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Many readers of EdSource know that a variety of factors have combined to put rethinking accountability on state leaders’ to-do list. But most people don’t understand what is really at stake. It’s not just about whether we add measures of “college and career readiness” to the API. This is a worthy goal, but the issue of accountability is much bigger than that.  Accountability isn’t just testing; it’s the whole structure of rules and regulations that govern school districts. Here’s why that matters.

Let’s start with some history. School district central offices were invented to manage the aspects of schooling that surrounded teaching and learning: budgeting, hiring, buildings, buses, books, etc. The assumption was that what happened in the classroom was the responsibility of the teachers. Later, district offices were also charged with administering federal funds and ensuring that a growing set of requirements were met. Together, these roles ensured that districts would use a hierarchical structure and standardized rules, processes and procedures and focus on managing the inputs to the education process. At the time, no one...

The unacknowledged crisis in public education is not teacher quality but teacher motivation. The engine of any major change process in any human system is people. We cannot change education without the enthusiastic and heartfelt participation of teachers, administrators, and, ultimately, students. As longtime reformer Michael Fullan puts it in a recent paper, “The key to system-wide success is to situate the energy of educators and students as the central driving force. This means aligning the goals of reform and the central motivation of participants.”

This should be obvious. But one result of the last decade of “education reform” has been to discourage, demoralize, and disempower teachers. Any review of any of the various surveys of teachers confirms this. If still in doubt, do your own data collection: Find a teacher and ask. Then put yourself in their place. Outsiders to education may think that including test score data as part of teacher evaluation makes obvious sense – but coming on top of a decade of focus on...

It often seems as if the rest of the nation – and certainly education policymakers in Washington – wants to avert its eyes from California. Many of the large national foundations have stopped or curtailed their investments here, and the federal government seems to have followed suit: California has yet to receive Race to the Top money, there is no word on California’s request for a waiver on NCLB, and when researchers cite “cutting-edge” work, it is usually happening somewhere else. The message we get is that state policy in general and education policy in particular in California is pretty much a mess and until we get our house in order, we shouldn’t expect either any help or any respect. The fact that six million kids go to school here is apparently their tough luck.

But there is another story about California and it is the one entitled “The Future Happens Here First.” I don’t mean just in Silicon Valley, though that’s part of it. I mean the future of education often happens in California schools and school districts first. Looking back, major forces like large-scale demographic change and the explosion of students learning English in our schools hit here first, and we adapted to the challenge of teaching children speaking some 150 languages. Policy change also happens here first:  California adopted the...