A District Transitions Planning Guide

Shared Accountability

This section explains shared accountability, shares inspiring shared accountability stories (bright spot) and offers selected resources to support your efforts.

What is Shared Accountability? Absenteeism is a cross-cutting issue and cannot be solved by any one person, department or agency. Create systems and cross-departmental and infrastructure support for attendance, and hold stakeholders — students, families, educators, agencies and community partners — responsible for helping to reduce chronic absence.

Shared accountability for the 2020-2021 school year should guarantee regular collection, monitoring and sharing of attendance metrics even if formal accountability for chronic absence has been suspended. Schools will need to enhance their internal and external support systems to meet the academic, social-emotional and health needs of their staff, students and families.

At the district level, policies need to affirm the importance of recording attendance and participation in distance and in-person learning. Accountability needs to be coupled with appropriate improvement supports.

Attention to Equity

District leaders can promote equity within shared accountability by ensuring that the systems and policies designed to support students and families do not result in disproportionate identification, labeling or punitive actions against particular groups of students.

Bright Spot
  • Oakland Unified School District makes chronic absence data widely available to school families and community members through its public dashboards. School staff can see more detailed school data, including this preschool experience dashboard.

  • Sacramento City Unified School District supports principals and school attendance teams in monthly meetings, and developed several easy-to-use data systems that display district-wide metrics for its schools. Read more.

Resources

Districts can support school leaders by offering guidance and resources. Here are two examples: