Accountability, Responsibility, and Enron

Sherman Dorn notes the upcoming release of Collataral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, a collection of anecdotes about educators making morally dubious choices when faced with the pressures of test-based educational accountability. Dorn says:

The plural of anecdotes is not representative data, but there are enough concerns over the past 5 years that we can say those who ignore test preparation and other side-effects of high-stakes testing are ignoring reality

... unless any of those happened to say that the fraud at WorldCom and Enron wasn't a reason to be concerned about corporate misdeeds. Then at least they can say they were consistent.

The Enron analogy comes up a lot in these conversations. It's worth examining, because it says a lot about the way people think about educators and public schools.

The people who ran Enron worked in an environment of high-stakes accountability. In their case, accountability was based on their financial performance, as reported in mandatory filings to a federal government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the numbers were good, their stock price went up, the company grew, and they all got rich. If the numbers were bad, the stock price went down, the company was damaged, and they could lose their jobs.

Unfortunately for the employees and shareholders of Enron, the people running the place made a series of spectacularly bad business decisions (Kurt Eichenwald's book, Conspiracy of Fools, has all the sordid details and is well worth reading). Even more unfortunately, they chose not to own up their incompetence. Instead, they tried to cover up their misdeeds with accounting shenanigans. They got caught, the company was destroyed, and a bunch of them went to jail.

In response, numerous pundits blamed the federal government for creating the financial accountability system, arguing that the otherwise-honest businessmen at Enron had been corrupted by the high-stakes pressure of filing quarterly SEC reports about their performance....

Oops, forgot we weren't talking about education.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. People called for more accountabilty, not less. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act over the objections of big business. And even as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, et. al., were excoriated far and wide as liars and thieves, they were at least given the respect implict in being held responsible their moral choices.