Politics and Governance

New Research to Address New Accountability

As states and districts develop strategies to meet the NCLB accountability pressure, there is a need to examine the new politics of accountability. Authors in this volume have offered a useful knowledge base for pursuing this line of investigation. First, diverse disciplinary approaches offer fresh perspectives on the politics of accountability. While path dependency theory directs our attention to the institutional incentives and constraints (chapter by Mawhinney), industrial psychology uncovers the complexity of public opinions (chapter by Jacobsen et al.). An application of Kingdon’s multiple streams framework illuminates the development of teacher policy over recent decades (chapter by Lewis & Young). A focus on policy feedbacks in the context of the politics of bad news provides an understanding on the simultaneous development of school choice and the mobilization against choice (chapter by McDonnell).

Second, the new accountability system cannot be understood without an appreciation of the interconnectedness of the different levels of our federal government. The organization of the 2013 Yearbook identifies politics and policy challenges at each level of the federal system. Federal NCLB and state accountability initiatives, for example, not only shape local communities but also are in turn mediated by local culture and practice (chapter by Berry & Herrington; chapter by Trujillo).

Third, authors in this volume are appropriately cautious in drawing conclusions from their findings in part because they were witnessing policy in evolution. In this regard, the chapters, taken as a whole, can be viewed as forming a useful “baseline” on the next phase of accountability. As states and districts adopt waivers for NCLB and additional federal innovation grants, authors may revisit the same research sites to track the implementation experience. For example, the case study on New York State Department of Education has found substantial influence exercised by private sector interest. In the next phase of accountability policy development, it may be interesting to revisit NYSDE to assess the influence among the key actors as defined in the study, namely, gatekeepers, partners, rivals, managers, and profiteers (see chapter by DiMartino & Scott).

New Landscape on Accountability Politics

In reviewing the chapters in the volume, I observe both enduring and new features on the politics and policy of accountability. First, “layer-cake” federalism is severely weakened with the implementation of NCLB accountability. McGuinn (2006) characterized the passage of the 2001 NCLB as a “regime change,” where well-entrenched political interests set aside their traditional policy positions to support the new policy. Proponents of state power were ready to set aside their beliefs in state and local control and to endorse a visibly stronger federal presence in education. Advocates of accountability pushed for a fairly comprehensive set of accountability measures, including annual testing of students in core subject areas with consequences. Political interests across the board were supportive of disaggregated reporting on achievement. Clearly, NCLB has sharpened our attention to achievement gaps. Depending on their socioeconomic characteristics, schools are required to report the academic proficiency of students in various subgroups, including economically disadvantaged students, students from major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students. In this regard, NCLB has made the achievement gap within a school more transparent for accountability purposes. Schools that persistently fail to meet AYP are subject to a gradation of intervention, including school closure and conversion to a charter school.

Building on NCLB and learning from its implementation lessons, the Obama administration has actively used financial incentives to mobilize state and local support for building reform infrastructure. Under federal direction, states and districts competed in Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation (i3) grants, and other federal funding sources to “transform” their current policy and practices in educator accountability, charter schools, and turning around low-performing schools. These innovative initiatives, defined and promoted by the U.S. Department of Education, sought the support from key state and local actors—including governors, state commissioners, mayors, unions, and networks of diverse providers, among others.

Drawing on the NCLB framework on “corrective actions,” the Obama administration continues the push for more direct district intervention in persistently low-performing schools. In his proposal to reauthorize the federal law in elementary and secondary education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued for four strategies to “turnaround” the nation’s 5% lowest performing schools (or approximately 5,000 schools). The federal government committed US$5 billion during 2010-2012 to support these efforts. The four strategies tightened the approaches that were established under NCLB, allowing for fewer district options. More specifically, the Duncan strategies include

In making its first School Improvement Grants (SIG) to support school turnarounds, the Obama administration allocated US$3 billion federal funds to over 730 schools in 44 states in December 2010. Of these schools, an overwhelming number of them (71%) had chosen the “transformation” option while very few decided to use either “restart” (5%) or “school closure” (3%). The remaining 21% opted for the “turnaround” option where the principal and a majority of the teaching staff were replaced (Klein, 2011). Equally important, only 16.5% of the students in all the SIG schools were White, as compared to 44% African American and 34% Hispanic. The choices made by the SIG awardees seem to suggest a leaning toward a more incremental approach to school improvement. This tension between the federal push for innovation and local realities is likely to persist. In anticipation of the local inertia toward incremental organizational changes, the Obama administration created the Office of School Turnaround in late 2011 to monitor and support local efforts to raise school performance.

