Thompson: It's Not So Easy Balancing Accountability & Trust

According to Managing for Results at the New York City Department of Education, a part of the AIR retrospective on NYC reform written by Stacey Childress et al, NYC's leaders knew all along that accountability couldn't just be a punitive regime. There also had to be high levels of psychological safety for adults to learn -- a high level of trust. Schools with high accountability and "high organizational learning" outperformed schools with low accountability (as they defined it) and low organizational learning." But engineering high accountability and high trust together at the same time wasn't easy.  Childress found 172 schools that were "high/high," meaning they had both a culture of accountability and earned their autonomy, while 180 were "low/low," meaning that something backfired.  Read the full report and see summaries of several others here.  JT(@drjohnthompson) Image. via.