Accountability Through a Picture Window.

Education is the nation's No. 1 worry, according to nearly every survey of public opinion. And discussions about reforming it are saturated with talk about accountability.

Some view accountability as the third rail of the reform movement, others as the Holy Grail. School administrators at both the district and school levels bear the brunt of much of this debate.

Yet accountability is perhaps the most elusive concept in education: Who holds whom accountable for what, decides what's important to be accountable for and determines the rewards and sanctions?

Today's modal form of public school accountability depends primarily on rules and compliance: Make schools follow lots of regulations, micromanage their activities and ensure that bureaucratic controls keep anyone from doing anything untoward. This language of accountability-via-regulation is the one that most school systems speak.

But the systemic reform movement's effort to set high standards that all young people should meet, combined with the spread of public school choice exemplified in strategies like independent charter schools and autonomous small schools, invite a different approach to accountability.

Plentiful Information

This approach is propelled mostly by public marketplaces in which a school's clients and stakeholders reward its successes, punish its failures, and send it signals about what needs to change. The main function of such a system is to furnish parents, policymakers, taxpayers and others with plentiful information about each school's effectiveness so that good schools can be found and sustained while bad ones can be repaired or removed.

This approach we call accountability via transparency--that is, a regimen in which so much is visible in each school that its many watchers and constituents (including families, staff, board members, sponsors, the press and rival schools) can and routinely do "regulate" it through market-style mechanisms rather than command-and-control structures.

What's needed is an education analogue to the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, otherwise known as GAAP, by which private-sector firms and many nonprofit organizations report information on their activities and results using standardized formats, taxonomies and independent audits with uniform definitions and common information categories. Call it Generally Accepted Accountability Principles for Education, or GAAPE, a carefully designed information-based approach requiring mandatory disclosure and producing what Mary Graham, a research fellow at Harvard and Georgetown, called "regulation by shaming" in her Atlantic Monthly article of the same name.

The idea behind GAAPE is that, even as individual schools have wideranging freedom to govern themselves, they also remain accountable via the marketplace, thanks to transparency. GAAPE affords everyone concerned with a school a picture window through which to see what's actually happening there and how well it is working. Instead of a brick wall around such information, the school is surrounded by glass.

Levels of Disclosure

GAAPE should operate at public education's key levels, with each routinely disclosing accurate and timely information:

* The school presents information about its educational program, fiscal soundness, organizational viability and compliance with the law, with ground zero being student academic performance.

* The district compiles comparable information about all of its schools on those same issues, including how it monitors and proposes to create new schools or intervene in failing schools, with the monitoring process incorporating regular school visits by outside reviewers who produce written public reports (akin to the British Inspectorate tradition).

* The state releases comparable statewide and regional information about its overall education program, including student testing results, district audits and independent evaluations of the quality, efficiency and impact of the program.

* The federal government monitors and regularly reports comparable information on the condition and progress of the whole of American education,

Evidence of Performance

Accountability via transparency has two complementary dimensions: internal accountability--the daily shared relationships and experiences that exist between staff and parents that make the school work well for students; and external accountability--the school's obligation to keep its commitments to taxpayers at large. Transparency facilitates and informs internal accountability and makes external accountability possible.

As in arms control, the credo of such an accountability system should be "trust but verify"--that is, the system gives schools plenty of freedom and it signals basic confidence in what they will do with their freedom. But such trust is inseparable from people's level of comfort that the school is telling the truth. Trust must be backed by hard evidence and reliable information.

Much remains to be done on the accountability front throughout U.S. public education. GAAPE is a new way to assemble the education accountability puzzle. The key is transparency: collecting and assembling vital information about school performance using a standard taxonomy and sharing it with a variety of audiences in a way that is easily understood.

This means pushing information out regularly and not forcing people to tug to get it; communicating regularly via annual reports, newsletters and interactive Web sites; answering informal inquiries; and meeting formal requirements. Sure, there is risk of data overload, but this is a lesser danger than suffocating from lack of information or falling back on command-and-control strategies and accountability via regulation.

Bruno Manno is senior program associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 701 St. Paul St., Baltimore, Md. 21202. E-mail: [e-mail]. Chester Finn is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute. Gregg Vanourek is a staff member at PremierSchool.com in Reston, Va. They are co-authors of Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education.