New Publication

From Governance to Accountability: Building Relationships that Make Schools Work: Kavitha Mediratta and Norm Fruchter, of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at NYU, have developed an important concept paper for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. The thesis of the paper is that previous governance reforms in NYC have failed to improve local schools, and will never succeed in improving student achievement without creating new relationships between schools and communities that lead to real accountability.

Four key indicators of relationships based on accountability are:

• Transparency: the system must produce useful information about student and school performance and hold public dialogues twice a year about how to improve the results
• Representation: new mechanisms for expanded representation of parents' interests and concerns must go beyond what existing parent associations or school-based councils offer.
• Power: these new mechanisms for representation must have authority to evaluate principals and superintendents and make recommendations for appointment and reappointment, at the school and district levels.
• Oversight: an independent and external oversight mechanism should monitor the accountability system, based on ombuds systems developed in Europe.

For a full copy of the report, go to: www.nyu.edu/iesp. A link to the report in pdf is posted on the home page.