In her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, eminent historian Diane Ravitch charges that accountability and school choice have been ineffective, destructive distractions from real school improvement. Given her longtime support for these ideas, her “turncoat” moment has raised quite a stir.

But the resulting debate has been plagued by confusion. Ravitch is no turncoat. Indeed, she is now making the same fundamental mistake, in reverse, that she made previously. Ravitch’s stance reflects the misguided premise that chartering and accountability are best seen as ways to improve instruction — like a new curriculum or reading program — rather than ways to create the conditions under which sustained improvement is possible.

Indeed, Ravitch’s mistake shines a light on the frailty of current Obama-administration reform efforts. There is a disturbing parallelism when one hears Ravitch or Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discuss merit pay, accountability, or charter schooling. Ravitch is disappointed because she thought accountability and charter schooling were supposed to make schools better, and now sees that they don’t. Duncan promises that they will make schools better. They’re both missing the central point: These structural reforms are means, not ends. Choice and accountability can only make it easier to create schools and systems characterized by focus and coherence, where robust curricula, powerful pedagogy, and rich learning thrive.

A lack of choice forces educators to serve families with very different demands and varying responses to discipline simultaneously, making it difficult to establish common norms. A lack of autonomy makes it difficult for principals to assemble teachers who share expectations and instructional principles. Political turbulence and the reality that professional advancement entails leap-frogging from smaller districts to larger ones means that superintendents change jobs every few years, and district priorities and initiatives shift as well. Bureaucratic and contractual rules governing discipline, the school day, and professional development trip up district leaders seeking to emulate effective practices.

Choice, in and of itself, doesn’t fix any of these problems, but it lets motivated people solve them outside of traditional K-12 systems, which hobble organizational focus and instructional coherence with their “little-bit-of-everything” mission, industrial-era contracts and staffing arrangements, ill-defined aims, balky governance structures, contested disciplinary arrangements, and the rest.