Process Indicators

Process indicators enable schools and teachers to scientifically make decisions for fit-for-all instructional strategies and high-quality professional development, to provide differentiated instruction, to increase organizational learning;, to calibrate their "what's going on" and to stimulate collaborative or collective learning.

Process data may be required to a new principal leadership that can not only lead teachers to generate and use data and build data-use culture for their instructional improvement and school accountability. However, result-based accountability revealed the limitation in that the heroic leadership may fail to draw on the teachers' active involvement and the mutual collaboration of practitioners with school leaders because of limited information flow and sharing, one-way communication, centralization of role and responsibility to one leader. Distributed leadership puts an emphasis on the fact that there are multiple leaders, multiple followers and situations and that leadership activities are "widely shared within and between organizations". Distributed leadership is able to facilitate teacher's motivation for sharing, co-performance and collective responsibility for school improvement and accountability. If principal leadership is stretched out to teachers, teachers may play a active role in shaping the culture of their schools, improving student learning, and influencing practices among their peers by becoming a resource provider, an instructional specialist, a curriculum specialist, a learning facilitator, a mentor, a school leader, a data coach, a catalyst for change and a learner.

Accountability policies are designed to promote the equality of educational results by taking care of poor and left-behind students. However, the input-and-output based accountability has resulted in the heated discussion of equality versus excellence. Proponents of educational equality, a teacher union and liberal interest group, worried that the policies would further polarize educational opportunity along class lines and family background and that it would have a pernicious labeling effect among schools. The advocates of educational excellence, government and conservative interest groups, tried to push through the school choice policy by increasing competition among schools and by promoting test score publication. These conflicts are due to lack of the deep consideration and discourse for jumping into the perspective and interest of each stakeholder.

Put another way, the conflicts come from a lack of the databased deliberation and collective inquiry process. In this case, it is not likely to facilitate "non-self-interested motivation" for increasing self-sacrifice and public good through "deliberation democracy" based on the deliberative communication, altruism and cooperation in a public sector. Ranson indicated that it is necessary that players of school accountability recognize a conflicting plurality and contestation and reach a mutual understanding about the meanings, purposes, perspective, and practices of school organization under open discussion and discourse processes. This reflective deliberation, fundamentally, results in the stimulation of a collective learning process and the formation of a professional community. In this vein, process data can be a key medium of connecting between proponents and opponents. It is not easy to reconcile the conflicting perspectives of both sides without considering what's-going-on data.

The process data can identify how poor students are learning higher order thinking and problem solving ability when comparing with affluent family's children, and how teachers have high expectation of learning to all and how class activities enhance their emotional and social development. Also the process data can check what factors have had a significant effect on stimulating critical thinking, conceptual learning and intrinsic interest in the subject matter, and desire to pursue future education. Furthermore, the process can pay attention to how and what make low-performing schools and poverty students have been improved their progress. In this respect, process data can promote Anderson's "advocacy leadership" emphasizing students' whole-being growth and all-round education by holding the following belief and practicality:

Process data is intrinsically required to internal accountability in that the data put an emphasis on collective inquiry and collaborative responsibility. Newmann, King and Ridgon found that school performance can be improved by internal accountability rather than external accountability in that it can facilitate self-producing organizational capacity by stimulating relevant utilization of professional knowledge and skills by sharing of objectives among stakeholders, and by establishing a cooperative system. Also, Abelmann and Elmore researched how schools conducted their own accountability mechanisms: 1) Putting emphasis on individual or professional accountability rather than administrative accountability; 2) Pointing to internal accountability through collective expectation and mutual control; and 3) Focusing on the strong leadership of principals and the internalization of accountability. In this respect, process indicator use must be conducted to facilitate organizational learning through which administrators and professionals can explore and share school problems and performance together in order to overcome the teacher individualism caused by a loosely-coupled organization and to flow relevant information into a separate room of teachers. Organizational learning makes administrators enter into the loosely-coupled school; on the contrary, it makes teachers open their closed window toward the external world and its changes. Therefore, as Darling-Hammond and Ball indicated, accountability practices must point to facilitate collective learning through open and deliberate dialogues and discussions between administrators and professionals to understand mutual perspectives and realties.

In the context of accountability, DDDM is a crucial driving force for school accountability and improvement. The successful implementation of DDDM within a school and between schools and local educational agencies are dependent on what indicators are stressed on. If DDDM is linked to input-and-output indicators, it is difficult to make sense of schools' processes and realities, draw on the best practices, figure out students' actual progress, and facilitate new culture creation and collective inquiry or organization. As a result, authentic pedagogy cannot be realized because it is combined with intensifying reflective professionalism and caring for the educational welfare for the poor and left-behind students. It undoubtedly comes from process indicators.