Since K-12 accountability is the subject of my new book (shameless plug, there), I think there are some differences between K-12 and higher-ed accountability that are important to keep in mind, and it's probably not the differences you may think of right away:

1) The credentialist/vocational orientation of much of higher education helps buffer it from accountability. The critical features are not just that college students are adults but that they and the general public sees a college degree as a job credential. As a result, the burden for accomplishing things shifts dramatically between institution and student, and the main obligations of institutions revolve around access (to enrollment and to that credential). The irony is that all of us who grate at the vocational attitude of many students are in many ways buffered from scrutiny because of it.

2) Because of the infrastructure in higher ed, a reasonable, transparent form of accountability might be easier than in K-12. I've occasionally posed this thought experiment: let's replace annual testing with a random sample of the work that students do in everyday K-12 classrooms: pick students at random, give every school a scanner, enough masking tape to protect confidentiality (i.e., cover names), and a computer with the programs necessary to upload dozens of pages a day to a central state server where anyone can read the work that students do. Would that be accountability? "Yes" is the usual answer, "but that's unworkable. You can't summarize student achievement if you just have daily work." (That starts another conversation about why we trust test scores, but go read chapter 2 of the book for more.)

But what is unworkable in K-12 is eminently feasible for higher-ed: put the work of our graduates online (anonymously, of course), and let it show what students are doing and how we're responding. I'd feel a bit naked the first semester or two it happened, but there are various ways to protect academic freedom and have hard conversations about what we're expecting and whether students are meeting those expectations.

The first major change needed, before we start discussing accountability in K-12 education, is to ensure equal funding across the board. Let's establish a minimum per-student dollar amount, and then think about logarithms that could increase that amount in indirect proportion to the economic status of the community. Let's also ensure equal resources. Every classroom should have a computer cart with: (1) enough laptops for each student; (2) a router or Airport; (3) a projector; (4) a printer; (5) digital cameras (still and video); (6) a midi keyboard. For starters.

Then let's pay teachers a salary commensurate with their education. A masters degree is required, and teachers should earn at least as much as other professionals with masters degrees. Every school should have a Ph.D. in every content area.

Then let's work on curricula. Jerome Bruner's argument that we don't challenge our youngest students intellectually remains on target. Rigorous content should be scaffolded for students of every age. But we need to work on the humanities. Social studies needs to become a real synthesis of anthropology, sociology, history, and political science. We then need to move beyond the reading/English split. Let's have one course on "culture," by which I mean literature, music, visual art, philosophy, and so on. And then let's have another course on rhetoric, which will cover speech, composition, and grammar. Foreign languages should be required from K through 12.

Sports and gym should be funded separately, outside of schools, by communities. Let's have rec centers for after-school sports.

Finally, let's organize many public schools as boarding schools. Students need to get away from families, from communities, and experience new environments. This shouldn't be only for poor kids, or urban kids, or children with behaviorial problems.

I totally agree about funding sports elsewhere, as well as about the boarding concept. I have long wished it were more possible for kids from disfunctional environments to get out and get a fresh start. My year teaching in a boarding school was eye-opening in this regard. A lot of the kids there were scholarship kids from poor urban areas; many were from Harlem. The school was their shot at getting out of a dead end life, and they knew it, and their families knew it, and they treasured it, and it worked. But the economics of this were debilitating; the school had no real endowment, and relied on the income from tuition-paying parents to cover the costs of scholarship kids (scholarships at this school were entirely need-based). That's a dangerous game to play, especially when the corners that got cut to make things work involved essentials like teacher salaries. Teachers at this school were lucky to make more than $25,000 / year. Beginning teachers made quite a bit less. That's not a viable model for attracting and keeping the kind of faculty needed to make a school of that sort work. I'd be curious to learn more about what an effort to publically fund boarding schools would look like.

I have a hard time getting my head around public boarding schools. It would require a radical switch in funding formulas, and would be at most a curiousity. But I am all for letting flowers bloom.

What would public boarding schools below HS look like? I simply can't imagine it, having raised only one child.

Better that we work to solve issues of poverty and so forth, that keen observers of public education such as Sherman Dorn and David Berliner say are the real elephants in the room.