Regulatory Accountability involves policies and regulations instituted by the government.
Market accountability involves feedback from the people who actually consume your services and products. Regulatory accountability is checklist accountability. You can take a document, see what it requires of you, and check off the items. The public school system prefers this kind of accountability. It’s largely administrative, and it doesn’t require the approval of parents. It doesn’t value agility. It’s top-down. Market accountability is much more difficult to achieve. To be accountable to the market is to figure out what people want and to consistently meet their expectations. That’s tough. Let’s take these two kinds of accountability outside of the public school system to look at them closer. You want to start a restaurant. You’re going to have to deal with both regulatory accountability and market accountability. Regulatory Accountability: Remit taxes, train and compensate employees, keep up with food handling and safety requirements, obey minimum wage laws, allow inspections from the county, follow terms of your lease, file business license paperwork and fees, etc. That’s the easy part. The hard part is dealing with market accountability. Sure, you can file all of your paperwork and meet the terms of your lease, but can you be accountable to customers? You’ll have to figure out what kind of food they want, and you’ll have to prepare it the same way every time they come. You’ll have to train your employees to treat customers well, or your customers will never come back. This is the hard part, and it’s the reason only the best restaurants survive. Very few restaurants go out of business because they don’t comply with regulations. Public schools are good at following regulations. So are private schools. If you look at the NDE website, you’ll find all kinds of regulations for both public and private schools. The following are screenshots of some of the current regulations governing private schools in Nebraska, according to the NDE website. 
Private schools have to deal with both regulatory and market accountability because they’re competing with other private schools for the same few customers. Only a few families in Nebraska can afford to send their children to private school, and the schools have to be attractive to those who can choose.
The public schools don’t have to deal with market accountability, and this is a major reason they fight against school choice. What would happen if low- and middle-income families suddenly had the option of sending their children to non-district schools? The district public schools would suddenly be subject to the whims of the market, and that’s the last thing they want. But it’s the best thing for parents and kids. I want to play you a clip from a local news program in Utah where they have public charter schools. Public charter schools are open to all students and they don’t require tuition. Because of their presence, public schools have learned to deal with the hard kind of accountability, and the results are great. In this clip, a principal at a district public high school talks up his school’s offerings because it’s just about time for parents to make their decisions about school for next year.
...Can you hear the difference between reulatory accountability (which administrators in Utah also have to deal with) and market accountability (which prompts district public schools to develop the kinds of programs parents want?)
Before we moved to Nebraska, we lived in Colorado, which has had market accountability in K-12 eductation since 1992 in the form of charter schools. Our kids attended both district and charter schools there, and I can tell you that the environment is totally different. In both kinds of schools, teachers and administrators are keenly interested in what parents want. Of course they still have regulatory accountability, but that’s not what makes the difference. It’s market accountability that matters. When there’s market accountability, all children benefit. The kids in district public schools benefit because principals are suddenly interested in turning their schools into institutions that can compete with every other option out there. It’s a win-win! I can hear the Nebraska administrators from here. They’re saying Whoa whoa whoa--what about the third kind of accountability, school boards elected by the public. In some places, I imagine there might be a tiny bit of accountability that comes from school board members, but here in Nebraska, it doesn’t exist. In fact, from what I’ve seen here in Lincoln, the school board works against parents, not for us. They stand shoulder to shoulder with administrators and even the media to squash the concerns of parents and rubber stamp everything the district wants. Regulatory accountability is nice for government employees, but it can be pretty awful for parents and students. I’m going to pronounce an understatement here: when I ran for school board in Lincoln, the district didn’t want me to win. One day I got a phone call from someone at district administration. She said something like this: “The Lincoln Journal Star called and asked us for some information about your children’s enrollment at LPS. Under policy blah blah blah, we can give certain student information to the media. We’re not calling to ask permission. We’ve already done it. We just wanted to let you know.” Oh, okay. You’re using a regulation to leak minors’ information to the media. Got it. Nice accountability. After the Lincoln Journal Star’s article was printed, containing my kids’ student information, a local radio talk show host called me and asked how the newspaper got the information. I told him about the phone call from the district, and he couldn’t believe it. He was furious on my behalf. Why would the newspaper be in on this regulatory-based effort to intimidate a candidate for school board? Newspaper reporting doesn’t pay much these days, but if you’re friendly to the school district, you can springboard into a lucrative career at the district. Mary Kay Roth worked as a reporter at the Journal Star and then transitioned to LPS to be Communications Director. In 2017, she made $102,451 at the school district. I’m guessing that’s at least double what she made at the Lincoln Journal Star. It’s all so cozy in the regulatory world, free from market accountability. I’m excited for the time when we have market accountability in Nebraska. Innovation will flourish, and more kids will find schools that meet their needs.
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Howard Fuller gets it.
