(PLEASE NOTE: Forgive me for posting twice in a row. I just wanted to offer something positive here to balance what I said originally.)

In my previous post, I came out strongly against increasing accountability around federal funding for education. But I think it’s important not just to be against things. When people subscribe to the “Philosophy of No”, discussions deteriorate, and serious problems go unsolved. So I’d like to take a few words to talk about viable and powerful alternatives to the present approach to accountability in education.

Whether we’re for or against accountability as the concept is applied to schools, we have to acknowledge that the term is a euphemism for threat and punishment. It’s also a dangerous conflation of the concept of personal or internal accountability with what we might call authority-based or external accountability. Personal accountability is great. People who have high degrees of it tend to be more reliable, more trustworthy, more effective, and much happier in their lives. But as I discussed in my last post when I referenced Dr. Richard Elmore’s ideas, external accountability doesn’t increase personal accountability unless personal accountability already exists. Applying threat and punishment to unaccountable individuals merely increases fear, resentment, and subversion – and makes them even less accountable in the long run.

But if not by threat and punishment, how do we motivate people to change? As Secretary Duncan has said, NCLB was all stick and no carrot. The new carrot seems to be increased funding. But again, this concept mistakes the group for the individual. States may be motivated to compete for dollars. But dollars won by states will do little to motivate that struggling principal in a rural district or that 9th grade English teacher whose kids can't read at grade level. So what will?

LEADERSHIP. Leadership is synonymous with change. Change is what leaders do. People who are in charge, but who do not create change, are managers, not leaders. I have argued many times for a national focus on the principalship. Even though good teachers have more positive effects, good principals know how to attract, train, and retain good teachers. Also, we have only l00,000 principals to reach. That’s a big number, but it’s nothing compared to four million teachers. Think about this: for every billion we throw at things like ARRA, RttT, i3, etc., we could invest $10,000 in each US principal. (Hope my math is right here!) This means that RttT alone could provide $43,500 worth of leadership training and support to every principal in America. Tell me how our present approach to accountability would be more effective than a massive targeted effort to improve the leadership capacity of school principals?

TRANSPARENCY. That old quote about sunlight-as-disinfectant sure makes sense to me in education. I’ve written policy briefs for local elected officials on “Transparency in Testing”, “Transparency in Teaching”, and “Transparency in Training.” Ideas like these would require schools and states to tell the public more about what they do, how they do it, and the results they achieve for their efforts. Fans of school choice ought to be huge fans of increased transparency. Every taxpayer should be a big fan, too. Best of all, transparency improves individual accountability as opposed to destroying it. And if this isn't enought, remember that externally-applied accountability reduces transparency (often via Campbell's Law) as we have seen with states that go to great efforts to cloud the view around their achievement results.

INFORMATION. Fans of external accountability support it on the assumption that threat inspires people to change in positive ways. Any psychologist – or parent – can tell you this is patently false but that’s beside the point. The thing is, more often than not in education, the people being threatened are already doing the best they can. It may not be good enough, but it’s as good as it gets at a given point in time. What most educators lack today is not the almighty footprint of government in their backside, but solid, accessible, ready-to-use information about how to improve what they do. The federal government could be a centralized source for this. For example, at this point in time, where would a kindergarten teacher go if she wanted to dramatically improve her success at teaching kids to read and write? I’m a national literacy expert and I don’t have a single place to send her. (I have many, but not one.) Even my own work, after 15 years, is not that comprehensive. The terrible irony of this situation is that such information is readily available, is not terribly complicated, and is relatively easy to apply. The challenge, however, is that a person has to go to 10 or 15 sources – research, professional literature, conferences, trainings, materials, etc. – to pull it all together. And it’s not at all obvious at first what those sources are. Improving teaching is currently a case of trail-and-error-under-threat. No wonder it doesn't work very well.

