Accountability in public education derives from a combination of government regulations and consumer choice.  Historically, because we’ve had so little consumer choice in public education, regulations have been the dominant component of accountability. But now that school choice is becoming more ubiquitous, consumer choice is assuming a more prominent role.

Unfortunately, some of our most important public education policy wonks are devaluing the importance of consumer choice by using the term accountability as a synonym for regulations.

My friend and former colleague here at Step Up For Students, Adam Emerson, in criticizing the lack of required state assessments in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program, recently wrote on his Fordham Institute blog that:

“Virtually no accountability measures, however, exist in most of the nation’s special-education voucher programs, including the largest such program in the United States, Florida’s McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities.”

Parents choose to apply for and use a McKay Scholarship. If their needs are not being met at one of the more than 1,100 Florida private schools accepting the McKay Scholarships, they can vote with their feet and go to another school. To suggest this level of consumer choice equates with “virtually no accountability measures” is wrong.

Adam’s gifted colleague at Fordham, Mike Petrilli, made a similar error a few days later. He wrote that “Indiana’s voucher program has accountability in spades,” then ignored consumer choice and equated accountability only with required student testing and school grades. (more…)

More Crist on vouchers: Charlie Crist on “Hardball” last night: MSNBC host Chris Matthews warned Crist that there was a “blue plate special aspect” now that he’s changed parties, and that he’d have to buy into Democratic mainstream arguments: opposing vouchers, supporting the public school teachers union. “I’m fine with that,” Crist insisted, to which Matthews replied that it’s “quite a switch.”

Jeb Bush on poverty and education. From an interview with Andy Rotherham in Time: “I would reverse the question: education impacts poverty, not the other way around. If we don’t empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children for the first time in American history, truly the first time, will not have the same economic opportunities. That’s not speculation. The evidence is in.”

Poverty categorical. From the News Service of Florida: “School districts with a higher percentage of low income students would receive additional funding from the state, under a bill filed Monday by Rep. Frank Artiles, R-Miami. The bill (HB 31) would authorize state education officials to create another special category of funding to address districts with higher percentages of low income students. … The bill would leave up to school districts how to divvy up the money, but the funding must be used for class size reduction, reading initiatives and intervention programs targeting students in kindergarten through third grade.”

Florida readers second in the world. In fourth grade, only students in Hong Kong did better on an international test, reports the Orlando Sentinel. The results were solid but not as impressive in math and science.

Imagine troubles. The Imagine charter school in St. Petersburg is recommended for closure, again, reports the Tampa Bay Times.

Charter school debate. The Florida Times Union offers pro and con.

More on remediation. StateImpact Florida.

More on teacher evals. Palm Beach Post.

Special education changes. A district task force in Hillsborough recommends many in a report following the deaths of two special need students, reports the Tampa Bay Times.

The next few years are critical for education reform, with the implementation of higher standards likely to put tremendous pressure on political leaders to abandon course, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday.

“The idea of implementing higher standards, the adoption in 46 states of higher standards, is clearly a huge step in the right direction. (But) that’s the easy part,” Duncan, referring to Common Core standards, said at a national education summit organized by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. “Will our political leaders have the courage when test scores drop 20, 30, 40, 50 percent? … Will they have the courage not to backpedal and dummy down standards like political leaders did under No Child Left Behind?”

Despite the challenges, Duncan said he was optimistic that state and local leaders would rise to meet them, and in bipartisan fashion. He pointed to recent reforms as proof.

“I’m actually extraordinarily hopeful,” he said in response to a question from moderator Andy Rotherham. “When I look at what states did, local legislative leaders, chief state officers, what they have done over the past couple of years, no one predicted that would happen. No one predicted that 46 states would adopt higher standards. No one predicted that three dozen states have taken teacher evaluations and principal support to a very different level. No one predicted that we would have 44 states working on the next generation of assessments. Frankly, we’ve had almost no rollback. And honestly, if a couple states choose to roll back, that would not be the end of the world.”

Duncan was a keynote speaker at the fifth annual summit, which drew about 800 participants from nearly every state. He made a pitch for continued investment in early childhood education and stressed teacher quality and teacher equity. He said the fact that not a single district has methodically moved to align its best teachers with its most struggling students is a sign of how far reformers have yet to go. (more…)

This column from Andy Rotherham appearing today on Time.com is so well worth reading that it's hard to edit it down to a few excerpts. It's the most prescient and fair-minded argument on where to direct our "Occupy" anger in the cause for social and economic justice, ending with a plea to the Occupy Wall Street movement to "demand the kind of radical change we need to create a school system that lives up to our values rather than mocking them."

On economic inequality: "... when it comes to giving Americans equal opportunity, our schools are demonstrably failing at their task. Today zip codes remain a better predictor of school quality and subsequent opportunities than smarts or hard work. When you think about it, that's a lot more offensive to our values than a lightly regulated banking system."

On ideas to foster equal opportunity: "... our politicians are too skittish to take on special interests or too wrapped up in ideology to acknowledge that no single solution — for instance, school choice, ending the federal role in education or just addressing poverty — will fix our education system."

On the teacher union embrace of the Occupy movement, what Rotherham calls "a sad irony": "The unions are hardly the only cause of our educational problems, but they’re not doing enough to fix them. In ways large and small, they defend practices and policies — things like how teacher pay is factored into the amount of money that is allotted to individual schools — that disadvantage low-income students. Can the Occupy movement square this circle? We’ll see."

