My colleagues at Democrats for Education Reform are planning a panel discussion with the Fordham Institute on July 25 on how charter schools are – and should be – held accountable. This is an important topic that too often suffers from confusion about what we mean by accountability.Accountability is comprised of two interdependent factors: government regulations and consumer choice (in this case, school choice). Their interdependence is such that as one goes up, the other goes down. Industries that are highly regulated tend to have less choice, while industries that have robust choice are usually less regulated. My favorite example is phone service in the 1950s versus phone service today. In the 1950s, every community had only one phone company and since there was no choice, these companies were highly regulated. Today we have a plethora of phone companies and plans to choose from. Consequently, today’s companies are far less regulated than their predecessors.
So the challenge in every sector, be it banking, medicine, telecommunications or education, is finding the proper accountability balance between government regulations and consumer choice.
Achieving this ideal balance is more complicated in public education because we are going through a transition in which some schools are operating in a highly regulated environment (e.g., neighborhood district schools), while others are operating in a more choice-driven environment (e.g., charter and private schools). These differing accountability balances are creating political tensions, especially since district schools are increasingly competing with charter, private and virtual schools for students. If district schools are going to be exposed to more choice accountability, they want charter schools to operate under more regulatory accountability.
Similar tensions existed between East and West German organizations immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
East German businesses were use to high regulations and little consumer choice, while West German businesses were accustomed to fewer regulations and more choice. When the Wall came down, East German businesses found themselves struggling to compete with West German businesses that were better able to adjust to changing consumer needs.
A unified Germany’s solution to this imbalance was not to apply the East German regulatory system to West German businesses, but to reduce regulations on East German businesses and help them become more customer focused. This is also the best approach for solving the accountability imbalances we’re seeing between district and charter schools.
Instead of increasing regulations on charter schools, we should move toward every district school becoming a choice school and reducing their regulatory burdens until district and charter schools are operating under the same regulatory/choice accountability system. Washington, D.C. School Chancellor Kaya Henderson made a similar point last week in a discussion with the D.C. City Council.
“I sit here at this table and people tell me that charters are eating my lunch,” Henderson said, referring to charter schools’ higher graduation rates and standardized-test results. If total freedom from union contracts and municipal regulations is helping charters succeed, she said, “why can’t I have the authority to do that too?”
While we wait for district schools to make the transition Chancellor Henderson is calling for, we should accept that in the interim, charter and district schools will have differing amounts of regulatory and choice accountability.