VISION. I don’t recall a Secretary of Education in recent memory who had a clearly articulated vision for American education. NCLB represented a goal of 100% at-grade level proficiency in reading and math. But since grade level is a fictitious and arbitrary concept, and states were allowed to lower their proficiency levels any time they wanted, I don’t think this really counts as a vision – seems more light a nghtmare to be honest. Furthermore, the terms “proficiency” or “at grade level” are meaningless in the larger discussion of what our education system should provide and what we want our kids to be able to do. A strong national vision for education, backed by credible and consistent policy, could move people closer to our ideals in a positive way. I’m thinking of something along the lines of Kennedy’s moon shot idea. I watch the YouTube clip of that speech at least once a year and it still makes me want to be an astronaut.

These are just four improvements on accountability. I have another ten or so but listing them all is unnecessary. My point is this: we would serve our schools better by holding a mixed “portfolio” of positive policies than we are serving our schools now with our current approach to accountability. If you add to this idea the data we have regarding the failure of accountability, changing our approach seems like the only reasonable and responsible plan of action to me. Yes, it’s hard to give up the righteous feelings of power and punishment that so many of us hold against education and educators (and I include myself in this for I, too, have had my moments of indignation), but accountability hasn’t worked, and all of the things I’ve suggested here have – albeit on a very small scale and to a very small degree.

We talk about taking things to scale in education all the time. We certainly took accountability to scale. And accountability took us to the cleaners. Let's admit that we screwed up (I’ll admit that I did), and move on to positive and more promising approaches. Imagine the power of scaling school leadership or scaling transparency. These seem like win-win ideas to me, in contrast to the current approach which seems more like lose-lose every year.

It has been fashionable for a decade or more to demand more accountability from our schools. Being in favor of accountability is like being “tough on crime” or “strong on national security” – it’s the contemporary litmus test of educational nationalism. But has accountability passed the “Dr. Phil Test”? Or, as the doctor himself might say if Arne Duncan dropped in for an episode, “How’s that workin’ for ya?”

I have nothing against accountability. But I have much against failure, especially the pig-headedly persistent failure of our accountability policies in education. Do we really think accountability is working? Or that more or different approaches to accountability will work better?

I don’t know where Chester Finn stands on accountability in education (and I hope I don’t misrepresent his position here by quoting him out of context) but he certainly understands the results of recent approaches to reform. Here’s a cogent analysis from his recent article, “The End of the Education Debate:”

“…despite all the activity and energy surrounding education reform in recent decades, American test scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. National Assessment (NAEP) scores have barely changed over the past 30 years. Recent years' SAT scores have shown tiny gains in math, offset by declines in verbal performance. The two major international testing systems invariably find American students in the middle of the pack in math, science, and literacy, with scores generally lowest in the upper grades. Some upward bumps in the data do appear here and there, but there are just as many downward blips. In other words, 25 years of outcomes-minded reforms have yielded little (or nothing) by way of genuinely improved educational outcomes.”

So how’s THAT workin’ for ya? It sure ain’t workin’ for me. Which leads me to believe that using money with strings attached will do little to change much of anything in education – regardless of the money and regardless of the strings.

If you want, you can make human beings do just about anything. All you have to do is figure out a way to threaten them that they find meaningful and then be prepared to carry out the threat swiftly and unmercifully. But how well do human beings perform under the threat of punishment? And worse yet, how well do those who receive the punishment perform thereafter? We keep thinking that accountability will somehow work differently this time. But I keep noticing that it hasn’t worked well in the past, and so I wonder, why should it work any differently in the future?

Where Richard Rothstein argues persuasively from a place of compassion and fairness, I would argue the same position from a place of pragmatism. Accountability, as a strategy for education reform, does not produce good results.

Here’s an analogy: If you think your kid is gonna wreck the family car, don’t let him take it out on Friday night. If he drinks his way into oblivion and slams into an oncoming motorist, you won’t have to worry about holding him accountable. So why use accountability as the mechanism to improve his behavior in the first place? Same goes for educational funding: if you don’t think the money’s gonna be well spent, don’t spend it.

We all want our tax dollars spent responsibly in education. But how have recent approaches to fiscal manipulation improved the quality of how our money is used to further the cause of increasing student achievement? Are we really happy now that for 10% of their annual budgets, our states fake their achievement data and our schools test-prep their kids to within an inch of their intellectual lives? How many times do we have to read Campbell’s Law before we believe it?

