Educational Bankruptcy, Takeovers, and Reconstitution of Failing Schools

It is a basic tenet of democratic thought that governments are accountable to the sovereign people. According to the Random House Dictionary (1968), accountability entails the obligation to report, ex-plain, or justify something, to be “responsible ” and “answerable. ” Thus, in the United States accountability is incorporated in many aspects of the constitutional framework and in the legal traditions of the nation, including elections, division of powers, and federalism. At the most basic level, elected officials are responsible to the voters. The framers’ fear of concentrated power led them to divide authority among the ex-ecutive, legislative, and judicial branches, with each branch being ac-countable to the others in certain respects. Furthermore, in our federal framework, specific powers are reserved to the federal, state, and local governments, and while accountability flows upward through the fed-eral structure, there is significant autonomy at each level. In other words, the principle of accountability is highly institutionalized in our political system. Accountability can be viewed both as a prevention for abuses of power and as a corrective device once those abuses occur. Hence, higher levels of government can intervene with lower levels when there is evi-dence that corrective action is needed. This corrective dimension of accountability tends to lead to policy approaches that are highly direc-tive and top-down. The implicit assumption in such approaches is that unacceptable behavior can be eliminated only through the use of regu-latory sanctions. Depending on the nature of the violation and the rem-edy sought, a theory of motivation that relies heavily on compliance may or may not be appropriate for bringing about wanted changes