Second, local control, though by no means diminished by the new accountability system, has taken on a new character. Mawhinney’s indepth study of Maryland’s failed attempt to takeover low-performing schools has led her to observe that there is a “localization of performance-based federalism.” Indeed, local culture and institutional practices have substantially mediated the accountability expectations. To be sure, this remains an issue for debate given the variability of governing practices at the local level. As Trujillo’s case study suggests, school board members could function as the enforcement agents for high stakes accountability at the expense of public inputs and deliberation. Equally complex is public perception of public school performance. In an analysis of the report cards in New York City, Jacobsen and her colleagues raised the concern that information on low school performance has dampened public support. This more fluid public opinion may constitute a key part of the new accountability reality in urban education. School boards and superintendents can no longer ignore the public pulse.

In the current accountability regime, local control often involves the politics of delay. In their classic study of implementing job training and job creation programs in Oakland in the 1960s, Pressman and Wildavsky illuminated how inactions of various stakeholders culminated in years of delays in meeting the policy objectives. They found organizational delays even when the programs received strong federal funding support. In NCLB, politics of local delay occurred in implementation of federal Supplemental Education Services (SES) for students who attended low-performing schools.

Not surprisingly, local districts were generally protective of their control over Supplemental Education Services (SES) and were slow in supporting parents to transfer their children from low performing schools. In his study of California, for example, Betts (2007) observed that school choice, as stipulated by NCLB, was largely underutilized throughout the state. Reasons for limited local implementation included the delay in making data available to parents, failure of districts to communicate clearly to parents the choice program, an inadequate number of seats in better performing schools, and lack of parental interest in moving their children outside of the neighborhood schools.

The California case also showed that participation rates in SES were low though not nearly as low as for the transfer option. Difficulties cited by state personnel with regard to implementing SES included a general lack of information about state-approved providers from the state, districts were tardy in providing parents with information about SES, and that some districts did not allow nondistrict providers to work on district property. Districts also had a considerable number of complaints about SES providers. Finally, like school choice, one of the greatest impediments to participation in SES was the substance and form of communications sent by districts to parents.

The extent to which local political power has reshaped the federal effort to redraw the boundary in service delivery is seen in large urban districts. An example is Chicago’s success in gaining federal approval to continue to provide supplemental services to students in schools that failed to make adequate progress. Under the NCLB, districts that did not meet the AYP criteria, including most large urban districts, were prohibited from providing after-school supplemental instructional services to their students. The U.S. Department of Education required that Chicago replace its own services with outside vendors in January 2005. Mayor Daley stepped in and put his political capital behind the district chief executive officer’s decision to continue the district services. In a series of private meetings between the mayor and Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Secretary of Education, compromise was reached. In return for the district’s continuation of its supplemental services, the city agreed to reduce barriers for private vendors’ provision of tutorial services. When Secretary Spellings announced the compromise in early September, Mayor Daley hailed the efforts as successful intergovernmental collaboration. Similar waivers were subsequently granted in New York, Boston, and a few cities where local political leaders organized their lobbying efforts effectively. Clearly, intergovernmental politics is far from absent from performance-based federalism.

Third, as accountability systems grow, new hybrid structures emerge. One type of new structure pertains to the governance of operation and management. In Michigan, the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) is granted fairly broad authority to manage districts that are under fiscal stress (see chapter by Arsen and Mason). Under Public Act 4, the emergency manager is subject to few institutional checks. Similarly, quasistate entities are prominent in other states, including the Recovery School District in Louisiana, and the Achievement District in Tennessee, among others. These new governing structures are given operational flexibility to contract diverse providers, close and/or consolidate school buildings, and function outside of the collective bargaining framework.