I wonder, too, why accountability isn’t a two-way street in education. It seems as though all the accountability goes from top to bottom. I don’t believe there is any accountability, for example, for any group of policy experts who have suggested a failed reform or a boondoggle of a program. Where was the accountability for the folks who brought us Reading First? Nor does there seem to be much accountability for superintendents, or district office personnel, or even principals, for that matter. Some sanctions might fall upon teachers. But, in reality, the hammer hits hardest on the heads of our kids.

Fundamentally, the power of influence is only as strong as the presence of integrity. When it comes to smart policies and successful reforms, our leaders have been sorely lacking over the past decade or two. It’s one thing to demand “research-based” practices from the people on the ground. But why don’t the people on top have to follow research? And let’s not mince words about this. The research on the effectiveness of federally-imposed accountability in education is conclusive: it doesn’t work. Even worse, there is reason to believe that we are now dealing with the negative effects of blowback and collateral damage.

Dr. Richard Elmore from Harvard has a theory about why accountability has failed, and why the kind of accountability we use now will always fail. He points out what almost all of us know intuitively: that accountability imposed from without cannot succeed unless it exists first from within. I would take that even one step further to argue that externally imposed accountability, where internal accountability is non-existent, actually makes it less likely that internal accountability will develop. This is why, as I travel the country working in schools, things seem to me to be getting worse with each year that passes.

The simple truth is that schools are not only not better than they were ten years ago, they aren’t more accountable either. If you walk through them, and teach in a few classrooms, and talk to a few principals and teachers behind closed doors, you’ll find a group of people who feel so manipulated, so resentful, and so encumbered by threat that they have no intention of complying sincerely with even the simplest requests. Yes, everyone learns to go through the motions, to give the teacher what he wants. But in seeking a culture of submission, we have ended up with a culture of subversion instead.

Give the money with strings or without. It probably won't make any difference at all. And it certainly won't change for the better how principals lead, how teachers teach, or how students learn. Why would it?

No, providing more money without accountability safeguards is not a good idea. As Race to the Top has demonstrated, even relatively small sums of federal money can drive substantial changes to state policy. The $4.5 competitive RtTT fund has driven legislative changes in Michigan, Colorado, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. This fund is more than five times greater ... just think of the potential leverage!

But two caveats to that. First, this question should not be asked in relation to stimulus, but rather to all federal education expenditures. Second, Rep. Kline is right when he suggests that stimulative measures have a hard time doing double-duty as reform. I've been wary of asking for too much reform from dollars whose efficacy is measured in the speed with which they leave the government coffers and enter the real economy. Truth be told, the only truly reform-oriented measures of ARRA - RtTT and i3 - have been the slowest to get out the door, and that's not coincidental. It's also not a bad thing.

But where I disagree with Rep. Kline is that there's no good data to support the assertion that the stimulus was a "colossal failure." (But this blog is about education, not Keynesianism, so I won't indulge that debate here.) And in general, there's no reason to fear more of a federal role in education, since a larger national role is a critical feature in most countries whose education systems vastly outperform ours. We just need the requisite accountability and standards to go with that federal role. And so it comes full circle ... put a nickel in the standards jar.

Another $23 billion from policymakers to help state and district officials duck hard choices. Isn’t that nice, and so seasonally appropriate? It’s a good deal for teacher unions, district administrators, and anyone who would rather not have to take a hard look at which employees are pulling their weight. It’s a lousy deal for the kids who are going to have to pay for all this borrowing and learn in schools where we're forfeiting this rare political cover for addressing incompetence and inefficiency (remember: the TARP dollars that are supposedly paying for all this are not dollars we actually have, they are just more borrowing that we’ll dump on our kids’ tab). Our kids got a bum deal in the original ARRA bill, even with “assurances” which were supposed to see that dollars promoted improvement and not just job security for adults; they’re getting an even worse deal in “Son of Stimulus.”

American schooling is living in its own bubble economy. Throughout the aughts, district spending steadily climbed—fueled in significant part by steadily growing property tax revenues. Those revenues, of course, were driven by valuations that we now know to have been illusory and which have declined sharply since 2007. Because most states adjust property valuations on a multi-year, rolling basis, however, those adjustments won’t fully play out until 2012 or 2013—and the parallel changes in commercial real estate may run another year beyond that. Meanwhile, even before the popping of the real estate bubble, states and districts were busy ignoring their massive, looming unfunded pension liability.

