Publicité
Accountability
Accountability is a simple word that means: “the willingness to stand up and be counted, be held responsible for a process or activity”. The challenge is to find a meaningful definition of accountability that can be applied to political, economic and social processes at the national and international level and to identify concrete mechanisms to strengthen accountability.
Canada recently created an act to hold the government responsible for its actions because one party in power(the Liberals) was considered to have abused its power.
Accountability has become one of the buzzwords of political discussions in recent years. Various countries and institutions have developed guidelines for organizational and individual behaviour.
● <B>Accountability in Education</B>
Accountability-the idea of holding schools, directors of education, principals, teachers and students responsible for results-has become the most recent watchword in education. In more and more countries, policymakers are moving to reward achievement and punish failure in schools, in an effort to ensure that children are getting a good education and that tax money is not being wasted.
The push for accountability has grown out of a common perception that various authorities(the PSSA in the case of private colleges in Mauritius) traditionally monitored the standard of a school by such criteria as the number of books in the school library, the size of classrooms and of football pitches, the number of computers, qualification of teachers, percentage pass at public exams etc, but paid too little attention to quality of teaching, to school ethos, to an atmosphere of learning and to performance. In UK the modern inspectorate (OFSTED) started very well by doing team inspection and taking a look at the entire school, in all its aspects, for a week at a time.
States are not only seeking to hold schools more accountable for results, increasingly they are also holding students accountable for individual performance.
Opponents of such practices are concerned about the validity and reliability of making high-stakes decisions that often are based on performance in single exams (Heubert and Hauser, 1998; Linn, 2000). Critics also argue that the focus on high-stakes testing will narrow and impoverish the curriculum, encourage cheating, and fall most heavily on poor and minority students, who traditionally have done least well in standardized exams. Opponents of such testing also complain that states have rushed to hold students accountable before the states have put in place the curricula, instruction, teacher training, and other resources that would enable young people to meet the higher standards.
Some states, such as Florida and New Mexico, are also attempting to hold teachers accountable by tying their evaluations and pay to students’ scores on state tests. But many educators and teachers’ unions contend that approach is unfair because too many factors contributing to student performance are outside teachers’ control.
For now, most policymakers say they are committed to the accountability agenda: setting higher standards for students, choosing “world class” benchmarks, measuring whether learning is effective and relevant and then providing incentives in the form of reward/punishment or in the form of praise/remedial help for schools administrators and staff, for students and for the community at large.
Surveys also show that the public and educators continue to largely support the general principles of accountability for standards and results.
● How far can accountability be extended?</B>
In the USA, the democracy par excellence, an organization was created after the Chicago and Boston Diocese scandals, to hold dioceses and their Bishops responsible for abuse by some of their clergy (see BishopAccountability.org site)
Beyond holding firms, hospitals, institutions, governments etc directly responsible for the wrong doings of their practitioners, can one move one step back and, for example, hold a medical school responsible for the medical blunders of its graduates or school of engineering responsible for the collapse of a bridge or building designed by one of its scholars?
Most certainly, ministers in all governments are ultimately held responsible for wrong doings, for incorrect decision taking, even though at the time the decision might have appeared sensible. For sure they are held accountable when decisions are taken against technical advice, against data realities and for reasons other than the common good; then the sanction is resignation/sacking or, failing this, sanction by the electorate at the next elections. How far does accountability go? Could citizens who were unable to obtain cement or iron bars for their constructions and those who lost their jobs as a result of mismanagement, successfully sue the CEO of the firms responsible or sue the relevant Minister concerned if they feel that it was his direct intervention that caused the trouble?
Conversely accountability implies giving credit for successes to those who took the decisions leading to positive results. Are parents accountable for the behaviour of their children later in life, after the age of 16, below which there are of course both moral and legal reasons for direct accountability. The law in Mauritius makes parents legally responsible for seeing that their children from 5 to 16 are attending school, but are they morally and legally responsible for what they do with that free schooling?
Are we to hold those chemists and industrialists who respectively synthesised and commercialised CFC’s (chlorofluorocarbons) for use in refrigeration, for the destruction of the ozone layer of Mother Earth? And what about those who synthesised thalidomide and marketed it without sufficient testing? Are we to hold those heads of agencies and governments who failed to put in place effective tsunami warning systems and raise a timely alarm, responsible for all the deaths by tsunami?
● <B>The example of Nobel </B>
Alfred Nobel born in1833 in Stockholm, discovered that a mix of nitro-glycerine and a fine porous powder called kieselguhr was a stable explosive. He named this mixture dynamite and set up factories around the world to manufacture this dynamite and other explosives. Construction and mining companies as well as the military ordered large quantities which brought Nobel great wealth. He felt strongly accountable for the use and misuse of his invention, so in return used his fortune to reward human ingenuity. First awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prize is still the most honoured in the world.
● <B>Who is responsible?</B>
In situations of chaos and confusion (like in Iraq today, in Rwanda in 1994, in Biafra/Nigeria in 1965, in Germany in 1938, in Russia under Stalin, to mention but a few instances) are we able to say who is accountable for these thousands, hundred of thousands or millions of deaths? When people die through suicide bombers, who is accountable? Who, beyond those immediately engaged in their fabrication and “delivery”? The financiers? The preachers and their flawed ideologies? Those in power as well as those well away from it all but whose evil influences permeate innocent minds?
And closer to us, will we ever know who to hold accountable for Steve Biko’s death? For Kaya’s demise?
To summarise, in the words of Josiah Stamp “It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities”
Dr. Michael ATCHIA</B> [email protected]</I>
Publicité
Publicité
Les plus récents
