Gov. Mark Sanford wants every family in South Carolina to be able to choose the best school for its children, whether it happens to be public or independent. To make that goal a reality, he is backing a universal [state and local] tax credit program called the Put Parents in Charge Act.

Recently, The Sun News argued ("True School Competition," Nov. 3 editorial) that the PPIC program must be accountable to families and to the public at large to ensure that it is really helping children. This is right.

The Sun News wants [Sanford] to require any school chosen under the PPIC to implement South Carolina's Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test system. The implication is that accountability is best achieved through state-mandated testing. That shouldn't come as a surprise: As a nation, we have forgotten what real accountability means in education.

Real accountability comes when schools are obliged to compete with one another for the opportunity to serve each and every child, to serve your child. Real accountability comes when schools know parents can and will walk away if they are not satisfied. Real accountability comes when ineffective teachers are forced to improve or find new careers instead of being passed from one school to the next - maybe to your school.

Real accountability comes when curriculum and testing are driven by the demands of parents, not laid down by bureaucrats who don't know your children's needs or your family's values.

Most important, real accountability, the accountability of a competitive education marketplace, actually works.

Today, only the tiniest fraction of independent schools across America are compelled to administer state tests. Nevertheless, they do better academically than our copiously tested public schools, even after adjusting for differences in student characteristics, and they do so at half the cost.

The benefits for minority students are especially great. Private schools narrow the racial achievement gap between the fourth and eighth grades. Public schools do not. A study by economist Derek Neal found that minority private-school students are far more likely to graduate from high school, enter college and complete college than similar students in public schools.

That is marketplace accountability at work.

A competitive education marketplace is clearly parents' best guarantee of accountability, but what about accountability to other citizens? The answer, based on decades of polling and focus group data, is that citizens have the same core goals for the children of others that parents have for their own children.

We all want children to get a solid grounding in the academic basics and to be prepared for success in private life as well as participation in public life. An education system that is truly accountable to parents will also be truly accountable to the general public, because the two groups share the same basic aspirations.

That unanimity on core goals does not mean that we agree on every last detail of the curriculum, teaching methods or values that should be taught in our schools. Children are not widgets, and schools are not factories.

Any system of accountability has to take our humanity into account. That's why uniform state-mandated testing of the PPIC program is not only unnecessary, it is harmful.

Mandating a single state-testing program for every child in every school yanks the reins of educational power away from families and puts them back in the hands of bureaucrats.

The last thing South Carolina needs is to see this promising reform straitjacketed by the conformist thinking of a bygone era.