To make this happen, educators, civic leaders, and parents must engage in ongoing dialogue and ongoing review of how well parents and other community members understand these issues. There must be accessible, understandable, and widely disseminated information about effective implementation of standards, the opportunities provided for students to achieve them, and how to make productive use of assessment results. This level of communication is crucial to maintaining public support for standards-based reform. The Learning First Alliance calls for a concerted effort by states, districts, and schools to explain clearly and disseminate widely the content, purposes, and consequences associated with standards and accountability, conveying fully their implications for all students. Balanced and comprehensive accountability systems.
Accountability is essential to improving education for all children.
Educators are accountable to the public, who entrust their children and taxpayer dollars to them. The public and elected officials are accountable for providing the long-term support and resources necessary to make higher levels of learning attainable for all students. And students are accountable for their own learning progress. The current concern about accountability focuses largely on high-stakes testing. Student accountability and school accountability must go together.