Information for Accountability

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an exponential growth in the availability and use of information in the education sector. At the global level, data such as those compiled by the United Nations Educational, Scientifi c, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics (UIS) are covering a greater number of countries with regular updates; coverage of 283 indicators com-piled by the UIS increased from 45 percent in 1990 to over 64 percent in 2009 (Porta Pallais and Klein 2010). Countries are increasingly carrying out national learning assessments, and more countries are participating in regionally and internationally benchmarked learning assessments. The number of low-and middle-income countries participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) increased from 15 to 38 between 1995 and 2011, and the number participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) increased from 18 to 37 between 2000 and 2009. At the same time, Education Management Information Systems (EMISs) are becoming commonplace and are being used for planning and for programmatic purposes in many countries. All of these data have the potential to be turned into information— information that can be used to leverage change for improved service delivery and better learning outcomes. A direct way that information can be used is as an input into management decisions, both at a national level and at the level of a particular school. An alternative approach—using information for accountability—aims to change the relationships of accountability among the various actors in the education system to change behaviors and thus improve outcomes. 300||Making Schools Work While some approaches focus on generating national-level data to spur debate and motivate change (as described in box 2.1), this chapter focuses on approaches that have attempted to use information for accountability at the school level. These approaches include reforms or interventions that generate information on roles and responsibilities, school inputs, outputs, or outcomes and disseminate that information to local-level stakeholders. In the cases to date, there have been vari-ants along a number of dimensions: the content, the level of aggrega-tion, the data collection and compilation, and the way the information is disseminated. The interventions, however, also have common ele-ments: they involve collecting representative data, compiling and ana-lyzing those data, and disseminating them. The information disseminated varies from simply reporting test scores to more comprehensive reporting of students' socioeconomic characteris-tics; other measures of performance; students' and parents' satisfaction with the school; school fi nancing; audit fi ndings; and the school's record of inputs, or expenditures. This information may be combined in different ways to produce a school report card, a ranking of schools within a geo-graphic area, a regional or national report card, or simply an article in the newspaper. Some approaches have focused on simple, easy-to-understand measures, while others have tried to adjust for socioeconomic or other factors. Once compiled, information can be disseminated directly through meet-ings with parents and parent and teacher associations; through notes and reports sent to parents' homes or, more broadly, through public events with the relevant government offi cials; and through public media (radio stations and newspapers, for example). To date, the specifi c purpose and audience for information campaigns have varied—with the concomitant variation in content, style, and chan-nels of dissemination. The main stated goals typically have been to stimu-late parental involvement and citizen demand for school performance and to motivate education reform at multiple levels—school, community, region, and country (Winkler and Sevilla 2004). An important defi ning feature of information-for-accountability inter-ventions is that they focus on the use of information, in and of itself, as the instrument of change. This focus stands in contrast to approaches that use information as an input into a system of offi cial rewards and sanctions in an incentive-based scheme. These incentives systems are dis-cussed at more length in chapter 4, " Making Teachers Accountable. " This chapter focuses instead on approaches that leverage information to affect the behavior of households, teachers, and school and local government offi cials directly.