An Accountability Lesson From Michelle Obama

By Douglas B. Reeves & Timothy Waters

For almost a decade, the complex enterprise of education has been reduced to box scores. Good schools have high scores; bad schools have low scores. Contrast this superficiality to Michelle Obama’s admirable efforts to combat childhood obesity.

If the first lady had suggested that every American child undergo an annual “weigh-in” and then publicly report the results, shaming and humiliating those whose weights were far off the mark, her policy prescriptions would have been ridiculed as a counterproductive waste of time. Wisely, Mrs. Obama counsels a more nuanced approach, including healthy food, accessible exercise, and frequent monitoring of health indicators. One of her first symbolic acts in promoting such an agenda was to have schoolchildren help plant a vegetable garden at the White House.

State and federal policymakers should, we suggest, visit the White House garden and ponder the implications for a new...