Real School Accountability Puts Families First

Arkansas has been a national leader on education freedom, but a bill before the state Legislature would be a step in the wrong direction.

In 2023, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed into law the Arkansas LEARNS initiative, an ambitious education reform package that expanded education choice, restructured teacher compensation to pay more for performance, prohibited Arkansas public schools from indoctrinating students, and more. Following these reforms, Arkansas moved up from No. 13 to No. 4 in the nation on The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card.

Underlying these reforms was a philosophical approach to education that trusts parents over bureaucrats. As explained in the Phoenix Declaration, the “highest form of accountability is when schools are answerable directly to well-informed parents.” By contrast, the policies proposed in Arkansas House Bill 1672 take a more technocratic approach.

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The bill under consideration seeks “to create a more efficient system” for charter schools and public schools of innovation. Among the many reforms in the bill are provisions that would eliminate waivers for charter schools that received a “D” or “F” on the state’s A-F grading system, and would automatically close charter schools that received an “F” three years in a row.

At first glance, such measures seem sensible. After all, who wants failing schools to continue operating? But top-down accountability systems don’t work. The ship of regulatory accountability usually founders on either the Scylla of standardization or the Charybdis of meaninglessness. Either way, it fails to regulate schools into quality.

Regulatory accountability in education is often too rigid, applying a one-size-fits-all framework that fails to account for the vast differences among schools and the populations they serve. Standards designed with the median school in mind disregard the unique challenges faced by schools geared toward the students who are the most difficult to teach. By focusing on compliance over meaningful improvement, such inflexible systems ultimately undermine the goal of fostering diverse and effective educational environments, especially for those students most in need. 

A prime example of this is the Rainshadow Charter High School in Reno, Nevada. Rainshadow’s mission was to serve the hardest-to-teach students, and it succeeded tremendously at keeping at-risk kids out of prison or even worse fates. Yet in 2016, due to a law very similar to the one Arkansas lawmakers are now considering, Nevada bureaucrats almost shuttered it for low performance. As Max Eden, then of the Manhattan Institute, explained:

Rainshadow earns the lowest possible rank on Nevada’s state ranking system in large part because of its low graduation rate. But 75% of students who transfer to Rainshadow in grades 10-12 enter credit deficient. Per federal requirements, Nevada calculates its graduation rate by the percentage of students who finish high school in four years. This makes perfect sense for monitoring a public school, but much less sense for a charter school such as Rainshadow where students often require a fifth year to graduate, yet are considered “dropouts” by the state.

Nevada law requires that the state shut down any charter school that earns the lowest possible ranking on the state system for three years in a row. This law, and laws like it in other states, would all but doom charter high schools like Rainshadow that serve and prioritize the most at-risk students.

Fortunately, after hearing the moving stories of the students Rainshadow served, the charter school board decided to allow it to remain open. But if policies proposed in HB 1672 were to become law, the students attending a similar charter school in Arkansas might not be so fortunate.

Top-down accountability systems also face the opposite peril: getting watered down so much they are meaningless. Take Arizona’s A-F grading system, for example. As my Heritage colleague Matthew Ladner has observed, Arizona’s grading formula “makes no sense” and “hands out approximately 120 ‘A’ grades for every ‘F’ grade,” despite lagging scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Yet although eighth grade students at Arizona district schools were the equivalent of a grade level behind the national average on the most recent NAEP math assessment, Arizona charter school students were a grade level ahead of the national average. 

Unlike technocratic charter sectors in other states, Arizona’s lightly regulated “Wild West” charter sector relies on bottom-up accountability. Although Arizona grants 15-year charters, the vast majority of charter school closures in the state are in the first five years of operation—closed not by bureaucrats looking at metrics, but by parents voting with their feet. 

The debate over accountability in education ultimately boils down to trust—do we trust bureaucracies to improve schools, or do we trust families to make the best decisions for their children? While top-down accountability seeks to impose quality through regulation, bottom-up accountability fosters quality through choice and competition.

As the Trump administration is taking steps to shutter the U.S. Department of Education, the locus of control in education is shifting away from distant bureaucrats and back toward states, local communities, and parents. If Arkansas lawmakers genuinely want an education system that prioritizes student success, they should eschew technocratic tinkering and empower families to hold schools accountable from the bottom up.