The concept of accountability, the notion that schools and colleges should shoulder the responsibility for the learning successes or failures of their pupils, calls for a revamping of much of our thinking about the roles of educational personnel and institutions at all levels. To create a society that is free, open, compassionate, nonracist, multicultural, and productive requires an educational system with the same characteristics. The Education Professions Development Act (EPDA) is an acknowledgement that earlier acts were ineffective in equalizing, individualizing, and humanizing instruction and that the only way to bring about change in education is by bringing about change in the people who control and operate the schools and colleges. Evaluation of the new federal programs will be based not on the means of training personnel, but on the effectiveness of the learning that results. New emphases include preparing personnel to work with disadvantaged and handicapped; changing the system for preparing personnel; long-term projects involving partnerships among colleges and universities, state and local school systems, and the community to be served. Three EPDA priorities are programs (1) to train personnel in fields of critical shortages, (2) to train personnel to meet critical problems in the schools, and (3) to bring new kinds of people into the schools, and to demonstrate, through training, new and more effective means of utilizing personnel. (JS)