So, you might think that states and districts would be seizing this opportunity to tighten their belts—because it’s going to be inevitable and because the current crisis provides invaluable political cover to rethink old routines and reallocate resources in smart ways (it was Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, after all, who reminded us that one should never let a crisis go to waste). Indeed, well-run for-profit and non-profit organizations have used the current climate as an opportunity to trim cellulite, address festering problems, and strengthen themselves. School systems might use this opportunity to pursue cost-saving transformation in procurement or human resources, push back on problematic collective bargaining agreements, rethink school design and staffing, revisit assumptions on class size or course offerings, or experiment with cost-saving technologies. In schooling, however, as the American Association of School Administrators survey documented this summer, the favored response has been makeshift adjustments, wage freezes, and tinkering with buses and thermostats.

And the House is apparently doing its best to indulge this behavior by pouring yet more dollars into the status quo, this time without even the fig leave of ARRA’s “assurances.” We’re being told, naturally, that the present crisis requires this stopgap; we’re assured that states and districts will turn to unsustainable budgets, unaffordable pension obligations, and the need for transformative reform once things stabilize. I seem to remember the last boom cycle—oh, must’ve been a whole two years ago—when those of us nagging about such concerns were dismissed as killjoys bent on creating distractions. But I’m sure, once we’re past the rough patch, this time will be different…

Providing stimulus money without conditions is not only a good idea; it is the only decent idea.

We are in a serious economic crisis, have only barely dodged a full-blown depression, and although the economy is now in recovery, this is still mostly a jobless recovery, with unemployment still at 10% and likely to remain unacceptably high for some time.

Stimulating the economy has to be our priority. Providing subsidies for jobs in schools not only employs educators, and cafeteria workers, and janitors, but the paychecks these employed public sector workers spend contributes to expanding employment in the private sector as well.

Political posturing like that of Rep. John Kline (R-Minn) notwithstanding, it is now apparent that the original stimulus bill prevented a serious recession from turning into something much worse. As the President's Council of Economic Advisors notes, in a report whose technical accuracy has not been seriously disputed, "Estimates of the impact of the ARRA [the stimulus bill] made by comparing actual economic performance to the predictions of a plausible, statistical baseline suggest that the Recovery Act added roughly 2.3 percentage points to real GDP growth in the second quarter and is likely to add even more to growth in the third quarter." The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that "in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States, and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA."

Nonetheless, unemployment at the levels we are now experiencing is not only an inconvenience. It is a tragedy. Its academic effects will likely overwhelm any school reform efforts.

The Census Bureau recently reported that the child poverty rate rose to 19.0% in 2008, from 18% in 2007. The number is undoubtedly now even higher, as unemployment grew substantially during 2009. Poverty directly depresses student achievement, as more children come to school hungry, homeless, and from households under severe stress.

A 10% unemployment rate will produce a black child poverty rate of over 50%. This is not only a human disaster, but an educational catastrophe. In such an environment, hopes of narrowing the black-white achievement gap will evaporate.

A recent policy brief by Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute notes:

From 2007 to 2008, the country experienced a historic rise in the number of households that did not have consistent and dependable access to sufficient food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) calls these households "food insecure." The number of food insecure households increased by over 4 million nationally to reach 17.1 million. In 2008, 10.7 percent of white households were food insecure, but 25.7 percent of black households were in this condition. Although the official 2009 USDA data is not yet available, it is likely that the numbers of food insecure households increased by a large amount this year.

Hunger is a problem in itself. But it also matters because of the long-term harm it causes, particularly in children. Children growing up in food insecure households are more likely to be in poor physical and psychological health. They have more behavioral problems and do worse in school. We want black children to do better in school, but academic improvements are not likely to occur when more and more black children are growing up in households facing hunger.

Recent economic research is more specific about what negative educational outcomes we should expect in coming years. University of California, Davis economists, Ann Huff Stevens and Jessamyn Schaller, find that children who have a parent who experiences a job loss are 15 percent more likely to be held back a grade in school.

