The politics of choice, accountability, and autonomy

From Kansas –

For the past decade, the debate over school reform has been fragmented into three debates: one of choice, one of freedom, and one of accountability. Choice remains dominated by the championing of voucher programs – an approach that this paper believes only serves to further stratify the education system. The continual rejection of voucher initiatives – most recently in Utah, the first vote since 2000 – speaks to the movement’s ineffectiveness. Freedom has reached the forefront in the debate over charter schools – and with it, concerns over accountability. And it is accountability, undoubtedly, that has been at the center of these debates: it is a shorter word for the No Child Left Behind Act.

Rather disconcertingly, these ideas have remained more as points of disagreement than being embraced, as this paper sees it, as complementary. As this paper has argued, the No Child Left Behind Act is failing precisely because it lacks the flexibility (and incentives) necessary to enable schools to extend their efforts beyond the test alone. The result is an environment that avoids risks – and potentially great returns.

Rage against the machine
The first line of argument is the failure of federal oversight. “Since the [federal government] has been seriously involved in education ‘we have suffered…a catastrophic decline in educational productivity, analogous to buying 1970s cars today and paying twice their original selling price,’” Neal McCluskey writes in Cato@Liberty, the public-policy institute’s official blog. “So what’s the solution to all this?” Mr. McCluskey asks. “Universal school choice. Give parents control over public education money instead of giving it to the educrats, and make the schools compete … Only then will the catastrophic flaw in top-down control at any level be eliminated, and the power structure for real accountability be in place.” (2)

The source of his frustration is test-based accountability – which he argues, continues to diminish standards. Richard Rothstein writes in The American Prospect that this system “corrupts schooling in ways that overshadowed any possible score increases.” One such consequence, he writes, is the goal distortion caused by undue emphasis on particular subjects (reading and math) and metrics. Even the specifics can be distorted: the No Child Left Behind Act demands proficiency of all subgroups, but by the very nature of statistical accuracy, the margin-of-errors become less reliable — in short, “inaccurate accountability.”

I have responded to this line of thought through part agreement and part argument. Mr. Rothstein’s questioning of goal distortion is more or less the same as this paper’s frustration with “entropy as the result of specificity” – and addresses it on several fronts. First, agreeing with Mr. Rothstein’s assessment of goal distortion, the paper’s understanding of a school’s effectiveness depends on more than test scores. It also agrees with Mr. McCluskey that accountability alone has and will continue to fail, but asks how will choice alone manage any better if schools cannot truly differentiate themselves from one another? Autonomy, too, is needed. It is here that schools can move beyond merely teaching to the test, but transcending it, through curriculums and policies that are truly competitive – and as a result, innovative.

This paper strongly disagrees that the federal government should not be a force in education—and questions how much so it truly has been ‘seriously involved’ in public schooling. The No Child Left Behind Act has suffered in credibility precisely because it lacks assertiveness: without universal national standards (which Mr. Rothstein supports, if proposed by a nongovernmental organization) it is in the states’ interest to limit standards to meet compliance.

The federal government must remain involved in the nation’s education, but it must transcend the ill-conceived frameworks in which it has been content with. In a nation wrecked by inequalities of funding and standards, it is the position of this paper that quite simply, the federal government must become a stronger force in this nation’s education. But it must be a focused force — uniting standards to reflect a united economic and democratic interest, and ensuring equality of opportunity, no less through guaranteed payment of tuition.

The opportunity is present, quite simply, to transcend this wretched system of inherent inequality—and federal policies ineffective precisely because they accept inequality as an unquestionable reality—to embrace a system that is truly both comprehensive and effective.

Think—but think clearly
This paper has not been disillusioned by either argument that education is in too much of the public interest to deny private (preferably, not corporate) interest, or too eager to embrace the fanciful notion that complete privatization can effectively regulate itself. John Kenneth Gailbraith sees the conclusion clearly: “I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that… I’m in favor of whatever works in the particular case.”

This is a unique case (Jim Horning is right, “nothing is as simple as we hope it will be”), one that is at once faced with enormous responsibility and immense complexity. The government must exist in education to ensure the equality of standards and funding, to see to it that at minimum, all schools are fulfilling their responsibilities; the market exists to encourage schools, parents, and student to demand more of themselves, and be empowered to seek it.

This debate is a question of words—all of them political, and all of them polarizing. It need not be so. Private, autonomous, charter are all the same: independence. Choice is nothing more than the proper fit for school, student, and parent. The aim is to continue to diminish the variance in performance between schools – and now to address the large variance in performance within them without compromising diversity. This paper has recognized and addressed the very real risk of uninformed (and disillusioned) parents by encouraging a greater transparency in discussing total performance and satisfaction, while also encouraging schools in turn to work further in the students’ and their own, to indulge in unspeak, enlightened self-interest.

This dynamic mechanism encourages schools to actively recruit students—and also offers them the incentives to seek out and develop poor-performing students just as much so as the talented. Competition requires innovation – and the abandonment of ineffective practice through the marvelous process of creative destruction. It is then that schools embrace the challenge of an empowering education—and if such an equilibrium can be reached, this paper has succeeded.