Another type of new structure pertains to the governing of data infrastructure. As suggested in the three-state study conducted by Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, and Bali, there is substantial variation among states in their capacity in data collection, analysis, and reporting. Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, and Bali observed the rise of informatics power, which resulted from “combining the coercive power of state-imposed incentives and sanctions with the control of measurement and computing technologies.” From their perspective, informatics power is substantially controlled by private contractors and vendors, who assisted the state agencies in building the data infrastructure but gained access to the data accrued.

Equally important, informatics capacity varies among states. Across the nation, the data analytic gap is well documented by the Data Quality Campaign (DQC). The DQC started surveying the states on their policies and practices on using data to improve student achievement in 2009. The first DQC survey (2010) focused on 10 actions that linked statewide data across all grades, prekindergarten through college as well as the workforce, expanded data access to key stakeholders, and ensured professional capacity to use data for instructional practices. The survey found that only eight states were tracking individual students from prekindergarten through college and across workforce sectors, an assurance required for second-phase state fiscal-stabilization funds. Although 10 states reported strategies in sharing individual student-progress data with educators, fewer than half of the states provided aggregated data reports to key stakeholders. Clearly, state leadership is much needed to meet the data challenges in performance-based, innovative federalism.

Fourth, the new accountability system has exposed the tremendous capacity needs and the achievement gap in many of the mid- and small-size urban communities. In Trujillo’s case study district of about 20,000 students, the leadership has instituted “a culture of fear” in the process of meeting the accountability challenges. In Michigan, the emergency manager took over not only Detroit but also two small districts, Muskego Heights (1,400 students) and Highland Park (800 students). In Rhode Island, Central Falls, a district of about 4,000 students, has been under state receivership for about 20 years. In New Jersey, the state has established control over several smaller urban districts, including Jersey City, Camden, and Newark. In other words, even though much of the research and the media tend to focus on the largest urban centers, smaller urban communities are very much in need of greater support. Given their interest in measureable impacts and broad media attention, philanthropic foundations have traditionally given only modest support for school reform in smaller communities.

Fifth, competing interests on accountability remain intense, an enduring feature in the politics of education. Interest group politics has not slowed down. In their chapter, Berry and Herrington analyzed the content of over 500 online comments by various stakeholders that were directed at accountability issues in a large urban district in Florida. They found commenters actively used various sources in the virtual space to frame education policy in an increasingly polarized climate.

Indeed, polarization of school accountability is embedded in our interest-based political structure. Polarized policy positions are seen between those who cherish state autonomy and those who uphold civil rights. On February 6, 2012, a coalition of the key state and local governmental groups submitted to Congress its collective view on the reauthorization of ESEA. These groups included the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, Council of State Governments, National Association of Counties, and National School Boards Association. The coalition emphasized the importance of federal-state-local partnership in implementing school reforms. To ensure local and state commitment, the coalition urged Congress to remove “those restrictive and unnecessary federal policies that limit innovation” (National Conference of State Legislature [NCSL], 2011). The current regulatory federal role was seen as hindering state and local leadership to promote their own school reforms.

Given their concerns on federal regulations, state and local governmental organizations sought greater flexibility in using federal funds to meet their specific academic needs. For example, the coalition viewed the federal threshold for maintenance of effort “not realistic” in the current fiscal environment. The proposal pointed out that the maintenance of efforts requirements “could severely curtail state and local authorities’ ability to control the use of their own state and local tax funds” (NCSL 2012). Seeing this requirement as a symptom of federal regulatory excessiveness, the coalition called for a major overhaul on all the federal “paperwork requirements” and the federal “waiver process.” A reduction in federal regulation was seen as a necessary condition to sustain state and local reform.

While State and local governments looked for greater flexibility, civil rights groups saw the need for federal direction to prevent public education from returning “to an earlier time when states could choose to ignore disparities for children of color, low-income students, ELLs, and students with disabilities” (Civil Rights Organization, 2012). On January 24, 2012, 38 organizations of civil rights, disability, business, and education submitted a joint statement to the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, opposing the draft ESEA reauthorization legislation known as the Student Success Act. Unlike the proposed legislation, the civil rights groups were strongly in favor of federal requirements on performance accountability of groups of students, such as racial and income groups. Using these performance disparity data, federal funds would be used to support efforts to close the achievement gap.

