INTRODUCTION

Educational accountability is nothing new. As far back as ancient Greece, there is
evidence of concern with establishing lines of responsibility or accountability for children’s learning:
“Fathers themselves, ought every few days to test their children and not rest their hopes on the
disposition of a hired teacher: for even those persons will devote more attention to the children if
they know they must from time to time render an account” (Plutarch, quoted in Wynne, 1972, p.
30). In Victorian England, the British Parliament established a plan through which teachers were
paid on a "Payment by Results" basis according to their students' achievement. Yet, as Frymier
attests above, educators fail to agree on what it means to be accountable and countless attempts
at educational accountability1have been equally unsystematic, hit or miss and or misguided.
Over the last century, trends toward accountability in education are based mostly on
models better suited to describe and regulate the functioning of machines or other inanimate
systems than that of vigorous teaching and learning practices. Our system of education (and just
about every other sector of society) has been influenced strongly by Isaac Newton's2 body of
beliefs about how the world works and is organized. "Newtonianism", now identified as "classical
science", holds that: 1) all “systems” (including people and human systems) are orderly, regular,
uniform, and can be understood and regulated or controlled if we reduce their complexity
(“reductionism”) by isolating and sub-dividing their basic components into ever smaller parts; 2)
systems function in a linear, step-by-step manner. Their actions and reactions are proportional
such that small exertions are used for small problems and large ones for large problems. Each
cause has one effect and each effect results from one cause (“mechanics” or “mechanical”); and,
3) systems seek stability and equilibrium, and so theoretically should be as predictable as
clockwork (“determinism”). For these reasons, we refer to educational paradigms that adhere to
Newtonian ideas as “mechanistic”.
In contrast to Newton’s clockwork perspective, teaching and learning call for the
coordination of large, diverse groups of people in situations in which lines of authority aren't always
clear, individual roles are stretched by multiple responsibilities, and ordinary actions produce
seemingly unpredictable consequences. Because these kinds of processes are representative and
characteristic of the behavior of living organisms, we refer to them as “organic” or natural.
A new scientific paradigm, non-linear dynamical systems theory (or non-linear dynamics,
for short — also known popularly as chaos and complexity theory), presents a more organic
perspective of how the world works and is organized than that obtainable through classical
science. Because non-linear dynamics focuses on such every-day issues as diversity, unpredictability, instability, disequilibrium, and qualities that emerge out of the interaction among
things (“the whole being greater than the sum of its parts”), it constitutes an intuitively
understandable picture of how order, change, and transformations take place. This new paradigm
offers some vigorous and compelling insights that can help galvanize the nature of educational
accountability through a better understanding of such concepts as: communication; interaction;
collaboration; reconciliation; how people and things self-organize; appreciating and drawing on
peoples’ resistance to change; and distributed control via relational rather than bureaucratic
models. As a theoretical perspective, non-linear dynamics does vastly more justice to educational
processes than does the classical predisposition to reduce all systems and their activities and
interactions to the sum of their parts. Thus, we propose its application as a more organic
conceptual framework conducive to creating effective, efficient processes of educational
accountability. (for rest of paper, see link in abstract)