are engaging communities – students, families, educators, community organizations, employers, and more – to develop their vision for education. The resulting “Portrait of a Graduate” ideally identifies competencies that can be assessed through authentic demonstrations of learning, both inside and outside the classroom, shifting the focus from seat time to mastery. 

These state and local graduate profiles can provide the foundation for reciprocal accountability performance frameworks. Measures could include familiar outcome indicators with an expanded menu of options such as performance assessments, portfolios, and capstones. Additionally, measures of opportunities for learning could include inputs such as career explorations and paid internships, support services for mental health and social-emotional learning, and outcomes such as student belonging. Locally derived performance frameworks will move accountability systems beyond single snapshot test scores and towards a more meaningful capture of student learning and well-rounded youth. 

Image Credit: Aurora Institute

Reciprocal accountability, anchored by comprehensive performance frameworks, holds every player in the learning community accountable for both achieving those goals and providing the resources, capacity, and conditions to make it possible. Schools will be accountable for a clear set of input and outcome goals driven by the graduate profile, while state and federal governments will be accountable for providing the resources and policy conditions to ensure success. This approach can drive continuous improvement cycles that will ultimately transform student learning inside and outside of the classroom. In Horizon Three, the school district will no longer be the institutional keeper of education; instead, education will be the responsibility of a larger dynamic learning community.

And get this: we can see glimmers of a Horizon Three reciprocal accountability system in several places already.

Pillsbury United Communities in Minnesota

Pillsbury United Communities (PUC)’s Office of Public Charter Schools (PUC-OPCS) is the authorizer for 18 charter schools serving more than 9,200 students in the Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota. With an asset-based and racial-equity lens, PUC set out to design a PUC-OPCS performance framework to create a better education and accountability system that is relevant to students’ culture, life goals, strengths, and needs. Guided by the belief that better schools lead to stronger communities, PUC aimed to design an accountability framework that transforms education for all students and strengthens the relationships between schools and the communities they serve. 

PUC-OPCS convened and gathered input from over 110 stakeholders using a combination of focus groups and surveys. PUC’s analysis of that input resulted in the High School Equity Framework. The Equity Framework provides a comprehensive picture of school quality and impact which includes a more diverse set of whole-child-centered school performance measures than those found in traditional accountability systems, including: 

  • Student enrollment by demographics, location, and participation in programs
  • Basic-needs support provided to students, family members, and community members
  • Social, emotional, and mental health supports
  • Implementation of flexible, personalized, and innovative instruction
  • Access to, perceptions of, and outcomes related to culturally and real-life-relevant curriculum
  • Access to and participation in extracurricular activities, career exploration, and identity development activities
  • Indicators of school culture 
  • Family and community engagement practices
  • Teacher and staff collaboration, training, turnover, and other indicators of satisfaction

The Equity Framework guides practitioners to use evidence across various sources, including surveys, student information systems, state-level databases, annual school narrative reports, and stakeholder stories.

PUC piloted the Equity Framework with eight high schools in the 2022-23 school year. These eight high schools serve an estimated 3,700 high school students, approximately 91% of whom identify as Black, Brown, or Indigenous (MN state definition), 25% of whom are English Learners, and ~80% of whom are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (based on 2022/2023 available data). In May 2023, the Minnesota legislature passed HF 2497, Line 110.25, Sec. 62, which formally recognized the PUC Equity Framework to “evaluate school performance in improving educational outcomes for students.” 

Kentucky

In Kentucky, the multi-year, grassroots effort, called United We Learn, seeks to “launch an accountability system that is meaningful and useful to all our learners.” The initiative is guided by four design elements: co-creation, inclusivity, empathy and reciprocity. The state has already developed a Portrait of a Learner (PoL), which captures what every learner should know and be able to do when they graduate. To design the new components of this accountability system, the state engaged educators, families, students, community members, and business leaders in surveys and focus groups. From those efforts, they found:

  • Educators and school/administrative staff prefer to focus on “access” rather than “quality” of learning experiences.  
  • The majority of community members and education staff would like to see the state move towards an “accreditation”-like model of accountability.
  • The majority of community members and education staff support a local accountability system that considers a broader set of indicators such as access to opportunities, and engagement.

