By A. Patrick Huff, Ph.D.
July 21, 2025
F
or over three decades, our nation’s public education system has been shackled by an illusion—an illusion that we can measure school success through standardized testing, punish poor performance into excellence, and reduce the essence of learning to a spreadsheet. In Texas and across the country, the Accountability System has become a weapon, not a tool. If we are serious about saving public education, we must dismantle it entirely.The current system, launched with the 1990s-era Texas model and supercharged by the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, promised a future of higher achievement, especially for low-income and minority students. That future never came. Instead, we’ve watched the opposite unfold: a collapse of trust, a narrowing of curriculum, and a generation of students and educators demoralized by test-based labeling.
The Evidence of Failure
Despite decades of high-stakes testing, national assessments like the NAEP show stagnant or declining performance in reading and math. The very goals used to justify the Accountability System—closing the achievement gap, raising literacy, improving math competence—have not materialized. What has increased is test prep, student anxiety, teacher burnout, and an education culture obsessed with metrics over meaning.
The system hasn’t just failed—it has harmed.
A System Built on Punishment, Not Progress
The most insidious aspect of the Accountability System is its pretense of equity. In reality, it punishes poverty. School ratings correlate almost perfectly with socioeconomic status. Low-income schools receive the lowest scores and bear the harshest consequences: funding cuts, staff turnover, charter takeovers, and public shaming.
It is not accountability; it is academic profiling—that is students become numbers. Teachers become data managers. Principals become compliance officers. And parents—especially in marginalized communities—are told their schools are failures without ever being given the resources or respect needed to change that narrative.
The Human Cost
Talk to any veteran teacher in Texas. You’ll hear about rising resignations, mental health strain, and the loss of joy in teaching. This system drives good educators away and deters new ones from entering the profession. It does not honor the complexity of teaching, the uniqueness of every learner, or the wisdom of local communities.
Worse still, it rewrites the purpose of education. Instead of fostering critical thinking, civic understanding, and a love of learning, schools are turned into test factories. Students are not inspired to become leaders—they are trained to become compliant test-takers.
A Path Forward: Local Control, Real Learning
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can imagine—and implement—a better system:
- Use norm-referenced assessments like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to identify student needs, not punish them.
- Return curriculum authority and evaluation to local school districts and communities, where decisions can reflect the values, challenges, and cultures of those they serve.
- Measure school success through holistic indicators—graduation rates, student engagement, parent feedback, and community involvement.
- Fund struggling schools equitably and proactively, not through punitive interventions but with the wraparound services they need to thrive.
The abolishment of the Accountability System governing public education, will not come from within the political system. The entrenched interests that maintain its grip on schools—from testing companies to policy makers—have neither the will nor the incentive to dismantle the very system that serves their purposes. Like many forms of institutionalized injustice throughout American history, the Accountability System is unlikely to be undone by legislative goodwill or reformist rhetoric.
Instead, true change is more likely to come through the courts. Just as the Supreme Court struck down legalized segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), declaring “separate but equal” to be inherently unequal, the legal system must now confront the moral and educational bankruptcy of the current accountability regime. In both cases, the state enforced unjust laws that deprived children of their right to a meaningful education—once by racial separation, now by data-driven dehumanization.
Today’s Accountability System—built on high-stakes standardized testing, punitive consequences for schools, and reductive metrics (referring to overly simplistic ways of measuring complex realities – especially when it comes to student learning, teacher performance, or school quality), does not serve children. It sorts, labels, and marginalizes, often disproportionately harming students from marginalized communities. It narrows curriculum, encourages teaching to the test, and crushes the joy of learning.
To set public education free, the Accountability System must be ruled unconstitutional. Like segregation, it must be seen not as a failed policy, but as a violation of fundamental rights—rights to equity, dignity, and a future not determined by a single test score.
If the goal is liberation for all children, especially the most vulnerable, then the courts must once again become the arena in which justice is demanded and delivered. To move an injustice into the justice system, the plaintiff must have standing. In other words, the plaintiff must demonstrate they are the victim of great harm. There is no other entity that demonstrates this harm of government than the children themselves. The system that best represents the children, other than parents, are the thousands of school districts whose responsibility it is to provide the very best education for the children they represent. Superintendents and school boards have organized before to fight the system, in this case the Commissioner of Education in Texas, Mike Morath. Once again, school district trustees and superintendents must find the will power to fight the juggernaut that is the Texas Education Agency, who implement the unjust laws passed by the Texas Legislature. It is the local Independent School Districts that have the necessary standing to file in the courts of justice and the court of public opinion, that knows all too well, what is passed off as public education today, bears little resemblance to true classical education, which was once taught in our public schools.
The time for tinkering is over. The Accountability System must be abolished.
Public education should be a cornerstone of democracy, not a casualty of bureaucratic overreach. If we are to restore trust, elevate achievement, and honor the educators who devote their lives to our children, we must break free from the failed legacy of high-stakes accountability.
Let’s liberate our schools. Let’s trust our teachers. Let’s give our children back their right to a meaningful, human education.
Dr. Patrick Huff is a renowned educator of thirty-four years, with experience as a middle school and high school principal. His public education experience was obtained in Aldine ISD, Conroe ISD, and Klein ISD. After retiring from public education, Dr. Huff taught as an adjunct professor in the graduate school at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. He has a B.S. from Texas Christian University, an M.Ed. from Sam Houston State University, and a Ph.D. from Prairie View A&M University.
His awareness and insight into the domination of testing in today’s public schools and the
unrealistic mandates of No Child Left Behind law, led him to write The Takeover of the Public
Education in America: The Agenda to Control Information and Knowledge Through the
Accountability System, 2015. Dr. Huff currently lives in Tomball, Texas with his wife Connie.
