School Accountability Is Back: Here’s Why It’s Key to Restoring Public Trust
Public education is central to 'the most elemental promises of our 250-year-old creed,’ and making it answer for student outcomes would go a long way.
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You probably know that it’s been a choppy semiquincentennial summer here in the District of Columbia. The National Mall’s and the made national news. There’s been less coverage of the degree to which the capital’s bunkered down — fences and barriers have made walking the Mall impossible, and heavily armed National Guard patrols are everywhere.
Long story short, our divisions and the dysfunctional governance are painfully, visibly real.
As we start the country’s 251st year, we need to restore public confidence in the effectiveness and legitimacy of our whole political system. That starts by showing the country that American public institutions can work, that they can do the jobs that our democratic officials set for them — and deliver the opportunities and outcomes that the public expects of them.
We need a firm commitment to public accountability in every possible sense. That means more firmly committing to holding our public systems — including K–12 education — accountable to serving public goals.
Sure, the solution to America’s flagging social cohesion must be more than new school accountability pilot programs. Of course. That would be like bringing a screwdriver to a hazmat cleanup. Our social tensions are far beyond .
But the depth and breadth of America’s problems now are also why school reforms have a role in resolving our troubles. Public education is uniquely central to the most elemental promises of our 250-year-old creed. If America means anything, it means that people who work hard, follow the rules and find solutions to persistent problems get rewarded. Public schools are our most tangible collective commitment to that promised — however imperfectly — American Dream. Surely that’s something we can all agree on.
Indeed, if Americans are divided now, it’s at least partly because that basic bargain isn’t as robust as it once was. A kid who grinds out years of K–12 schooling now can’t count on a . Work hard now, and she still might not be able to cover her health care costs, let alone buy a house where there are good jobs or save up for retirement.
Young Americans feel the frustration. , the share of young Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track has been three to four times greater than the share of young Americans who think we’re going in the right direction. What’s more, just 30% of respondents said that they expect to do better than their parents, financially speaking. also broad pessimism about public schools.
A path forward for schools will require rebuilding public confidence in the public education system’s ability to deliver upward mobility to students — to future graduates — who show up, work hard and follow the rules.
How? Local, state and federal policymakers need to set compelling, transparent goals for K–12 systems that reflect families’ actual priorities for kids and schools. For instance, fashionable as it might be to posit that public education needs to be remade with AI and other ed tech tools, about in schools is growing. Leaders can’t persuade families that schools are on the right track by ignoring the things families really want.
And what might those be? While recently took to The New York Times’ opinion page to argue against the country’s accountability focus on math and reading scores under No Child Left Behind, it’s worth exploring whether Wiener has his finger fully on the public pulse. After all, when the Pew Research Center asked what’s taking schools in the wrong direction, more parents — — said that “schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.”
I’ve long suspected that the pandemic reset American families’ views on schools and testing. Months of uncertain instruction and learning — and a drumbeat of media coverage about the pandemic’s impacts on student learning — left many families eager for more information about how their children were faring. Without some sort of standardized assessment, it’s almost impossible to efficiently track how students are doing. This is easier to appreciate after a major disruption like the pandemic — subjective evaluations or holistic, local rubrics are unlikely to provide useful, comparable data on students’ progress.
We might not want to return to No Child Left Behind, but education leaders should consider whether schools need stronger incentives to get kids on track in core subjects. It’s not enough to establish public education goals — policymakers also need to make them matter for schools and educators. Whichever priorities we set for schools, we need to 1) track their progress towards these, and 2) build systems that provide resources and pressure for educators to prioritize that progress.
To work best, accountability requires clarity about the outcomes we want to see. Effective school accountability systems need goals for student growth and benchmarks for academic achievement in each grade. Data on schools’ progress towards those goals should be published in easily accessible formats. Schools that persistently fall short shouldn’t be punished as they might have been under No Child Left Behind — instead, they should be given supplemental resources with strict strings attached that lead to meaningful school-level changes that will support better student learning.
That’s accountability, and it’s a key element for building trust in public systems.
If policymakers want Americans to believe in public institutions, they need to build safeguards like these for showing how these institutions serve the public interest. Notably, the simple, blunt, unlovely, unloved, imperfect No Child Left Behind accountability era coincided with , including for .
Then, after — over my warnings, for what it’s worth — Congress replaced those priorities with a much looser, lower-accountability system under the Every Student Succeeds Act, . (For the record, I was unimpressed, even back then.)
A quarter millennium’s a long time, during which the American experiment has substantially evolved more than once. Like the 2026 reflecting pool — which has been — our collective project needs much more than a fresh coat of paint.
To move forward, we need to reduce our suspicions of one another, increase our levels of social trust and reimagine just what it is we’re trying to be together as a country. That means rebuilding trust in public, democratically accountable systems. Where better to rebuild that faith than in public education?
The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations.
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Conor P. Williams is a researcher based in Washington, D.C. He was previously a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group and a first-grade public school teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
