Problogger Alexander Russo's posting on This Week in Education suggests that the Secretary should but won't.  It's started a bit of commenting in response - sadly rare for the news-oriented edublog.

Your editor is horribly conflicted. 

As a general matter, he is distinctly "old school." The U.S Navy has a tradition of ending the career of any ship's captain whose vessel runs aground. Period. It doesn't matter whether the officer was manning the ship's wheel or fast asleep in his bunk after a 24-hour watch. It doesn't matter whether it takes fifteen days to get free of the bar and underway or fifteen minutes. The captain is responsible.

It is no surprise that few ships in the U.S. Navy run aground.

Secretary Spellings allowed her ship to run aground twice - Reading First and college loans. Whether she authorized everything, looked the other way, didn't want to know, or was absolutely cluess is relevant only to God and our system of crimninal justice. She was responsible. To hell with the fact that no one really resigns for anything anymore - they have to be dragged to the door and handed a golden parachute. In your editor's book, she is honor-bound to resign, and our government would operate a lot better if society expected its leaders to take personal responsibility for their agency's disasters. 

Remarkably for those of you who are opposed to business in education, publicly-held companies are pretty much the only place where leaders are still held personally accountable, a value only reinforced post-Enron. Few CEOs can last as long as Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, or Alberto Gonzalez (and your editor says this as a pro-market, pro-defense Republican).

On the other hand, the Bush Administration doesn't have a very deep bench when it comes to public education policy. For all her faults, it's Spellings and the President who hold the line on AYP - this is absolutely fundamental to the school improvement market. And while NCLB probably won't be reauthorized during this Administration, there's plenty of time for a new Secretary to start appeasing the opposition in salami slices. At the end of the process everything that might have been traded in negotiation over reauthorization, will already be given up.

Of course this is a purely intellectual exercise. Spellings will neither resign nor come under much pressure to resign. But it is an exercise worth doing, if only to contemplate our own views of responsibility and accountablity. The most ironic element of all this is its illustration of how change is great - for other people. The burlesque of a Secretary who wants to hold educators accountable for district, school and classroom outcomes that are objectively not within their control entirely - and has come up with mandatory responses to failure, but who is running away from responsibility for actions entirely within her agency, cannot be lost on teachers. Someone is having a hard time walking the talk.