The teacher was waiting for me when I walked into my office.
Her eyes were red. Her shoulders were tense. She held her data report in her hands like it weighed more than it should. Benchmark results had come in below our campus and classroom goal. She knew what that meant.
From the beginning of the year, I had been clear: When a teacher didn’t meet minimum expectations, a growth plan would follow. I intended that not as punishment but as a transparent pathway forward.
About This Series
In this biweekly column, principals and other authorities on school leadership—including researchers, education professors, district administrators, and assistant principals—offer timely and timeless advice for their peers.
Still, nothing about that moment felt procedural.
As I walked her through the expectations, I felt both of our hearts breaking. She wasn’t making excuses. She was devastated—because she cared deeply.
That moment changed how I think about accountability. On paper, I had done everything “right,” and yet something was wrong. Yes, I had protected accountability, but I had underestimated its emotional cost for this teacher. Too often, I realized, we confuse accountability with fear.
Later that week, my assistant principal and I made a decision: If this growth plan was going to work, it had to feel like support, not surveillance.
We gave the teacher bite-sized feedback. We coached in her classroom. We planned side by side. We named growth, not just gaps. Slowly, her confidence returned.
It would be easy to frame fear-based accountability as a leadership failure, but the truth is more complicated. In many schools—especially turnaround campuses—fear doesn’t come from one harsh leader. It grows quietly inside well-intentioned systems.
Principals carry constant pressure. Campus performance affects evaluations. Enrollment reflects community trust. Staff stability determines sustainability. At the same time, we are asked to lead with heart and results.
Balancing urgency and empathy is difficult. When stakes rise, many leaders default to heavier documentation—not from a lack of compassion but because control feels safe.
We rank teachers. We sort data. We analyze results together as a team. Performance is constantly reviewed by districts, departments, and state systems.
Along the way, accountability stops feeling like a pathway forward and starts feeling like a warning.
When accountability is driven by a leader’s anxiety, teachers stop feeling safe. Fear may produce short-term compliance, but it rarely produces sustained excellence. High expectations without relational support accelerate burnout. Innovation fades. Instruction becomes scripted. Collaboration weakens. Teachers begin working in isolation, and many leave.
You only have to browse the thousands of social media posts by educators documenting their resignations to see how fear-based accountability erodes psychological safety. (The TikTok tag #teacherquittok has more than 23,000 videos, for example.) What we are witnessing is not those teachers’ lack of commitment to the profession but a response to systems that mistake pressure for progress.
That emotional meeting with the teacher who didn’t meet her benchmarks stayed with me. I reflected further while engaged in my doctoral work and I began asking myself harder questions: Was “producing results” coming at the expense of sustaining people? Could I do both?
I began listening to my staff differently and looked for signs of hesitation. I watched for the moments where confidence disappeared. I knew that fear was never going to produce the growth I wanted. Instead, I needed to make support intentional and consistent rather than reactive.
That realization marked a shift in how I approached accountability—one that would reshape the systems, conversations, and culture at my school.
When I began rethinking accountability, I did not abandon transparency or expectations. Data remained visible. Standards remained high. Outcomes still mattered. What changed was how my administrative team and I supported people in reaching them.
First, we gave teachers more ownership over their growth by celebrating improvements publicly. When classes met their goals, we gave teachers sweatshirts with their last names printed on them. We also recognized the students who reached standard alongside them. This new approach sent the message that achievement was something we honored—not audited.
Next, we made coaching more personal and more present. Instead of relying primarily on written feedback or post-observation conversations, I increased in-class modeling. I taught alongside teachers and demonstrated instructional strategies in real time.
I ended every coaching cycle with clarity and encouragement. I sent teachers a short follow-up email highlighting two or three specific next steps and scheduled a planning session to address them. Just as importantly, I used those messages to consistently name what was working. I documented growth and recognized effort.
Together we built a rhythm: Observe, model, reflect, plan, encourage—repeat.
The results were tangible. One teacher on a growth plan experienced 214% growth according to our accountability metrics. Another showed similar gains. But more important than the numbers was what happened beneath them: I watched as teachers’ confidence returned. Their professional identity was restored.
To better understand this shift, I surveyed teachers who demonstrated significant growth from one assessment cycle to the next. When asked what made the difference, their responses were strikingly consistent.
They described leaders who held them accountable without demeaning them. They emphasized the importance of dignity throughout the process. They spoke about feeling believed in—even when improvement was required.
We do not need less accountability in schools. We need better accountability.
If we want schools where students thrive, we must first build environments where educators feel trusted. Strong systems only work when the people inside them are supported. When we rely on fear to create compliance, we lose creativity, trust, and, ultimately, our best educators. Accountability should never cost us our people.
