For thirty years, most education reformers have hung their hats on test-based accountability. Let's kick the tail of traditional public schools on standardized tests, as the thinking goes, and much else will take care of itself. For “no excuses” charter schools in particular, this was until recently their raison d'être. Now, with the rapid spread of education savings accounts and other private choice vehicles, the salience of parents “voting with their feet” has—along with a shift in the political zeitgeist—pushed test-based accountability further and further into the background.
This tension around accountability has brewed within the reform community for years. By way of table-setting, my colleague Mike Petrilli once described this as a tribal feud among three distinct camps: (1) choice purists, (2) choice nannies, and (3) choice realists. In a nutshell, all three support parental choice, but part ways on the extent to which they can get behind test-based accountability. Robert Pondiscio characterized the internecine dynamic as a schism between “those whose preferred flavor of school choice emphasizes charter schools, strong authorizers and performance-based accountability versus those who think the ultimate control should rest with parents—[with] private schools very much part of the mix.”
In reality, this duality—test-based accountability versus accountability entrusted to the parent marketplace—is not binary; empirical proof of achievement and parent preference are distant locations on a spectrum rather than two sides of a coin. Indeed, I find much to like about the libertarian view of parent power and school autonomy and nod in agreement with many of their criticisms of test-based accountability, especially the ways it can distort and narrow the curriculum. But I also find the forceful pushback against using tests to measure and evaluate schools to be problematic if it undermines the broader goal of improving life outcomes for our most marginalized kids.
Consider what’s now happening in Houston ISD, the eighth largest district in the nation and the largest in Texas. For choice enthusiasts, the Lone Star State is the biggest prize on the map, being one of only four states controlled by Republicans that do not yet have private school choice. At the same time that choice boosters seem to be on the cusp of a big victory statewide, Houston and its embattled superintendent, Mike Miles, are taking fire from all sides as they attempt to raise the city’s abysmally low floor on academic instruction and student performance.
Just last month, Miles and his team faced hours of grueling public comment from a procession of parents protesting budget and personnel cuts—with the decision to terminate some teachers and principals based in part on student and school performance data. Their grievances were familiar (one person on X called the protesters the “Moms for Mediocre Schools”), but lost in the noise and rancor was the district’s woeful academic performance and the role that test-based accountability has played, and is playing, in starting to turn things around. If Miles were to defer completely to the will of the parents in the room (who represented only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands in the district), it’s difficult to see how that would help close Houston's yawning achievement gaps.
The episode calls to mind an apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Along the same lines, Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Miles has described Houston ISD as a tale of two districts: Its high performing schools are some of the best in the nation, while the struggling ones have languished for decades. Accountability to parents is unquestionably needed, but it’s often insufficient—especially in circumstances where parents have been denied an ambitious vision of what’s possible.
At the same time, test-based accountability has its fair share of problems. Heritage’s Jason Bedrick has written persuasively about its limitations and the double standard often applied to education savings account spending versus public school spending. While the research on the academic efficacy of programs like ESAs is to date inconclusive, there’s a lot to be said about developing delivery models beyond conventional K–12 classrooms and creating the conditions for more agency among students and families.
Simply put, whether you agree with it or not, the following assertion from my colleague Checker Finn gets to the heart of the accountability tension:
We can’t assume that every child is going to be well educated if the parents are put in charge, because not every child has parents who can responsibly take charge.
Or this one from the New York City Parents Union’s Mona Davids:
Parents don't care about politics, we just want our babies educated. And, we are capable of deciding which school will do that.
Can these two ostensibly disparate perspectives be reconciled?
Maybe. Maybe not.
