ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the conceptual groundwork for accountability and federalism. It presents key design elements in accountability – goals, indicators, actors, and consequences – followed by an overview of how these elements combine in different institutional forums to produce the four accountability types: administrative, professional, political, and market. It then describes how the three levels of American federalism vary as political arenas with respect to legal authority over education, actors and organizations, political ideology and culture, and financial capacity. This creates different settings for politics and policymaking. This variation leads to different emphases at each level in the approach to accountability systems.