These findings, and more, will be used to develop a set of policy recommendations for a future accountability system.

Building on the United We Learn vision, education stakeholders in Kentucky are working to enrich student experiences to ensure all children have access to equitable and engaging learning opportunities. Local districts are making significant strides in co-creating local accountability models alongside their communities, aligning closely with Kentucky’s United We Learn vision. David Cook writes that the collaboration between local districts and coalitions, the Kentucky Board of Education, and the Kentucky Department of Education “have led to a longer-term and more rooted vision and goals than any previous large-scale initiative.”

New Mexico

New Mexico revised its high school graduation requirements in 2024, requiring all charter and traditional schools to develop local graduate profiles. As part of this work, districts will design local assessment systems that allow capstone projects as a culminating assessment instead of standardized tests – the sort of performance-based assessments that could be prevalent in a Horizon Three. Such assessments consider more holistic knowledge, skills, and attributes that are named in a school or district’s graduate profile. Capstones allow students to exhibit real-world learning and engage in community. For example, with the prevalence of agriculture in the state, students may choose to focus a capstone on farming, and demonstrate particular skills and practices that are aligned with their graduate profile. 

The changes in the graduation requirements resulted from years of community-grounded efforts to better prepare New Mexico’s students for their futures. The 2018 decision in the lawsuit Yazzie and Martinez v. State of New Mexico, which required increasing education funding, provided a key catalyst for change. Some of the new funding went towards New Mexico’s Innovation Zones which specifically offer flexibility to blend funding sources and align existing initiatives for culturally responsive, student-centered, rigorous, and relevant learning inside and outside the school walls. Innovation zones have enabled communities to define a graduate profile, integrate work-based and experiential learning, and introduce capstone courses. By avoiding top-down mandates and allowing communities to hold and steward changes, innovations have a chance of being durable and sustainable even in the face of leadership or electoral transitions.

Building a Horizon for Reciprocal Accountability

Horizon Three offers a vision of accountability that is rooted in community, driven by shared purpose, and focused on human flourishing. It’s about preparing young people to thrive as individuals, in their careers, and as active contributors to their communities and democracy. Reciprocal accountability systems ensure that education systems receive the resources and conditions they need to achieve those goals.

Building reciprocal accountability systems will require a reprieve from traditional systems. States can play a pivotal role in this work by granting waivers, supporting local pilots, and ensuring equity and continuous improvement remain central. An R&D agenda, developed with researchers and communities, can help validate new approaches, identify disparities, and refine practices for greater impact.

As communities drive the purpose of their education systems and see new ways to meet the needs of their learners, families, and broader community, we will expand our mental models of “school” and push into new territory for how we measure success. From durable skills to access to new learning opportunities to student belonging, from learner joy to learner life-outcomes five and ten years out to community engagement and resilience, the possibilities for new accountability measures are for communities to discover. Reciprocal accountability both provides the infrastructure to transform systems and structures towards equity and creates a new space to catalyze Horizon Three designs in teaching and learning.

Laurie Gagnon is the CompetencyWorks Program Director for the Aurora Institute.
Virgel Hammonds is the Chief Executive Officer for the Aurora Institute.  

This blog series is sponsored by LearnerStudio, a non-profit organization accelerating progress towards a future of learning where young people are inspired and prepared to thrive in the Age of AI – as individuals, in careers, in their communities and our democracy. 

Curation of this series is led by Sujata Bhatt, founder of Incubate Learning, which is focused on reconnecting humans to their love of learning and creating. 

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Getting Smart loves its varied and ranging staff of guest contributors. From edleaders, educators and students to business leaders, tech experts and researchers we are committed to finding diverse voices that highlight the cutting edge of learning.

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