Is teacher accountability possible? If the teacher is to be held responsible for what the pupil learns, teachers must exercise such a clear influence over the pupil’s learning outcome that the latter is substantially dependent on the quality of the teacher’s input. For a number of countries the PISA surveys have become a premise for comparing the average educational performance of different countries in selected subjects. The decline in Norway’s average scores in the PISA 2000, 2003 and 2006 surveys is tangible. This has sparked a significant interest in the official debate about Norwegian education. In his 2008 New Year’s Address to the Norwegian people, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg spoke of this development as “a serious warning. School should be a place of learning and of fundamental knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic. Teachers should have a clear responsibility for what pupils learn in school.” Teacher accountability is well known in research (for instance Valli et al 2007). The question of how the teacher in Norway is to be held responsible for what the pupil learns in school is, however, not entirely clear. Accountability systems have never been approved for use in the Norwegian education sector, but some accountability thinking is nevertheless seeping into the way in which some of Norway’s local quality-assurance systems are designed This cross-sectional study investigates the impact of teacher instruction by means of comparing the perceptions of secondary-school pupils regarding the extent to which teacher input energises their learning with pupil perceptions of their own engagement. A multiple-measurement model employing factor analysis with factor correlation provides an estimate of the potential impact of teacher influences on engagement, motivation, volition, and learning outcomes for Norwegian secondary-school students (16-year-olds). The main conclusion is that there is virtually no correlation between pupil perception of the quality of teaching and the pupils’ self-reported grades in the relevant subject, whilst the indirect effect of the quality of teaching in terms of pupils’ state of mind is rather greater. A possible interpretation of this is that the teacher’s educational influence over the learning outcome can be indirectly measured and that the effect on learning outcome is heavily dependent on the pupils’ attitude towards the teaching.A number of cautions and nuances must however be emphasized.

The empirical study that forms the basis for the analyses was completed with seven high schools. A total of 1112 students voluntarily participated. The survey response rate was high and close to 100%Students answered a questionnaire about learning strategies, motivation/self-discipline, teacher behavior/class environment, teacher-student-interactions and parental engagement.Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) was used to assess the factor structure. The assessments are based on the p-value for the χ2 statistic, RMSEA, NFI, GFI, AGF . The standard criteria of p > .05, RMSEA < .08 and NFI, GFI and AGFI >.95, have been used for acceptable fit.The fit indices for the structure model indicate that the model could be considered as acceptable

The main conclusion is that the secondary school teacher should only be responsible for teaching (and therefore held responsible for the quality of teaching). What we rather see in our measures are cumulative effects of teacher influence. The single teacher influence on achievement is an issue which needs further exploration.Accountability should belong to that effort. It does not appear useful to parcel the individual effects of teachers (Raudenbush 2004:124)Several methodological difficulties emerge in using student achievement data to evaluate teacher behavior (McCaffey et al. 2003). An important nuance is that the measurements of teaching quality we have emphasized work in indirect proportion to learning outcome. .