In addition, schools are maintaining student performance when a much larger population of students are coming from families whose backgrounds hinder their efforts to support their children's learning. The Consortium believes that American schools can achieve continuous improvement through techniques that have been successfully employed in other fields and urges a series of systemic reforms of schools aimed at increasing the amount of teaching and learning without the need for additional funds. The governors and managers of the public K-12 system should exchange autonomy for accountability. Suppliers have autonomy to start schools, subject to state licensing requirements consistent with the U.S. Constitution and possibly to performance contracts with the community's school board. Suppliers also have the autonomy to manage schools, except for issues such as conflicts of interest, equity, or economies of scale that are better managed at levels above the individual school.
Families have the autonomy to choose schools.
Failing to meet its performance responsibilities should have consequences in the form of the revocation of its state license, and, if it is operating under a performance contract with a local school board in the cancellation of its contract. The principle of accountability should be extended to all major functions of the system not merely teaching and learning. Each level of governance should set performance criteria for each important function and ways of measuring performance that are cheap enough to allow frequent measurement and useful feedback that can result in productivity improvements. Use the Education Financing System to Improve Educational Productivity Money is a powerful tool that can encourage schools and subsystems to improve their performance. The report calls for reorganizing work within the school to multiply professional interactions around improvement.