False premises: the accountability fetish in education.

• Author: Derthick, Martha

"She took math and reading workbooks home so her children were always ahead in school. And she insisted on discipline and chores to teach the importance of accountability." (1)

--The New York Times on Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mother

"Accountability" has become the mantra of education reform in the United States. During the presidency of George W. Bush, it was also the guiding principle of intergovernmental relations, according to a little-noticed essay in the 2002 Economic Report of the President. Setting out his presidency's approach to federalism, it said that "[t]his Administration seeks to create an institutional framework that will encourage the development of measurable standards to which all providers of public services--Federal and local public and private--can be held accountable." (2)

In federal policy for elementary and secondary education, which is susceptible to management through grants-in-aid to state and local governments, measurable standards became an explicit statutory goal, not to say an obsession. In policy for higher education, measurable standards began to glimmer in the federal government's eyes as well, but because of the greater legal and organizational variety--and because the bulk of federal aid goes to students as grants and loans rather than directly to colleges and universities--federal regulation of higher education is quite problematic politically. The Bush Administration's effort to revise federal regulations on accreditation in higher education stirred a firestorm of opposition and was blocked in Congress.

1. NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

   "Bipartisan education reform will be the cornerstone of my Administration," President Bush said in a position paper sent to Congress only a few days after his inauguration. (3) He had campaigned on education reform, repeatedly promising a regime of annual testing, which was the practice in Texas. (4) As governor, he claimed credit for the improved performance of students there. (5)

   This presaged a much deeper federal government intervention in K-12 education, yet President Bush's critique of America's schooling was not new. During the Reagan Administration, A Nation at Risk (6) had raised alarm about the performance of students in the United States as compared with those of other nations. There was also concern over the achievement gap at home between white and minority students. Nor was President Bush's proposed remedy original: Preceded by state governments, the national government had been advocating "accountability" through content standards and testing. (7)

   But the national government had been moving only gradually. The Improving America's Schools Act (IASA), (8) a 1994 renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), (9) nudged rather than compelled the States toward adoption of standards and testing. As the ESEA came up for renewal again in 1999, several bills from different political perspectives sought to define a more effective accountability regime, but were never enacted. (10)

   The advent of the Bush Administration brought several changes, first among them education's greater salience as a political issue. Education had unpredictably shot to the top of the public's concerns in the 2000 election, and President Bush had made education central to his campaign. This was especially noteworthy given that the Republican Party had in the recent past favored a federal retreat from K-12 education. In party postmortems following Senator Bob Dole's loss to President Bill Clinton in 1996, however, then-Governor Bush had argued that this retreat was an error, and that Republicans would benefit from embracing a more compassionate, and hence more activist, conservatism. (11) President Bush's election led to a convergence between Republicans and Democrats on a need to deploy federal government power more aggressively vis-a-vis state governments and their local school districts. "Although education is primarily a state and local responsibility, the federal government is partly at fault for tolerating ... abysmal results," President Bush said. "[A]fter spending billions of dollars on education, we have fallen short in meeting our goals for educational excellence." (12) It was conservative, he suggested, to demand results in return for money. (13)

   Yet there was a second face to President Bush's initial position that was kinder, gentler, and more compassionate toward the nation's school establishment than the law that eventually emerged in 2002. Bush's early position, like that taken in the Republicans' ill-fated "Straight A's" bill (Academic Achievement for All Act), (14) favored flexibility for the states with a block grant approach. Under this approach, states would have substantial discretion over spending so long as their academic performance met a standard on which the state governments and the federal government jointly agreed. (15) Likewise, President Bush's policy statement promised greater flexibility in the use of federal funds, consolidation of overlapping and duplicative categorical programs, and a radical-sounding "charter option" under which states and districts "would be freed from categorical program requirements in return for submitting a performance agreement to the Secretary of Education and being subject to especially rigorous standards of accountability." (16) The statement promised rewards for "[h]igh performing states that narrow[ed] the achievement gap and improve[d] overall student achievement," as well as one-time bonuses to states that met "accountability requirements" quickly. (17) The Economic Report essay on federalism, while asserting that government service providers would be held accountable for meeting measurable standards, said also that these providers would be allowed to find the best way to meet the standards. (18)

   The law that was eventually enacted, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), (19) contained mostly sanction with little reward except for an increase in authorized funding. It soon elicited angry reactions from governors, state legislatures, and, above all, school teachers. (20) The radical-sounding charter proposal turned into an authorization of demonstration projects in seven states and 150 local districts, and has proven to be virtually a dead letter. No state has participated, (21) and only one locality, Seattle, has. (22) The consolidation of categorical programs took place only modestly, a frequent outcome for Republican Presidents who have attempted to enact block grants. Meanwhile, NCLB required every school in the country to administer annual tests of reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and to make "adequate yearly progress" toward universal proficiency by 2014. (23) The progress was to be measured not only in the overall student body, but also in "disadvantaged" subgroups defined by income, race, ethnicity, handicapped status, and limited English proficiency. (24) Schools that failed to attain their targets were subject to a cascade of sanctions, beginning with permitting students to transfer to better schools in the same district and eventually culminating in "restructuring." (25) This scheme threatened many schools with the prospect of officially declared failure. (26)

   To be sure, elements of federalism (too many elements, in the eyes of many education reformers) remained: NCLB permitted states to design their own standards of proficiency and their own tests. Many had already done so, though they now had to submit their plans for federal approval and suffer consequences--namely a loss of federal money--if they did not respond satisfactorily. NCLB thus created incentives for states to lower standards, making it easier to report that their students were meeting mandated levels of proficiency. Fears of a race to the bottom have not yet been justified; the states' responses have been more like a "walk to the middle," albeit one that is slightly downhill. Since 2002, some states have raised their standards, but, to the chagrin of NCLB's advocates, more have made their tests easier. (27) In addition, states have tended to set very low standards in elementary grades and then dramatically raise them in junior high school, setting children up for failure. (28) NCLB also put off the most significant requirements for achievement gains until 2013-14. (29) As the magical date of universal proficiency approaches, NCLB, as presently designed, will further pressure states to lower standards. Thus, a law designed to inform parents and promote accountability instead fosters a smokescreen of proficiency.

   Even with loopholes, NCLB was a much more coercive federal policy than anything that preceded it: It is more widely applicable to schools and more penetrating and burdensome in its requirements, especially the disaggregation of the student population into categories of putative disadvantage. Disaggregation was, for some liberals, the most valuable part of the Bush project--"the heart of what NCLB is all about," according to a Democratic staff member (30)--and also the most surprising, because the explicit racialization of policy seemed at odds with the conservative Republican critique of affirmative action. For local officials, disaggregation was the part of NCLB most offensive, inconvenient, and ill-conceived, (31) particularly as it applied to English-language learners and students with disabilities, for whom federal policy prescribed unrealistic standards of annual progress. (32)

   Perhaps the clearest contrast between President Bush's twenty-eight-page outline of January 2001 and the more than six hundred pages of law that Congress enacted lay in provisions for improving teacher...