Can you balance accountability and innovation in education reform?

When public money is used to fund education, then there should be an expectation that this funding will be used for the public good, and that is what accountability is for. And innovation should be the catalyst to use this funding in even better ways for the public good. Yet, in my experience of being the system architect of several innovative schools, there has clearly been tension between how regulations attempt to have accountability vs. being able to innovate within a school to have greater and better outcomes for all involved. Thankfully there are ways to shape policy to go beyond "balancing" and to instead have accountability support true innovation, in which good innovation has more accountability to society than the status quo.

I believe accountability starts with the educational system being accountable to the students and their parents. While people love to mention college access in Europe, they fail to address that in most of those nations, they operate on a “school choice” model rather than a public institution. As a result there is competition to retain the best teachers or to focus on certain types of learning to attract students. If every student is assigned a dollar amount, leave it to investors or businesses to try and attract students. The current public school model adds confusion to young people as public schools don’t support the beliefs of the students and their families. Told to respect authority, when the authority conflicts with family….

The major source of friction between accountability and innovation, is that accountability tends to be "do xyz this way", which stops xyz from being done a different more innovative manner. Or else, accountability has a school reach a minimum value on an internal quantitative outcome, such as test scores. This second form of accountability, in theory, allows for more innovation, except these tests fail to determine whether the learning ultimately contributes to the public good. These issues can be mitigated through using external measures instead of internal ones, such as wages earned after graduation. But true external measures often have too long of a time horizon, and they can often be gamed. So those issues still need to be addressed.

The potential benefits to society are too great for us to throw up our hands and say "it isn't possible to have innovation in the public sector". Free market capitalists will have you believe that only businesses can innovate because of a clear measure of profit, and Darwinian factors where only the best survive. This has a whole bunch of false assumptions. But so does the assumptions that underlay most socialist philosophies. If we build accountability systems that take the best of both philosophies, and find synergy where possible between accountability and innovation, and strategically choose the trade-offs to mitigate unintended consequences, then society and our world will benefit more

Accountability can encourage innovation by measuring external outcomes, such as graduate wages and happiness. But these take a long time to see, so they must be supplemented with internal measures that have very strong correlations to the appropriate external measures, and also have clear causation to these external measures. But this accountability can still be gamed, such as a school only accepting wealthy students. Or these measures can penalize schools trying to serve the most unserved. To reduce this problem, value-added measures should be used. But as California found, these can be fiendishly difficult to do with validity. So accountability still needs rules of what should not be done, to reduce unethical behavior in school leaders.

Charter schools in California have shown both success and failure in accountability and innovation. On the side of success, there are charter schools whose innovations led to vastly better external outcomes, such as college enrollment. This has been facilitated by the laws reducing traditional regulations on charter schools, and instead to focus on results. There have been failures, where corrupt people running charter schools have sought to get rich at the expense of the tax payer without benefiting society. There has also been the failure of how despite the legislation wanting charter schools to be encouraged, the financial motive for school districts is to block them. And we still have the problem that we measure the wrong outcomes.