When Congress debated the first economic stimulus bill last January, critics accused the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress of using the bill as a masquerade for hidden domestic policy initiatives that had nothing to do with job creation or economic growth. While this criticism was off-base with regard to most of the $787 billion package, it was on target when it came to discretionary funds given to the Department of Education. No matter how meritorious it may be to expand charter schools, link teacher evaluation to student achievement, turn around low-performing schools, improve teacher quality and distribution, advance standards and assessments, and raise the bar on data collection, these do not create significant numbers of jobs, and do not belong in an economic stimulus program. They should properly be taken up and debated in the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, not now.

While I disagree with many of Rep. Kline’s points including, the disconnect between education spending and jobs, I must ask, “Have we learned nothing?” Money without strings, especially when it comes to education funding, is not a wise move. The glaring inequities in our public school systems across the country have been perpetuated while no one was watching the cookie jar; we can expect more of the same where no accountability is required. Even as stimulus funds flowed to states to supplement education spending, moves were made to try to undermine the Obama Administration’s intent to augment spending to shore up our public schools. Local jurisdictions like my own, Prince George’s County, Maryland (which needed the funds desperately) sought waivers to have stimulus funds act as a substitute for local spending. Similarly, stimulus funds in other areas continue to be spent and no one really knows if the aspirations behind the Recovery Act are being met due to lax spending and data collection requirements.

As a result, unfortunately, we may have missed an extraordinary chance to undo the wrongs of the past and make significant strides toward closing the educational opportunity gap. Closing this gap is a long-term fix for what ails our economy.

This is wonderful news for 250,000 teachers, not-so-wonderful news for those of us who have to pay for those who probably shouldn't have been hired in the first place.

According to the most recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureay, the entire United States public school system enrolled only 60,966 more students in 2006-07, yet it hired 20,564 more teachers. Twenty-six states showed a decline in student enrollment, but only 14 had fewer teachers than the year before.

With more payroll chasing a flattening number of students, it's no surprise to discover that per-pupil spending rose a healthy 5.8% in 2006-07, and the amount spent on employee salaries and benefits increased 5.9%. The nation's public school employee compensation bill came to $382.5 billion.

If this is to be the focus of jobs stimulus bills, why not continue to hire teachers until we have one for each and every student?

Stimulus And Education Reform Both Get Shortchanged

I'm not one to say "I told you so," but there are plenty of people, myself included, who saw this coming. We've been speculating about what happens when schools hit the "funding cliff" almost from the moment the stimulus was signed into law. It's no surprise Democrats are coming back now to extend the supposedly temporary spending they provided earlier this year. I was skeptical of the stimulus in February, and I'm even more skeptical today, when all accountability has been removed.

The original stimulus has been a colossal failure on its objectives of immediately creating jobs and keeping our nation's unemployment rate below eight percent. Now, we see the son of stimulus funneling more money to the same types of programs and initiatives that fell flat the first time.

One of the frustrating things to me has been this linkage between education reform and the stimulus. If the goal of the stimulus was to dramatically reshape our nation's education system, we should stop calling it a stimulus. If the goal was to create jobs, we should stop allowing federal bureaucrats to tell teachers how to teach and local school boards how to run their schools in exchange for this funding.

Creating jobs is a vital goal. So too is strengthening our schools. But by burying major education reforms in the stimulus, both objectives have been shortchanged.

To answer the question of whether stimulus money without the assurance of accountability is a good idea, I would say my original objections to the stimulus remain, with or without those four assurances. This funding will not create jobs or create the circumstances for employers to put Americans back to work in the long term. Moreover, by backfilling state coffers over and over again, we're making states more and more dependent on federal taxpayer dollars to balance their budgets, making it harder in the future to pull this "temporary" money back. Many states have acknowledged that they could have shuffled money or scaled back elsewhere before actually eliminating education-related jobs. As we make states more and more reliant on federal dollars to fund their education systems, we're opening the door to those who want to exercise more and more federal control over education as well. States and local communities should be wary of this funding and the strings that will come with it in the future if not today.