Despite significant investments, lower-income countries face a learning crisis. A clamor has thus arisen worldwide for greater accountability of those involved in service delivery. To obtain new insights, the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report was dedicated to accountability in 2017, and the research on this topic was reviewed. A summary is published herein. Accountability seems strongest in explicit hierarchies with direct principal-agent relations, as in an army, and when individual contributions are identified. It is enhanced when tasks are clearly defined, information is sufficient, and sanctions for violators are significant and credible. People may demonstrate better judgment if they are accountable for procedures, such as teachers using class time efficiently. By contrast, accountability for difficult outcomes, such as students’ actual memory consolidation, results in avoidance and efforts to limit one’s role. Conditions inherent in the education sector may compromise accountability. Government officials, who frequently change, are accountable to groups, whose staff and consultants also change. At the school level, parents rarely have principal-agent relations with staff, so the latter may feel little obligation to teach. In complex organizational settings, accountability could be enhanced by identifying individual contributions to a task, providing comparison standards, imposing significant and enforceable sanctions, and focusing on processes and decisions rather than strictly on outcomes. The Sustainable Development Goals will be more easily fulfilled if governments and donors can mitigate the effects of this little-understood phenomenon.

中文翻译：

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问责制特征及其对教育政策的影响

尽管进行了大量投资，但低收入国家仍面临学习危机。因此，全世界都在呼吁对参与提供服务的人员承担更大的责任。为了获得新的见解，2017 年教科文组织全球教育监测报告致力于问责制，并审查了有关该主题的研究。在此发布摘要。在具有直接委托代理关系的明确层次结构中，如在军队中，以及在确定个人贡献时，问责制似乎最强。当任务明确定义、信息充足并且对违规者的制裁重要且可信时，它会得到加强。如果人们对程序负责，例如教师有效地利用课堂时间，他们可能会表现出更好的判断力。相比之下，对困难结果的问责，例如学生的实际记忆巩固，导致回避和努力限制自己的角色。教育部门固有的条件可能会影响问责制。经常变动的政府官员对团体负责，团体的工作人员和顾问也发生变化。在学校层面，家长很少与教职员工建立委托代理关系，因此教职员工可能觉得没有义务教书。在复杂的组织环境中，可以通过确定个人对任务的贡献、提供比较标准、实施重要且可执行的制裁以及关注流程和决策而不是严格关注结果来增强问责制。如果政府和捐助者能够减轻这种鲜为人知的现象的影响，可持续发展目标将更容易实现。