Rethinking Accountability: A Grand Bargain for Public Schools
Introduction
Across the country, choice-based schools, whether it’s charters, microschools, and other alternatives, are growing rapidly. Policymakers and parents typically frame this movement as a form of accountability: if families “vote with their feet,” schools will be forced to improve. But this narrative is misleading, because choice is a signal of preference, shaped by convenience, culture, marketing, and socioeconomic factors, which is different from accountability. True accountability requires transparent, comparable reporting of outcomes, coupled with structures that allow schools and teachers to meaningfully improve.
We don’t automatically give the Best Picture Oscar to the highest-grossing film. A popular medical treatment isn’t automatically an effective one; that’s why clinical evidence exists. We don’t evaluate a bridge by how many cars cross it on opening day, but by whether it holds up over time. Popularity tells us something, but not everything, about quality. In most fields, we accept that demand and quality are related but not interchangeable. Education policy should be held to the same standard of judgment.
How We Got Here
The current landscape didn’t appear overnight. It is the result of decades of policy decisions shaped by fear, faith in measurement, and a persistent search for scalable solutions. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk marked a turning point, framing public education as a system in decline and positioning schools as a primary threat to national competitiveness. While subsequent analysis has shown that the report relied on selective statistics and alarmist rhetoric, its influence was undeniable. It reshaped public perception, legitimized aggressive oversight, and embedded the idea that external pressure, rather than internal capacity, was the primary lever for improvement.
In the 1990s, charter schools emerged as a response to this climate. They were designed to introduce innovation and parental choice into a largely standardized system, operating with greater flexibility in exchange for performance-based accountability. Over time, charters have been alternately celebrated as engines of innovation and criticized as destabilizing forces (what’s most interesting is that both sides of the political spectrum have made identical arguments at different points), often through oversimplified narratives that obscure the diversity of charter models and outcomes. Regardless of where one falls in that debate, charter schools are now a permanent feature of the education landscape and a central component of choice-based reform.
More recently, microschools, learning pods, expanded homeschooling, and other boutique models have accelerated this trend, particularly in the aftermath of COVID-era disruptions. These models promise specialized instruction, flexible schedules, and smaller learning communities. Meanwhile, district schools remain bound to state accountability systems: standardized tests, reporting mandates, and compliance frameworks designed to ensure minimum standards and equity. These systems, while well-intentioned, have created rigid structures that often limit experimentation and adaptation.
The result is an increasingly uneven accountability environment. Choice-based models often operate with lighter, alternative, or less standardized oversight, while district schools continue to bear the full weight of testing and compliance regimes. When accountability applies asymmetrically, one of the essential conditions of a healthy choice system is lost: meaningful comparison. Without shared expectations for transparency and outcomes, enrollment growth is easily mistaken for quality, and the substantial work happening inside district schools remains largely invisible.
A No-Nonsense Look at Testing and Resources
Standardized testing dominates much of district life. Teachers spend hundreds of hours preparing students, administering assessments, and analyzing results (estimates place the amount of time at roughly 50 hours per teacher per year spent on preparing for, and administering, these tests). Budgets are stretched to cover testing infrastructure around reporting and compliance, resources that could otherwise support instruction or innovation. While much of the public bemoans the growing administrative class in schools, the real culprit in these swelling roles is the expansion of bureaucratic requirements.
In contrast, many charter and microschool models face lighter or alternative accountability requirements, or may be evaluated on different measures entirely. Charter schools are typically accountable to charter authorizers, who may have the ability to approve alternative or additional performance measures. The systems used to approve and oversee charter schools alone varies wildly from state to state, and the policy landscape for microschools is even less defined than charters. Comparing these models to district schools without accounting for these differences is like judging a marathon against a sprint. Skewed perceptions often follow: enrollment growth or popularity is mistaken for quality, and the intense work district schools do behind the scenes is overlooked.
In addition to the strain standardized testing has put on the time available to teachers, and their autonomy over the curriculum, there is also a financial point to consider. There isn’t a clear, national figure on how much of a district’s monetary budget goes to testing and compliance because states and districts allocate assessment costs differently and don’t report it in a uniform way (which is most convenient for testing companies, but much less so for everyone else). Across states and districts, billions of dollars are devoted to administering, scoring, reporting, and complying with standardized testing systems, despite broad skepticism among educators, researchers, and even policymakers about their value.
Reframing Accountability
Accountability should be reimagined as a twofold system:
Choice with Transparent Outcomes: Families’ decisions should be paired with clear, comparable data on student learning and school performance. Enrollment alone is not a reliable measure of quality. Transparent reporting ensures all stakeholders (parents, teachers, policymakers) can evaluate schools meaningfully. A well-designed choice system doesn’t just let families pick; it equips them to understand and act on outcomes.
Professional Autonomy for Educators: As choice expands, a logical counterbalance is to empower excellent teachers in district schools. Autonomy, rooted in professional judgment and evidence-based practice, allows those educators who are capable to innovate, respond to local needs, and pilot new initiatives. Autonomy does not eliminate accountability; it shifts the emphasis from procedural compliance to purposeful, teacher-led improvement. Schools with room to experiment can use evidence and iterative improvement to drive meaningful outcomes, rather than simply checking bureaucratic boxes. The major challenge associated with this branch of the proposed system is that we have dramatically lowered the standards for entry into the teaching profession for the past three decades, meaning we currently have an incomplete picture of teacher quality and/or capacity.
Toward a Grand Bargain
Imagine a system where choice and transparency coexist with meaningful teacher autonomy. Families make informed decisions based on accessible outcomes. District schools gain the room to innovate while adhering to clear, comparable metrics. Educators are trusted to lead, and accountability focuses on growth, impact, and continuous improvement.
This is the “grand bargain”: expanding choice while elevating the expertise of teachers, acknowledging the limits of compliance-heavy systems, and placing transparency at the center of accountability. While at first glance it may sound utopian, it’s actually a practical, equity-minded, and scalable solution. As a side benefit, imagine how we might redeploy some of the resources that have gone most wasted over the past few decades, time and finances, if we reimagined our accountability systems. A system designed this way adapts to change, serves all students, and supports educators in doing what they do best. A system like this would also improve teacher retention over time and elevate the profession to its rightful place.
Conclusion
Choice alone is not accountability, no matter how much we wish it to be. And compliance alone does not drive improvement, as evidenced by the past 30+ years of education reform. Real accountability lies in balancing transparency, informed choice, and professional autonomy. When families have the information they need and teachers have the authority to act, schools (and students) stop merely surviving and start truly thriving.