There is a reason Richard Lee Colvin was selected earlier this year to lead Education Sector. He was an accomplished national education reporter who left the Los Angeles Times in 2003 to lead the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University's Teachers College, where he guided other education reporters to be smarter journalists, myself included. So it is with great respect when I say I miss the nuanced leadership and analysis exhibited by Education Sector's co-founder Andy Rotherham.

I wasn't looking for an endorsement of private school options from Colvin when I read his thoughts yesterday on Indiana's new voucher plan on NPR's StateImpact. But I was looking for a more sophisticated conclusion than his assessment that the policy represented the outcome of a struggle between only two groups -- market dogmatists and "common schooling" democratic advocates.

Further, Colvin slips into familiar ideological traps when he claims the "unfortunate" wave of vouchers this year is "undermining" already anemic public school budgets. We're also beginning to see some peer-reviewed studies that show some voucher-like options are modestly boosting the academic performance at the public schools mostly likely to lose students to the programs, but Colvin dismisses any competitive effects with almost absolute arrogrance.

Rotherham has never endorsed vouchers, either, but he at least lives up to his reputation by taking a careful and balanced look at one of our nation's most volatile education policies. He knows that taxpayers are seeing some financial benefits when programs like this are in place, and he also understands that we're beginning to find evidence of the positive competitive effects that vouchers can have on public schools, but that we need to learn more.

We do need to learn more, and Rotherham is correct to also call out the more outrageous claims from voucher proponents and opponents alike. Here's hoping the think tank he left behind can re-ignite itself as a responsible resource to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Andy Rotherham today gives us a look at a few examples where progressive-minded teachers are acting as change-agents within their unions. And, surely, the news is promising. But these "insurgents," as Rotherham calls them, are still mostly acting as engineers tinkering with the machinery that drives a top-down model of public education. Nowhere in Rotherham's examples do we find evidence that teachers want to disestablish the duopoly among boards and unions and introduce parents at the bargaining table.

This takes us to an overlooked passage in the now-famous strategy document prepared by a Connecticut affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. The AFT, to be sure, understood that simply saying, "No," was no longer a solution, that it had to propose ideas to reform troubled schools if it wanted to kill legislation that would have established a parent trigger. The AFT believed that it stopped the parent trigger and, according to the document, "turned it into a vehicle for collaborative success." The union's ideas included the creation of school governance councils that gave parents a voice, but it acknowledged that the word "governance" was a misnomer. The councils would have no real authority.

To be fair, Rotherham does argue that these insurgents still have a lot to prove and they have yet to wrestle with the decision to protect their members while agitating for real reform. But our debate still mostly looks at reform within a corporate structure and falls short of finding solutions that create a truly professional relationship between teachers and families. The change-agents profiled by Rotherham say they want to be more accountable, but we don't know to whom.  Giving parents authority through the trigger or through choice establishes professionalism between families and teachers simply because the parent can sever the relationship at any time. NewTLA, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus are to be commended for their ambitions, but they should strive to be more responsive to the needs of parents. By doing so, they will empower themselves.

Andy Rotherham spent his weekly real estate on Time.com describing his method of choosing a school for his children. Of particular note to redefinED are his comments on choice, equity and empowerment:

... the amount of choice is still limited by administrators (who alone get to decide, for instance, whether to open a second Montessori-style school in a district even if the first one has an insanely long waitlist) and legislators (who can do things like refuse to let charter schools into districts like the one I live in). Our school district does offer some choice, but it's called "controlled choice" — we were able to pick only from a subset of the schools ...

... It's amazing how routine it has become in public education to deny people choice and power. Giving more Americans this kind of empowerment matters to my wife and me out of basic fairness, but also because in ways large and small, our fate is bound up with those of millions of parents around the country who are growing frustrated with our public system ...

... In other words, so far it's worked out for us, but I'm struck — as both an analyst and parent — by how much public education, an institution that is predicated on a common understanding of the collective good, does things to undermine the very support it's dependent on to thrive.

In his weekly "School of Thought" column on Time.com, Andy Rotherham considers the political backlash currently afflicting charter schools and walks away with two lessons that help explain the difficulty in having a nuanced and complex conversation about their role in public education today:

First, with 5,000 charters ranging from very traditional to completely online, the term 'charter school' is increasingly meaningless. After all, what does a network of schools like Achievement First really have in common with the mostly low-performing online schools run by White Hat Management in Ohio — the force behind the proposed deregulation there?

Second, the public can't be expected to parse those distinctions, so the quality issue has more potency than many charter advocates seem to realize. The education marketplace is not an economic one with the best ideas winning out. Rather it's a political one with the loudest or most organized voices usually carrying the day and the most compelling examples winning the public debate. So one spectacular charter screw-up counts more than 100 quiet successes, and the good and great schools can't overcome the headwind created by the laggards.

In his latest Time.com column, Andy Rotherham provides a fair-minded appraisal of the school voucher debate as he attempts to disspell the common myths that are tossed around like rhetorical hand grenades. Vouchers don't drain money from traditional public schools, Rotherham argues, nor do they skim the best students. On the flip side, he says, we need more evidence to support the contention from some that vouchers lead to higher academic achievement and that the resulting competition for students leads to greater results overall for public schools (although on this note, Rotherham does reference the results from a recent study of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship which found that the competitive effect boosted the academic performance of public schools faced with the threat of losing students).

Notably, Rotherham concludes his column with a statement that arguably should guide the debate over school choice, but too often does not:

Parents should worry a lot less about the legal status of a particular school than whether it's the right school for their child. A good fit depends on a host of factors including a strong academic program, successful outcomes, a clear curriculum, areas of emphasis like arts or technology, and even lifestyle factors such as limiting time spent in transit or a year-round schedule.