Overall, the civil rights coalition saw that “safeguarding equal educational opportunity” was a primary federal responsibility. From this perspective, the federal redistributive role was seen as a higher priority than balancing the power dynamics in the federal–state partnership. In an April 2011 joint statement, the civil rights leaders explicitly stated that “ESEA is a civil rights law” (NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., 2011). Civil rights leaders faulted NCLB for not providing the “mechanism to address the continued racial and ethnic isolation of students and the dramatic increase of, and disparities in, counter-productive school discipline practices” (p. 1). Likewise, civil rights were concerned that federal accountability to protect the disadvantaged would be undermined by competitive grants, such as Race to the Top. Consequently, civil rights leaders recommended the federal government to guide “targeted, tailored intervention options” for school improvement. For example, federal interventions were seen as necessary to address “dropout factories.” Equally important was their proposal to eliminate systemic barriers to student success, including teacher preparation and data transparency.

Future of Accountability

At the conclusion of the 1997 Politics of Education Yearbook, the coeditors observed that a long period of weak accountability had contributed to some of today’s problems in public education. Accountability must be reassessed on an ongoing basis. As our current accountability system evolves, what kind of politics and policy do we anticipate? Politics is likely to be shaped by divided governance at the federal level as well as by the prevailing practice of local control in public schools. Different scenarios may emerge.

First, political polarization may sustain enormous gridlock on accountability issues at the federal government, as suggested by the lack of Congressional support for moving forward with the reauthorization of the ESEA. In these circumstances, states and districts are likely to take their own initiatives, notably with wide variations across communities. Among the likely local initiatives are an expansion of charter schools and other school choice programs, stronger partnership between K-12 and higher education to support career and college readiness, efforts to target on turning around low performing schools, mayoral control, portfolio management systems, and parental triggers.

Second, political contention may give way to bargaining politics. Political leaders may find common ground toward a stronger accountability policy system, with clear national standards and coherent support to needy schools. Policy agreement can be facilitated by the growing public concern for global competition. An effort to approach K-12 reform from a nonpartisan perspective came from the Council on Foreign Relations’ Independent Task Force on K-12 education. This task force tried to frame the education challenges from a national security perspective. Whether such a frame will lessen partisan disagreements and form the basis for a new common commitment remains to be seen.

In March 2012, the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force issued its report on the future of K-12 education, entitled “U.S. Education Reform and National Security.” The task force was cochaired by Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City Schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state during the Bush Administration. The report opened with the sobering warning that “a weak education system” threatens national security. The framing is reminiscent of the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk (see Wong & Guthrie, 2004).

The American workforce is seen as inadequately prepared to ensure U.S. security in an increasingly complex global political economy. The report stated the importance for all students to develop “a strong academic foundation in literacy and numeracy, as well as a sense of global awareness and a strong understanding of their nation’s democratic values and practices.” These foundational skills constitute the necessary building blocks for the nation to make continuing progress in technology, diplomacy, economic growth, and military readiness (Council on Foreign Relations, 2012, p. 14). Consequently, the task force makes three major recommendations. First, the task force called for an expansion of the Common Core State Standards to include teaching and assessment of skills that pertain to the long-term security of the nation. Among these critical skills are science, technology, foreign languages, civic awareness, and problem-solving skills (Council on Foreign Relations, 2012, pp. 44-45). Second, the report supports school choice for high-need students who attend failing schools. Students who exercise the choice option will be given “equitable” resource support. Third, a “national security readiness audit,” coordinated nationally, will be implemented to engage the public and to hold school and public officials accountable for meeting the academic standards.

Particularly interesting is the recommendation for a “national security readiness audit.” The challenge is its implementation. If these audits are not part of the “high stakes” accountability system, school leaders and teachers are less likely to pay attention to them. To ensure public attention, the Council on Foreign Relations may have to work with the educational policy community and the Congress to make sure that the task force’s recommendations become part of the reauthorization bill.

In 15 years, another yearbook on accountability may revisit these evolving policy issues. The next generation of researchers will need to reexamine the way we conduct our investigation on accountability politics. They will also need to reassess the new landscape of accountability politics in 2030. Their research agenda is likely to be just as interesting and complex as the one that we face currently.