But it is in the way in which teachers work together that we find the real strengths of the relational accountability system in new village schools. In the overwhelming majority of schools in America, teachers work in isolation. They are largely insulated from the radical changes in the world of work, as well as from the demands of parents and the community, as they work alone in their classrooms all day long. Faculty meetings are usually little more than brief monthly occasions for announcements and other forms of administrivia. It might even be said that a majority of older teachers see education as one of the last places in our society where one can be "self-employed." Once you close the classroom door, you are king or queen for the day.

Not so in new village schools. Here, teachers spend long hours discussing the curriculum and student work together. They are constantly in and out of one another's classrooms. Many classes are team-taught. Large- and small-group meetings of faculty members are a time for true collaborative inquiry and problem-solving. Their relentless focus on improving teaching often leads teachers at these schools to reach out to educators from other schools, inviting them in to help assess the quality of student work, teaching, and curriculum. Some also invite business and community leaders in to randomly audit student work and to discuss the skills needed for work and citizenship.

This highly collaborative approach to improving teaching and learning is a close cousin of the Japanese secret ingredient for improving schools. In their book The Teaching Gap, James W. Stigler and James Hiebert describe the way in which teams of Japanese teachers study a common learning problem shared by many of their students and collaboratively devise, test, and refine a series of lessons aimed at helping students learn more effectively. In Japan, ongoing team-based inquiry has led to significant improvements in teaching and learning.

This highly collaborative educational approach is a close cousin of the Japanese secret ingredient for improving schools.The track record of the small New York public high schools is even more impressive. In a system that graduates barely 50 percent of the students who enter the 9th grade, the average graduation rate of these schools in New York City is over 90 percent. Even more impressive, despite having a majority of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, many of these schools achieve better than a 95 percent college-attendance rate. And they are not significantly more expensive to run. Judged on a cost-per-graduate basis, new village schools actually represent a cost savings when compared with large comprehensive high schools serving the same population.

Can the relational-accountability concept be taken to scale? An example of a voluntary effort that points the way to what states might do is the New York Performance Standards Consortium. It is a collaboration among 40 small high schools to define a common set of standards for high school graduates' work. Peer reviews of both student work and classroom teaching serve as the foundation for ongoing professional development within and among the schools.

And in Rhode Island, state-sponsored teams of educators, parents, and community leaders visit schools in other districts to conduct what are called "school quality reviews." According to Peter McWaters, Rhode Island's chief state school officer, these reviews sometimes reveal that so-called "good" schools with high test scores aren't really challenging students or adding value, while many low-scoring schools in poor communities are making a significant difference in students' lives.