He attended the November Elizabeth Warren rally held at Clark Atlanta University. The rally was billed as a recognition of the historic role of black women in protest. And a group of black women (and men) ended up protesting at the rally. They protested Warren’s recently unveiled education plan, which curtails charter schools. Here’s what Fuller experienced (as published in The 74 Million): “Sitting in that gym, listening and absorbing all of it, was in some ways surreal. We had a section in the bleachers. There were probably about 175 people from the parent network. There was a huge electronic sign above the stage saying black women are valued, and then Elizabeth Warren’s name under it: Elizabeth Warren values black women. The whole program was set up to honor black women who had engaged in struggle over time. All these speakers had been lavishing praise on Warren, how she was going to fight for all of us and, “We got to flip the table, create a new table.” I’m sitting there saying to myself, “You’re talking about all this struggle, yet you’re pursuing a policy that denies the self-determination of black women.” For me, the whole rally was a contradiction. That for me was surreal.” 
Here in Nebraska, we’ve seen the same script play out. Privileged white women like Connie Duncan and Kathy Campbell claim to “advocate for women” while actively working to make sure only wealthy mothers have school choice. If they genuinely cared about women, they would help women with one of their biggest worries (their kids’ education). Duncan’s situation parallels Warren’s even further: both women sent their own children to private school but work to prevent low-income kids from having the same opportunities.
Back to Fuller: Fuller accompanied Sarah Carpenter to another room where she visited with Elizabeth Warren (see the video here). “She [Carpenter] was really just pouring out her heart, right? And she said, she being Sarah, “Your children probably went to a private school.” Warren said to her, in a manner that tried to make Sarah feel uninformed and stupid, “No, my kids went to public school,” and then patted her hand. If you look at the video, you’ll see it. I didn’t know at that moment of time she was lying about the school situation of her child, that came out later. But it was just — how can we say we value black women and treat Sarah the way that she did? It was disgusting." 
Nebraska parents have dealt with this patronizing attitude for far too long. When parents ask for more options, we’re met with insulting responses like, “Nebraska already has school choice.”
But it doesn’t stop there. Instead of just trying to placate parents with insulting platitudes, the Nebraska elite goes one step further and accuses parents of being paid to advocate for choice. It must be unthinkable to our state’s comfortable elite that parents would stand up to the status quo simply because they love their children. Money must be involved, right? Just a few weeks ago, we got some comments on our blog posts that illustrate this. 
And it’s certainly not the first time. From the beginning of our grassroots parent organization, people have asked who funds us. We don’t have funding. We’re not a non-profit. We’re parents who love our children. We trust parents and believe they will make better decisions for kids than faraway administrators and politicians possibly could.
And Fuller sees the “money attacks” for what they are. Again from the 74 Million piece: “The second thing is, there was, of course, reference to Dr. Martin Luther King and his struggles. And what’s really interesting is the way that J. Edgar Hoover attacked Martin Luther King was to accuse him of being funded by the communists. In my way of looking at the world, they’re using the same playbook, whether it’s Elizabeth Warren or [her] so-called progressive supporters, the same playbook. We don’t talk about the issues that people are raising, like the right of self-determination, the failure of the traditional system to educate their children, the need for them to have the same powers to choose that Warren had for her own child. They don’t want to talk about that. They want to try to get you caught up in, “Well, they must be here because the Waltons paid them to be here,” or, “They’re paid provocateurs.” It’s an old tactic. That playbook has been used over and over against people who tried to make a change in the status quo, and what’s interesting is, you could ask anybody in there, “Who pays you?” or “How did you get here?” or “Who paid for these buses?” or whatever. But I assume that people are there because they believe in whatever it is they’re talking about, not because somebody paid them.” We have politicians like Elizabeth Warren right here in Nebraska
Nebraska state senator Lynne Walz chose to send her children to Archbishop Bergan Catholic School in Fremont. This school prides itself on “recognizing the individual learning styles and abilities of each student.” With a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1, it’s very possible to do so. This is the kind of attention and focus that many parents would like for their children.
Surely, Lynne Walz is a conscientious parent, just like Elizabeth Warren. She trusts herself to make good decisions about her own kids, and fortunately, she has the means to carry out her plans. When it came to tax-credit scholarships for low-income families, however, Walz stuck with the teachers’ union, which cannot abide any competition. Despite the fact that tax-credit scholarships save states money (Georgia has saved between $12 million and $85 million; Florida saves $144 million every year because of its tax-credit scholarships), Walz said, "If you really have any interest in reducing property taxes, you would agree LB670 is a step in the wrong direction," according to the Lincoln Journal Star. It’s simply not true. When the state saves money on educating students (by allowing parents to use less-expensive schools and encouraging private donations for funding tuition), we don’t need to collect as many property taxes. Why would a private-school mom make such a silly argument? We certainly can’t speak for Walz. We wonder, however, if her endorsement from the NSEA has anything to do with it. Money talks. Apparently, it’s more persuasive than moms and dads trying to do right by their kids. 
Unfortunately, we’re used to this kind of hypocrisy in Nebraska, a state where many millions of dollars are spent on PR campaigns for our monopoly public school system each year. We’ll let Fuller have the last word on hypocrisy:
“I’m used to it. It’s just another example of the hypocrisy that exists among so many so-called progressives and liberals. Elizabeth Warren, when you read what she’s talking about eliminating: She doesn’t want to have vouchers. She doesn’t want to have tax credits. Which would be the only way that most poor parents could get their kid to a private school, like she was able to do for her child. That to me, is the hypocrisy. And she knows it’s hypocritical. That’s why she lied.” |
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