From the White House to the National Governors Association, a clarion call has risen, articulated recently by none other than Bill Gates, for a transformation of the American high school. Gates (2005) minced no words in describing the challenge: "American high schools are obsolete. . . . By obsolete I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and underfunded. . . . I mean that our high schools – even when they are working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today."

Some foundations, like Carnegie Corporation of New York and Gates's own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have, in collaboration with many reform partners and school systems, been seeding high school reform for some years. The investments have been huge. Prescriptions for new policies and practice abound and sometimes conflict. In the field, there is excitement – and some apprehension – about this long overdue attention to the nation's most reform-resistant category of schools.

The case for reform is compelling. High schools have indeed been slow to reform. They continue to fail badly with certain populations, especially low income, urban youth. They inadequately prepare significant numbers of young people for higher education and employment; for instance, approximately 40 percent of graduates reported key gaps in their preparation in a recent poll (Achieve and the National Governors Association 2005). And they are generally organized in ways that better serve the interests of early-twentieth-century America, rather than the world of today.

As the efforts to redesign high schools move forward, though, it is essential that the policies being put in place at the district, state, and federal levels fit with and support the new educational designs of schools and school systems. Accountability policies are critical. As anyone who has watched school reform since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) knows, accountability can be a powerful tool – for good or for ill. An accountability system for high schools that supports improvement can accelerate change; an ill-conceived plan can stifle reform.

President Bush proposes to bring the accountability pressure of NCLB to bear on high schools. Secondary educators, now in the spotlight (or is it headlights?) express a new sense of possibility, coupled with uncertainty and apprehension, about the direction and substance of the reforms as well as the operation of new accountability systems. Scholars such as Michael Kirst of Stanford University have noted that the power of accountability systems to drive reform and school improvement may vary depending on level of schooling. Based on his analysis of reform in California, he finds gains in elementary schools, but no improvement in the high schools, even with an accountability system that operated similarly for all schools. This variability, coupled with the myriad problems associated with the implementation of NCLB's accountability provisions to date, suggest that a headlong rush to applying the same NCLB accountability approach to high schools would be unwise.

The complexity of high schools, the need for multiple and qualitative indicators of success, the variability of the high schools, and the sheer scale of these schools are all factors that call for a fundamentally different approach to accountability than has been applied at the elementary level. How can policymakers avoid the mistakes of the past and craft a more realistic, genuine, and helpful accountability mechanism for American high schools?

Basic Principles

Achieve Inc. and the National Governors Association (2005, p. 17), the organizations that sponsored the meeting at which Gates made his provocative remarks, advised that data produced by a new accountability mechanism ought to be "more focused on the success of each high school in preparing students for college, work and citizenship." What kind of a system would produce such data?

Here are a few basic principles that a new system might strive to attain, along with some potential indicators.

Genuine Accountability
The accountability system should present a rich portrait of school performance that presents meaningful, actionable data for school-improvement purposes. The focus of the system should be on the degree to which the school increases student learning of the knowledge and skills needed to be successful in the next stage of the student's life. Naturally, the system should employ instruments that are valid and reliable.

Pressure for Improvement
The accountability system should leverage pressure for school improvement. The system should have consequences for performance, especially intervention with support and assistance for those not making progress.

Useful, Diagnostic Data
The system should provide data that administrators and teachers can use to shape strategies for improving student learning and school performance. The data should drive increased productivity in education by pointing to the areas in which capacity and performance need to be increased.

Constructive Consequences
The consequences for persistent underperformance should be real and work to maximize benefit and opportunity for children. Consequences like the schoolchoice provisions of NCLB have been largely ineffective, for a variety of reasons. At the same time, the technical assistance functions that were expected to be offered to schools "in need of improvement" have frequently not materialized.

Multiple Measures of Performance

One of the most challenging aspects of designing the new system of high school accountability is determining appropriate measures of school performance. Issues of measurement are, of necessity, complex and somewhat technical. However, architects of this system must strive to make the data it produces understandable and readily available to educators and the general public. As Achieve and National Governors Association put it, the results ought to be both "user friendly and accessible."

Accountability for Educating All Students: Big Commitment, Unprecedented Goal

The proposed system is not only more costly but more labor-intensive and timeconsuming than current approaches. It certainly injects a substantial qualitative ingredient into the school-evaluation process. Devising such an accountability system would undoubtedly be challenging work. But if the ideals of such a system could be realized, then high school accountability could truly become an instrument for school improvement. Accountability "on the cheap," on the other hand, would only yield misleading information.

An accountability system such as that described here is not a silver bullet or an answer to all the woes afflicting high schools. Major issues like teacher quality and the poor preparation of entering students, to name just two, require urgent attention as well. Finally, this accountability system should complement – but not substitute for – human resource and professional development systems that must be designed and installed to build the expertise and effectiveness of educators to do what our society has never, until now, asked them to do: educate all students to a high standard of learning.