The Accountability Gap
Minnesota's school accountability system is built around the idea that competition and local control will drive improvement. Twenty years of data say otherwise. Recently, Minnesota legislators, politicians and pundits have attributed massive fraud to a lack of accountability. Minnesota's traditional public school districts are subject to a robust financial accountability system, and fraud is rare. However, when it comes to delivering an adequate education to students with higher educational needs, true accountability is largely missing. It might easily be argued, that the damage to Minnesota arising from lack of educational accountability is more serious than the financial fraud recently discovered.
Of all the elements of school finance reform, accountability is perhaps the most politically fraught. In Minnesota, accountability has long been equated with interference — an imposition of state mandates on the professional judgment of local educators and the democratic authority of locally elected school boards.
This attachment to local control is genuine, and the values behind it — community responsiveness, democratic governance, respect for teacher professionalism — are real. The problem is that those values, pursued without a parallel commitment to outcomes, have produced a system in which persistent failure continues without meaningful consequence. The students who suffer most are the ones with the least power to demand change.
This post examines Minnesota's current accountability system, explains why it has not worked, and describes what a genuine accountability infrastructure — one that supports and challenges local educators rather than simply watching from a distance — would look like.
What Minnesota's Current System Looks Like
Minnesota's accountability system rests primarily on two mechanisms: school choice and public reporting. The theory is that if parents can choose among schools, districts will compete for students and that competition will drive improvement. And if test scores and graduation rates are published publicly, embarrassment and community pressure will motivate underperforming districts to do better.
Neither mechanism has worked as intended.
Open enrollment and charter schools now serve about 10% of Minnesota's public school students. But the Research Appendix documentation is clear: school choice and charters have not produced the systemic changes necessary to make progress in closing the achievement gap. In 2024, the Minneapolis Star Tribune released a report criticizing the lack of accountability of Minnesota charter schools specifically. Competition has not driven system-wide improvement in outcomes for the students who need it most.
The public reporting mechanism — embodied most recently in the World's Best Workforce Act (now renamed Comprehensive Achievement and Civic Readiness) — has fared no better. A devastating 2022 report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor documented the system's fundamental inadequacy:
"Many schools see the WBWF report as a 'check-the-box activity,' not as a strategic planning imperative."
— Office of the Legislative Auditor, 2022
The auditor found that at the time of its review, MDE had allocated exactly one Full Time Equivalent staff position to World's Best Workforce administration. One person to oversee a statewide accountability system for over 2,100 schools. The auditor also found that MDE lacked any clear authority to intervene when districts set unambitious goals or failed to meet the goals they set. Districts were required to write plans. They were not required to implement them effectively. There were no meaningful consequences for failure. Recent data suggests that the MDE report to the legislature itself cost approximately $4,268 to prepare, including staff time, printing and mailing expenses. That's a very small figure for a statewide accountability report covering nearly 500 districts, suggesting the staff investment in review is minimal.
A January 2025 report summarizes how districts use these reports. It suggests that in many districts the CACR is indeed a check the box procedure.
Minnesota's Regional Centers of Excellence (RCE) represent the strongest element of the state's school support infrastructure. Staffed by specialists in literacy, math, special education, English language development, and school leadership, the Centers provide on-the-ground coaching and capacity building that goes well beyond what most districts could assemble on their own. By most accounts, their work is substantive and valued.
The problem is who they reach — and who they don't.
Under Minnesota's North Star accountability system, RCE support is triggered primarily for schools in the bottom 5 percent of Title I performance statewide, plus high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. This is a deliberately narrow threshold, and the statewide proficiency data suggest it leaves a great deal of preventable failure unaddressed. As of 2025, fewer than half of Minnesota students are meeting grade-level expectations in math and reading — 43 percent in math and 48 percent in reading — essentially unchanged from 2023 and 2024, and proficiency rates remain roughly 10 percentage points below where they were before the pandemic. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has described Minnesota's educational disparities as deep, wide, and persistent, noting that they span all parts of the state and all types of schools, whether district or charter.
Against that backdrop, a support system calibrated only to the worst 5 percent is not a system designed for broad improvement — it is a floor, not a framework. The hundreds of districts and charter schools operating in the middle tier, where proficiency rates are chronically low but not catastrophically so, receive no independent review, no external coaching, and no structured accountability beyond the self-reported CACR process described earlier in this post. The result is a large population of students attending schools that are failing them in measurable ways, with no systematic mechanism to trigger outside help.
The Minneapolis situation illustrates a second structural flaw, one that compounds the first. Twenty of Minneapolis Public Schools' roughly 96 schools were identified for comprehensive support — the highest level of state intervention — including 11 elementary schools. That concentration is striking: no other district in the state comes close to that number of comprehensively identified schools. Yet schools identified for support in Minneapolis work with their own district leadership on school improvement, while all other schools work with state-funded staff in the Regional Centers of Excellence.
This carve-out for large urban districts undermines the very logic of the support system. The RCE model exists precisely because outside expertise and independent perspective are essential when a school cannot diagnose and fix its own problems. Redirecting that support through the same district leadership that presided over years of underperformance removes the independent intervention that struggling schools most need. MPS is simultaneously managing a major school transformation initiative and a budget gap that required a one-time draw of $55 million from assigned fund balances — hardly conditions under which district leadership can be expected to mount rigorous self-directed improvement across 20 chronically underperforming schools.
