Longer school days and school years; billions more in federal funds for education; a national standard for academic achievement; alternative routes to teaching certification; earned, rather than automatic, tenure for teachers. Which of these does Arne Duncan favor in a TIME magazine interview? All of the above. Before that, in his own pronouncements and those of his boss, other ideas: merit pay for teachers, more charter schools, mayoral control of urban school districts.

Is there a strategy in all of this, or is it nothing more than a policy laundry list or just a politically ambiguous embrace of both sides in the never-ending war between charter and traditional public schools?

Duncan's implicit analysis of the problem with public education system is that it is out of control. As a nation we depend on the system to mold the next generations and we pay it hundreds of billions of dollars a year to do the job. But we are unsatisfied with the results; as a whole, educational achievement in the U.S. is losing ground to other nations and, within the country, a large "achievement gap" separates most low-income, minority, immigrant students from more affluent, white students. For decades now, presidents, governors and mayors, school boards, superintendents, and education entrepreneurs, not to mention parents, community groups, and students themselves have railed against the situation, but nothing has stopped the slide into competitive mediocrity and nothing has closed the gap. The system has shown that it cannot significantly improve its own performance; it is out of control.

Duncan's hypothesis about how to fix the vast, fragmented education system starts with accountability. If charter schools are going to be freed from education regulations, he told TIME, "you have to couple that with very strong accountability." If teachers are to obtain tenure, they should have to demonstrate they've "done a great job in increasing student achievement." A few weeks earlier, Duncan advocated that big-city mayors be given the authority, now in the hands of elected school boards, to run their cities' schools, in part because the change would establish a single point of accountability to the community.

But what exactly does "accountability" mean? The usual answer is the dictionary definition: "to hold answerable for," as in "who should answer for the education system's lousy performance?" But when Duncan uses the "A" word he means more than where to point the finger of blame. After all, decades of blaming superintendents, teachers unions, government regulators, teachers colleges, parents, students, school boards, and everyone else haven't led to much improvement. What he means is this: The education system needs people--teachers, charter entrepreneurs, mayors, for instance--who will answer the call, put themselves on the line, to boost its performance, and so we can hold them accountable for how they do, we have to say clearly what we want them to accomplish.

Accountability starts with goals, Duncan says. With goals in place, everyone in the system knows what they are supposed to accomplish and they can and will try to do it. "We need to be really tight on goals and have these common... standards that we're all aiming for, but then be much looser in how you let folks get there." This is the "tight-loose" model of business management that In Search of Excellence popularized in the early 1980s. Two big barriers stand in the way of using the approach to fix the education system:

1. Can government establish clear and ambitious goals for K-12 education? "At the end of the day," says Duncan, what matters most is "student achievement." What he has in mind, it seems, is a goal for producing "college-ready" students. Agreed! The charter schools we helped establish in Detroit focus intensely on achieving a 90 percent high school graduation rate and a 90 percent college enrollment rate; that's why they're called "University Prep." As part of the effort, they also seek to raise scores on the national ACT, a college-readiness test, to at least the national average. But state education regulators focus on state tests, even though colleges don't even consider those scores when assessing applicants, and the 500 of so school boards in the state rarely set performance goals for themselves. Notice, too, that a goal has to be more than a statement of aspiration such as "our students will go to college." It has to have measurable targets, as in "90 percent of our high school freshmen will graduate for years later." Lower targets are easier to achieve, of course--yet another way to avoid real accountability. But few educators seem willing to set "stretch targets" for which they will be accountable. 
2. Can educators become competent in the practices of improvement and innovation? Do educators know how to make their systems better? Improvement of a system is a discipline. Think: "continuous improvement," "re-engineering," "lean" or "six sigma" processes, or "innovation management." These are distinct practices and competencies, with specific processes and tools, established know-how and skills; they require time and money. At the core of these practices is a sound analysis of the root causes of the system's failures. When low-income minority kids do poorly in academic classes and drop far behind their white peers, why is that? If you think it's because these students have bad study habits, you might provide them with tutors or try to get their parents to pay more attention to homework. If you think it's because their teachers don't know how to make the classes feel relevant to them, you might provide training in instruction. If you think it's because the students are not motivated to do well in school, you might try yet something else. Improvement processes test your ideas and show whether they work, but you have some testable ideas about why things are they way they are. Little of this sort of capacity and commitment exists in the K-12 system, not in the traditional or charter schools and not in the education colleges. Yes, ideas for change float around--change the curriculum, train the teachers, help the parents--and some get tried here and there. But that doesn't lead to much improvement and rarely achieves large-scale impact. Being "loose" on how the school system will achieve whatever "tight" goals are set is a good idea, but being too loose won't lead to improvement. The system will have to invest in its own capacity to understand its failures and do better. 

Maybe Duncan will be able to hurdle these barriers, navigating the deadly politics of education to build a genuine "scorecard" for the K-12 system and persuading school districts and other education institutions to use federal stimulus money for more improvement- and innovation-competence building. But even as he tries, we suggest he also build a "coalition of the willing"--the education innovators, like ourselves, who already have stepped up to the challenge; set stretch goals for performance; held themselves accountable for results; developed fundamentally different analyses about the sources of K-12 failure (e.g., our belief that the achievement gap between rich and poor students is basically due to low-income students' lack of social, not intellectual, capital); and built capacities for improvement and innovation. We might be a relatively small band, compared to the vast K-12 system, but instead of having to persuade us and maneuver around our politics, all Duncan would have to do is help us keep testing our ideas for producing dramatic improvement in school performance.