![]() State and federal offices, then, are trapped in an impossible bind, in which they are unable to relinquish control without abdicating authority. Yet, greater exertion of control only produced a new legitimacy challenge: the charge of ineffective-ness. ![]() By the 1980s, however, such loose coupling had become politically untenable and led to the standards and accountability movement. Due to limitations inherent to centralized governance, state and federal offices of education exercised little control over schools across much of the twentieth century, even as they acquired considerable authority. In this essay, Jack Schneider and Andrew Saultz offer a new perspective on state and federal power through their analysis of authority and control. We present our conceptualization (i.e., Multi‐level Contextual School Accountability Framework) of what a comprehensive and fair accountability system might look like, based on reviews of existing literature and our evaluation of an alternative school's effort to transform into a full‐servicecommunity school. In this study, we argue for a multilevel and contextual perspective on alternative school accountability system just as some scholars in the education and health sectors have argued for a multilevel social–ecological framework for understanding individuals in context (Bronfenbrenner, 1977 Golden & Earp, 2012 Lemieux‐Charles et al., 2003). Although proposals of alternative accountability indicators exist, these proposals rarely consider contextual indicators that are important for understanding the academic outcomes of students attending alternative schools. School performance indicators commonly used for school accountability purposes (e.g., student attendance, achievement on standardized test scores, graduation rates) do not adequately reflect student progress in an alternative education context (Brewer et al., 2001 De Velasco & Gonzales, 2017 Rumberger & Palardy, 2005 Warren, 2016). We call for examinations in other states to determine if, and under what conditions, AP accountability incentives increase AP course offerings while narrowing access disparities. Our results suggest that adoption of AP school accountability incentives may not be a long-term solution to improving AP access for all schools or narrowing disparities in access between schools. Also, the sizeable gap between schools with the most and fewest AP course offerings did not narrow across time. Pennsylvania’s AP accountability incentive was associated with an initial increase in schools’ AP course offerings, but the trajectory of change during the post-policy intervention period did not differ from the pre-policy baseline period. We also analyzed if the indicator differentially affected schools we hypothesized as sensitive or nonsensitive to the policy and examined demographic differences between those school groups. Specifically, we examined whether adoption of an advanced course access accountability indicator was associated with an increase in AP course offerings initially and in the three years after the policy intervention. This study employed hierarchical piecewise growth modeling and two interrupted time series models to examine the effect of introducing an Advanced Placement (AP) school accountability incentive on AP access in Pennsylvania.
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