Taken together, these two design choices — a 5 percent threshold that ignores widespread middle-tier failure, and a Minneapolis exception that routes improvement work back through the district itself — leave Minnesota's most vulnerable students with the least access to independent, expert support. A more effective system would lower the threshold for RCE engagement, establish periodic independent reviews for districts with persistently low proficiency regardless of their ESSA designation, and end the practice of allowing large urban districts to substitute internal management for genuine outside intervention.
Local Control: The Argument and Its Limits
Advocates for Minnesota's local control approach argue that community-responsive governance produces better outcomes, that locally elected school boards provide genuine democratic accountability, and that state mandates stifle innovation. Some of these arguments have merit in specific contexts.
But there is a significant problem: Minnesota's strong local control tradition has produced deeply unequal outcomes, and average performance metrics — which tend to be high in Minnesota — mask that inequality. When the Minnesota School Boards Association points to Minnesota's above-average ACT scores as evidence that local control is working, it is describing the performance of the state's advantaged students. It is not describing the performance of students of color, English Learners, or students from low-income families, whose outcomes have stagnated for two decades.
Peter Cunningham, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, has put the counter-argument plainly:
"In every important metric of success from student achievement to access to rigorous classes to high school and college completion, stubborn racial and economic gaps remain. The plain fact is that local control and quality control rarely go hand-in-hand... The absence of accountability breeds complacency."
Local control, without accountability for outcomes, protects the status quo. And the status quo has consistently failed Minnesota's most vulnerable students.
Two Models That Work
To understand what genuine accountability looks like, it helps to look at two systems that are producing results.
DoDEA runs a worldwide school system serving 64,000 students. In 2022, by some measures, DoDEA students outperformed all 50 states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — and were the only jurisdiction to see score increases during the COVID-19 pandemic. DoDEA students' demographics are challenging: high mobility, 50% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 80% have parents without college degrees. Their success cannot be attributed to advantaged student populations.
Minnesota's special education system demonstrates that robust state accountability produces results. Federal law requires a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities, and Minnesota has built the systems to enforce it: five-year monitoring cycles, fiscal oversight, complaint adjudication, and dedicated staff with genuine authority to require corrective action. It is far from perfect, but it represents Minnesota's best existing model of what accountability for educational outcomes looks like.
What makes DoDEA work? Researchers have identified a clear set of success factors: centralized direction-setting paired with local decision-making; policy coherence and regular data flow on instructional goals and professional development; sufficient financial resources linked to instructionally relevant strategic goals; staff development that is job-embedded, intensive, and sustained; high expectations for every student; and a genuine organizational commitment to continuous improvement.
Notably, DoDEA's accountability system is not limited to test scores. All 50+ curriculum and student services programs are on a five-year review cycle. A dedicated Research, Accountability, and Evaluation office designs and analyzes surveys to assess the effectiveness of professional development. Schools undergo accreditation reviews that include in-person site visits. In 2021–2022, 40% of DoDEA districts earned Cognia's "distinction" designation — compared to 8% of other Cognia-accredited districts nationally.
As one education professor at Harvard told the New York Times: "If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what's going on."
What a Real Accountability System Would Look Like in Minnesota
Minnesota does not need to replicate DoDEA's military-adjacent structure. But it does need to build accountability mechanisms with genuine authority, adequate staffing, and a culture of continuous improvement rather than compliance theater.
Several elements are essential:
An independent oversight board with real authority. Modeled on Maryland's Blueprint Commission, this body would monitor implementation of funding reforms and evidence-based practices, require corrective action plans from districts that persistently fail to close achievement gaps, review how categorical funds designated for high-need students are actually spent, and report publicly to the Legislature. Advisory bodies without enforcement authority have been tried repeatedly and have not worked.
Substantially expanded Regional Centers of Excellence. These centers — which provide intensive, expert support to struggling schools — have demonstrated positive impacts on the schools they serve. But they currently reach only about 360 of Minnesota's more than 2,100 schools, with funding frozen at $1 million per year. The Legislative Auditor specifically recommended expanding funding and availability. A real accountability system provides not just consequences for failure but support for improvement.
Adequate MDE staffing for accountability functions. One FTE is not a serious accountability infrastructure. States that have made genuine progress on the achievement gap have invested in the state-level capacity to monitor, analyze, support, and — when necessary — require change.
Data systems that go beyond test scores. Accountability based solely on test scores misses critical dimensions of educational quality — including implementation fidelity for funded programs, graduation rates, attendance patterns, and post-secondary outcomes. Minnesota should develop the kind of comprehensive data infrastructure that DoDEA has built, making progress visible and actionable at the school and district level.
Accountability as Support, Not Just Surveillance
It is important to be clear about what strong accountability is not. It is not a punitive system designed to catch teachers and administrators doing something wrong. It is a support system designed to ensure that schools have the resources, knowledge, and expectations they need to succeed — and that when they are falling short, there is a pathway to improvement, not just a public shaming.
Odden and Picus, whose school finance research has informed dozens of state adequacy studies, put it well: the best results occur when district or school leadership embraces a culture of accountability — not as an external imposition, but as a fundamental commitment to the students they serve. Highly successful schools "believe it is their work on curriculum and instruction that produces improved student performance, and 'go back to the drawing board' when student performance does not rise."
That culture does not emerge spontaneously across all schools in all districts. It is cultivated by a state system that sets clear expectations, provides meaningful support, and holds schools accountable for results in a way that is consistent, professional, and focused on the students who are being failed.
No comments:
Post a Comment
comments welcome