Politics-free Accountability is like Calorie-free Chocolate

Thanks to the good leaders of Maryland and Baltimore for providing a case study in how messy the interaction of politics with public school accountability can be.

On March 29, the Maryland state board of education voted to transfer management of 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore middle and high schools away from the Baltimore City School Board to third-party groups. State-imposed management takeovers and private management of public schools are always contentious, but Baltimore is particularly contentious because Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and the current governor, Bob Ehrlich, is a Republican.

O'Malley accused Ehrlich, State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, and the Maryland state board of education of playing election year politics with the school takeovers; O'Malley's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, seized on the issue as evidence that he is better on education than O'Malley; Democrats in the state legislature passed a last-minute bill to block the takeover (Ehrlich says he will veto the bill; it's not clear whether Democrats have the votes to override him.); and Ehrlich fired back at the Democrats opposing the takeover. Expect more fireworks around this issue ahead.

Messes like these drive education policywonks and more pragmatic reformers to curse politics and wish it out of education altogether...

Some policy wonks seem to devote a lot of energy to trying to protect public education accountability systems from politics. In some ways, that was a major force driving the authors of No Child Left Behind, who had seen the way states flouted or deliberately watered down accountability requirements in the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act and were determined to write the law so as to narrow states' leeway and force them to do the right thing. As we lurch towards the coming debate on NCLB reauthorization, I sense a similar yearning in some conversations about what NCLB 2.0 should look like--this sense that, if we just get the policy details, if we just get the legislative language right, if we can just come up with the ideal way to identify schools, we can create an accountability system that works on its own, unsullied by and without dependence upon politics.

But trying to make accountability work without politics is like trying to make calorie-free chocolate. Accountability--real accountability--is inherently political. For accountability systems to have substance, there have to be consequences. Having consequences requires some person or entity to make a decision, to flip the switch that sets those consequences into action. We can't create an automated accountability machine that swings into action without a second thought whenever a school crosses x-defined accountability threshold--these decisions are important enough that they require human judgement.

For this decision-maker to have legitimate authority, there must be evidence that the public has placed its trust in this entity, either through election or because the entity is accountable to an elected official. Even when elected leaders choose to vest authority for school accountability in an ostensibly independent entity, that entity still operates in a politicized climate, subject to the will of the elected officials who created it and the public. But this means that accountability decision-makers are also subject to political pressure from organized interests that stand to benefit or lose from the consequences they have the power to impose, and this makes accountability decisions highly politicized.

The only way I know of to really isolate accountability from politics is by abdicating public responsibility for public education altogether--devolving all educational decision-making, through vouchers, to parents, with no public oversight of the schools to which they choose to send their children. Some voucher supporters think the evils of politics in education are sufficient to justify this trade-off, but it's one that I, ultimately, cannot accept. To paraphrase Churchill, educational accountability is the worst option, except for all the others we've tried.

Rather than railing about the influences of politics on education policy and accountability, the only real solution is to change the politics itself, to create a new politics that gives policymakers the right incentives to hold schools accountable in ways that are good for children. The most obvious way I see to do this is by organizing and empowering parents and children whose voices often go unheard in political power struggles over education. Steve Barr is doing this with the Jefferson High School movement in Los Angeles. At a more macro, much less grass-roots level, I think Education Sector's goal of "making the debate about public education public" is a part of this, too. But there are a lot of other ways to change the politics here, too, and I'd welcome any suggestions or comments for ones I'm not thinking of now.