Perspectives on Accountability in School Counseling

We increasingly see the need for counselors to evaluate the services they provide as part of their school counseling programs. We believe that evaluation (i.e., gathering information about the attributes of school counseling programs) and accountability (i.e., sharing the results of the evaluation process) complement each other. When preparing our graduate students to be accountable school counselors, however, we sometimes hear negative comments such as:

“I hate statistics, and I’m not good at statistics. What am I to do?”

“Good anecdotes and stories do more to sell a counseling program than statistics.”

“The only reason we have to evaluate our work is to satisfy politicians.”

“Too much attention to outcomes stifles imagination and creativity!”