5 Accountability Systems That Build Trust
- Jason Jansky
- 16 minutes ago
- 2 min read
For years, education leaders have been told that Accountability means standardized tests, state dashboards, and top-down consequences. That’s the deal. If you want legitimacy, you measure what matters to the system—even if it’s not what matters to your students or the communities to which they’ll be contributing.
But what if we flipped the script?
What if communities—parents, students, business leaders—defined what mattered, and moreover, and states legitimized it and helped them measure it?
A new paper from C!E and FairTest challenges the status quo, and highlights five places across the country where it’s already happening. The paper, titled “Recalibrating Accountability and Assessment: Successful Innovative Local Systems Supported by the State,” lays out a case for assessment systems transformation and goes deep into the places where local leadership and state partnership are combining to build assessment and accountability systems that are more authentic and equitable.
These aren’t pilots. They’re not ideas on a whiteboard. They’re real, working systems in. The paper highlights:
Chicago - where a new accountability system was co-designed with more than 20,000 stakeholders
Kentucky - where districts collaborated with communities to develop graduate profiles and locally meaningful performance tasks
Massachusetts - where a consortium of districts has built a shared, competency-based framework for both school quality and student learning
New Mexico - where student’s capstone projects are redefining how readiness is demonstrated
New York City - where schools use meaningful performance-based assessments instead of standardized exams
Across all five case studies, the pattern is the same: local communities lead, the state adopts a supportive role, and students benefit from systems that reflect real learning and community values.
In each example, these redesigned systems have one thing in common: they build trust. They reflect what matters to the community, and because of that support and reciprocal accountability, they’re built to last.
We don’t need to keep managing systems that no one trusts. Instead, together we can build the ones we need.