IDENTIFIERS *Australia

After discussing the demand for public accountability in Australian education, the first section of this paper treats the scope of accountability and details the responsibilities of a state minister of education, other key administrators, schools and teachers, and the national system itself. The second section examines what the public wants to know about the educational system regarding its context (historical/political, legal, economic, demographic, social, and technological); inputs (financial costs and expenditures); process (teaching performance); and student outcomes. The third section comments on methodologies for keeping the public informed, such as committees cf inquiry and standing committees, and discusses monitoring methods and their difficulties. Systematic national or statewide testing programs are costly, define literacy and numeracy in limited ways, and may have undesirable backwas