A few weeks ago, my colleague Robert Pondiscio argued convincingly that the accountability policies of the No Child Left Behind era did not work as effectively as they could have because schools did not know how to respond to the pressure they felt to improve instructional practice and deliver stronger results. I think that’s right and, as Robert argued, that’s why leading states discovered that they needed to provide help, and in some cases mandates, to get schools to adopt approaches that would actually improve student performance and narrow achievement gaps. Robert wrote:
The states and districts showing the strongest results today are not those that abandoned accountability. Nor are they those that relied on accountability alone. They are the ones that paired accountability with coherent instructional strategies, high-quality curricula, teacher support, and a clearer understanding of how children learn. Mississippi’s literacy gains did not emerge from testing by itself. Neither did the progress seen in places like Louisiana or, more recently, Houston. Accountability provided urgency and focus. It did not provide the instructional playbook.
I agree with all that, and it’s in line with some things I’ve written about the need to marry accountability with greater capacity building, as some standards-based reformers have long urged.
But it’s important to point out that directly improving instructional practice wasn’t all that NCLB in particular, and consequential accountability in general, were about. They were also trying to shift the local politics of education. That’s why many consider NCLB to have been a civil rights effort as well.
Putting students first
In the parlance of the time, the idea was to “put students first.” And, of course, to “leave no child behind,” especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
This meant applying pressure at the level of policy and politics—trying to shift the decisions of local school boards and district superintendents. It was a political science proposition: Left to their own devices, most districts would let normal politics plod along, which generally meant giving organized labor and other adult interests what they wanted, including giving upscale parents what they wanted, and not giving much of anything to anyone else, most notably poor kids.
Whereas Robert’s view of standards, testing, and accountability resonates with reformers who spent time in the classroom (as he did), the accountability-as-political-game-changer view has long appealed to those of us with more of a poli sci, econ, or public policy background. Vlad Kogan, author of the 2025 book, No Adult Left Behind, is currently the most effective evangelist for the proposition that U.S. school systems have been “hijacked” by adult interests and that external accountability pressure is one way (among others) to disrupt this status quo.
But just as accountability pressure alone doesn’t give districts clear advice on what to do to improve instructional practice, neither does it provide clear advice on what to do to “put students first” or “leave no child behind.”
Sometimes we reformers claimed that districts would be shamed into doing right by the neediest kids: spending more on their high-poverty schools, giving them their fair share of the best teachers, and making sure disadvantaged students had access to rigorous curriculum and advanced courses.
But, frankly, we were terrible messengers about this. I remember giving speeches in the early 2000s as a twenty-something George W. Bush appointee, trying to make this case and seeing education leaders in the crowd look at me like I was from Mars. If NCLB was about getting school boards and district central offices to “put students first,” that was news to them.
And we’re still not clear enough about what it would really mean, in practice, to put students first. So let me take a crack. I would argue that putting students first—especially disadvantaged students—means:
- Scrutinizing collective bargaining agreements and district bureaucracies for any expenses that aren’t connected to pupil achievement or other student needs. That would include bloated central office staff (especially highly paid administrators who were “promoted” from their jobs as principals because of weak performance by the schools they led); salary supplements not connected to evidence of effectiveness, like master’s degree bumps for teachers or raises for longevity (beyond the first ten years or so, when returns to experience generally peter out); extravagant employee healthcare policies, especially for retirees and their families; and ballooning non-teaching staff without a direct role in serving students.
- Taking any savings and driving it into initiatives to recruit and retain effective teachers in high-need schools. That means paying teachers dramatically higher salaries to take the toughest assignments while also paying more to teachers with a track record of boosting achievement and narrowing gaps, as D.C., Dallas, and now the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment have done. On top of the instructional-improvement agenda that Robert writes about, ending the teacher-retention crisis at high-poverty schools is the most promising way to help many more young Americans achieve their full potential.
- Removing from collective bargaining agreements and district policies any provisions that impede instructional improvement. Here’s where the two branches of reform come together. High-quality instructional materials, for example, won’t make much difference without high-quality professional development, teacher planning time, and regular coaching and feedback. But some union locals force districts to the bargaining table to negotiate all of that, and more. The more includes the details around high-impact tutoring, automatic enrollment of qualified students into advanced courses, and pretty much everything else that instructional reformers dream up. This must stop.
But let’s be honest. No amount of top-down accountability—or competitive pressure from school choice either, to be clear—would be sufficient to motivate most school board members to embrace these sorts of reforms. Not so long as they depend on the teacher unions and other adult interests for campaign donations and get-out-the-vote efforts.
As with instructional reform, if we want more than a handful of districts to take these sorts of politically treacherous actions, then we probably need state policymakers to do the heavy lifting. This means, for example:
- Banning automatic pay raises for master’s degrees or experience after ten years or so;
- Mandating significantly higher pay for teachers in high-need schools;
- Prohibiting districts from offering taxpayer-subsidized retiree healthcare benefits; and/or
- Going “full Scott Walker” and limiting collective bargaining just to wages.
That sounds like a pipe dream in blue states. But in red ones, maybe it could happen?
Here’s the point: Accountability is necessary but not sufficient. That’s true with instructional reform, and it’s true with forcing political change, too.
