Snapshots

It turns out there are around 30 things that matter to parents and students when it comes to a public-school education.[1] None of them are a surprise to anyone: keep students safe, make sure each child has friends and feels connected to others, deal with uncertainty, focus on the creative, etc.

Coming in at around the 20^th position are basic academics, not because basic academics are unimportant, but because at least 20 other things are considered just as important.

The business world agrees.[2] Their studies put dealing with uncertainty in the 1^st spot, and basic academics at around the 30^th (of around 40 things) again, not because basic academics are unimportant, but because so many other things are just as important.

That leaves school accountability in its current form in a precarious spot because left to its own devices it will be incapable of engendering trust in a school. If trust is to be had then the school must account for all the things that matter to the people for whom they matter. Failure to do that is a recipe for distrust.

The current school accountability environment is not by design an accountability environment capable of creating trust in schools. It only accounts for (at best) a few of the things that matter.

The things that matter we call benefits. Benefits represent the reasons stakeholders entrust the education of their children to a school. Benefits are what they expect and anticipate in return for that trust. For trust to exist educational leaders must account for their effectiveness regarding what matters, or in other words, those benefits.

It is critical educators learn to think differently than they have in the past about how to account for their efforts. When a benefit is discussed the concern most educators have is how to measure it. This is a colossal mistake. To paraphrase Einstein, “most of what matters can't be measured, and a great deal that can be measured doesn't matter.” Nowhere is that truer than when it comes to benefitting our young people.

Benefits-Based Accountings are new to most educators. Learning to account for things using evidence and interpretations requires some getting used to. But it is also something that every person that has engaged with another profession has experienced, so it is easily learned.

You can imagine a basic form of Benefits-Based Accountability if you envision a list of ~30 benefits down the left column of a sheet of paper and information to the right about a school's efforts regarding each. You could signal whether the school is actively engaged in a programmatic change relative to that benefit, whether it is stable in terms of its efforts, or whether it is considering a change once the bandwidth is available.

As simple as that sounds it would create understanding of the school's priorities today and of the school's priorities going forward in language that makes sense to all stakeholders. Understanding is the true definition of transparency, not the data dumps that are commonplace and contribute little if anything to accurate understandings.

What you can say to others

1. Benefits are what stakeholders expect.
2. Evidence is critical.
3.  Trust is everything.

Summary

Benefits-based approaches allow school leaders to account for what matters, which is the only way to develop trust in what those schools and their leaders do. 

[1] You can see the current list curated by John Tanner at www.durablelabs.net.

[2] Dondi, M., Klier, J., Panier, F., & Schubert, J. (2021, June 25) “Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work,” McKinsey and Company. Downloaded from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work#/.