Here's a pop quiz. If you had some money to give to someone to do an important job, would you prefer to: (a) Give it to them with a detailed blueprint of how to go about doing the job, whether or not they did it well? (b) Give it to them and let them do whatever they wanted, so long as they were trying to get the job done? Or (c), give it to them to do the job, but with a portion of the money contingent on getting it done well?

If you answered (c), then you understand the basic logic of the President's new proposal for federal assistance to states and school boards for K-12 education. As noted in last week's DLC Update, the President said in his State of the Union address that virtually all federal school assistance should be made contingent on acceptance of a five-part strategy for education reform designed to promote accountability for educational results -- with the amount of aid keyed to success in achieving these results.

This is a radical departure from the status quo not only in federal education policy, but in the relationship between the federal government and state and local recipients of federal dollars. For decades, the old, familiar pattern of federal grant design has been the so-called "categorical grant" -- essentially (a) above. Federal cash is doled out for a narrow purpose by some population or "need" formula with its use micro-managed by federal bureaucrats, and little or no attention is paid to actual results other than as an ex post facto justification for more congressional "funding." As a generation of state and local officials and reformers have noted, categorical grants tend to reproduce federal bureaucracies in state capitals, city halls, and county courthouses while complicating if not thwarting the use of federal money in a way that responds to local needs.

A more recent trend, especially beloved of Republicans, is to create "block grants" in their purest form -- essentially (b) above. In the legitimate pursuit of freedom from the micro-management of means in categorical grants, block grants offer an illegitimate indifference about ends -- the national purposes that make expenditure of federal funds necessary and appropriate in the first place. A good example is the education block grant promoted by congressional Republicans. It would require that a certain percentage of federal K-12 funds be spent in the classrooms, but otherwise does not specify what state governments or school boards should seek to accomplish with the funds. Furthermore, funding is by formula, just as with the old categorical grants. The overall message from the federal government is: "We don't care what happens to this money. You can even waste it -- so long as you waste it in the classroom."

The President's proposal is the logical "third way" for federal engagement of state and local governments in education and other areas traditionally managed by them, offering simple conditions linked to the national purpose that provides the rationale for federal funding, and rewarding success instead of failure. It builds on the example of the performance bonuses recently offered by the federal government -- first proposed by the Progressive Policy Institute and attached to the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation by DLC Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) -- to states that succeed in placing welfare recipients in private sector jobs. Furthermore, performance-based grants offer a good model for state governments offering assistance to local governments or private sector organizations in a wide variety of issue areas.

The details of the President's performance-based education grant proposal have not yet been released, and state and local officials have appropriately withheld comment until it is clear the actual proposal matches the President's rhetoric. If it does, however, it is critical that New Democrat governors, legislators, school board members, and other local elected officials, accept the challenge of accountability.

It is understandable that state and local officials in both parties would prefer the maximum amount of federal assistance with the minimum amount of accountability for its use. But it is important to the country that public officials who spend taxpayer dollars, regardless of the immediate source, accept accountability for achieving the public policy goals according to the best and clearest yardsticks of the desired outcomes. State and local officials have nothing to fear but failure. More to the point, nothing should succeed like success.