Instructor: John Tanner
New cohort open
A Path to Benefits-Based Accountability™ for K-12 Schools
Join the movement - and take a student-first approach to school performance.
You always knew school accountability was broken.
You just couldn’t put your finger on why.

Meet Your Instructor
John Tanner is one of the nation’s foremost voices on school accountability. His bravEd Benefits-Based Accountability™ Framework was designed to help school district teams embrace a system of school performance that puts students and community stakeholders, and not test scores, first. Sign up today.
The Experience
Here’s what to expect when your school team joins braveEd’s nationwide Benefits-Based Accountability™ Framework.
The Sessions
What follows is an example description of the sessions you’ll attend in Year 1 of the program:
Session #1
Define your hopes and dreams
Get an introduction to benefits-based accountability, learn the vocabulary and plot a path forward for your schools and students.
Session #2
Understand Benefits-Based Accountability™
Learn about the two types of accountabilities and establish a system based on shared benefits.
Session #3
Build broad capacity for change
Improving accountability means becoming a different type of organization. In this session, you’ll answer key questions to help transform your thinking one conversation at a time.
Session #4
Become a trust-building machine
Master and embrace the best parts of the Benefits-Based Accountability Framework to build critical community-based relationships and tell the truth about change.
Session #5
Communicate ‘for what’ and ‘to whom’
Together, your team will learn how to clearly communicate the motivations and goals behind your program to colleagues, parents and policy-makers.
Session #6
Pressure test your benefits-based framework
Develop an early draft of your organization’s Benefits-Based Accountability Framework™ to share with stakeholders for candid feedback.
Session #7
Take an evidence-based approach to success
Learn how and where to collect evidence of success and use the right data to generate continued support for your approach.
Session #8
Scale your work across multiple systems
Done right, a Benefits-Based Accountability Framework isn’t ‘one more thing,’ it’s the thing that helps you communicate the success, or failure, of your most important initiatives.
Session #9
The role of the central office
Learn how school district leaders can work together through shared responsibilities to build broad-based support for change.
Session #10
Speak Benefits-Based Accountability™ fluently
Deploy your Benefits-Based Accountability Framework™ to have a new kind of community-based conversation about the future, one that puts students, and not test scores, first.
The Outcomes
A Benefits-Based Accountability™ mindset starts with you and your schools being able to do the following four steps over and over, with ease.
1. Use the right vocabulary
2. Center everything around student benefits
3. Shape your school for the future and not the past
4. Tell your truths, in a language your stakeholders understand
The result is a student-centric accountability environment that is good for your students, understood by their parents, and embraced by communities.
We’re leading a nationwide movement of 1,000+ school districts to change how schools do accountability.
Join us today.
Experience the power of
Benefits-Based Accountability™ today
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is accountability exactly? I’m not used to thinking about it the way bravEd describes it.
Accountability is a leadership discipline that enables and empowers an organization and its stakeholders to come together around a common purpose. It requires regular accountings as to where an organization is and it’s not effective at meeting stakeholder needs, but it isn’t the work of the organization. The goal for every leader is to insert the accountability function into the DNA of the organization. As such, real accountability is neither a program nor an initiative, but rather mindset accompanied by a set of frameworks.
I have lots of new leaders and principals this year/I’m a new superintendent. Do we wait to do this work until we get settled in, or do it now?
Our position on this is unequivocal—an environment with new leaders or new leadership represents an ideal position from which to do this work. Accountability is the most powerful organizational force in any organization and will create directional forces that will guide the organization towards its future. Accountability doesn’t negate the other components necessary to create coherent leadership team (that isn’t its purpose), but it can help create the necessary environment for those components to quickly thrive.
How does a benefits-based accountability and a strategic plan work together?
The accounting or accountability function in an organization represents the capacity an organization needs to indicate clearly where it is effective and where it is not yet as effective as it needs to be. The accountability function is therefore neutral when it comes to the content of an organization. Strategic plans represent one content component that will require a rich accountability function for them to be more than a series of tasks and metrics. Our experience suggests that the most traditional of strategic plans often need to be rethought once a benefits based accountability system is in place but that the opposite is not true. Schools that build a benefits-based accountability system first experience a much shorter timeline when doing their strategic work, as well as increased coherence across the entire system regarding their priorities and what needs to be accomplished.
How will this fit with the other initiatives and programs we have going?
If your organization is like most schools and districts we have worked with the answer is quite nicely. Remember that our benefits based accountability system is not an initiative or program, but rather, the mindset and frameworks regarding how best to account for those things. One of the most powerful moments in the process is when a school system can view all its strategic efforts, programs, and initiatives, through a coherence lens and see for the first time how everything fits or doesn’t fit together. Think of accountability as the glue that holds everything else together with a surprisingly small amount of effort.
Can you really put this in place in a few hours each month?
You can. Schools are unique in the universe in how accountability has been done to us and as a result we’ve become conditioned to think of accountability as a massive undertaking that sucks up considerable time and effort on a daily basis. But real accountability is part of an organization’s DNA regarding how it understands and communicates its effectiveness to a variety of audiences. Real accountability is as natural to an organization as breathing is to a person.