They leave such duties to non-academy-members -- to writers with something to lose, that is.
Lord Storey, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, thinks cutting local authorities and non-academy schools out of the school improvement process is a serious mistake.
And if you strip out the GCSE-equivalent qualifications used by many sponsored secondary academies, the improvement in non-academy results appears to be better.
There are now 5,302 academies and 304 free schools – and the Cameron government's pledge that all non-academy schools should eventually convert has not been retracted.
But if somebody else throws the party, or if non-Academy riffraff are also invited to the screening, then bring on the caviar and the stars.
Many of the converter academies were already high-performing and the committee says that allocating this amount to them instead "may have been at the expense of weaker non-academy schools which could potentially have benefitted from it more".
Last November the then education secretary, Nicky Morgan, awarded Stockport-based Bright Tribe, one of five "top performing academy sponsors", an undisclosed share of £5m to take on struggling non-academy schools.
That is not to say there aren't question marks for the local authority in the Birmingham case, or that under the traditional stakeholder model of governance that applies to most maintained (non-academy) schools, it is impossible to "pack" governing bodies with fellow travellers.
One report for the Sutton Trust, a charity that promotes social mobility, found that the proportion of poor pupils achieving five good GCSEs in the five top academy chains is at least 15 percentage points higher than the average for similar pupils in non-academy schools.Yet these are encouraging signs, not the proof of overall improvement that would silence doubters.
School funding, of course, is already out of council control for academies, and increasingly for non-academies.
And non-academies starting with the same – generally poor – test results as sponsored academies in 2013 actually registered faster improvements in 2014, we found.
