Then, like Groundhog Day, I went through a lower-key ritual as my children returned to school in England a week later.

What struck me was the similarity of the concerns. The top issue in both countries was the teacher shortage. The US estimates it must recruit more than two million new teachers over the next decade.

A study by Harvard Graduate School of Education suggested 40 per cent of newly-qualified teachers in New Jersey did not plan to remain in the profession for the rest of their careers. In England, the chief inspector of schools estimated a similar proportion of trainee teachers leave the classroom within three years.

What is it about the US and Britain which has caused these parallel crises? Indeed we might ask the same question about Canada and Australia too.

It is no coincidence that all four have also undergone a crisis of public confidence in their school systems. Each has responded with energetic reforms to tackle underachievement in literacy and numeracy.

In the US, virtually every state has introduced “standards-based reforms”. These amount to state-by-state versions of the reforms England went through with the introduction of a standardised curriculum, regular testing and measures to tackle “failing” schools.

President Bush is close to completing his first major education legislation. Based heavily on the standards-based reforms in his own state of Texas, this will extend the monitoring of pupil testing nationwide and identify schools that fail to raise standards quickly enough.

In response to public concern over literacy and numeracy, Australia set new national goals for schooling in 1999. South Australia is planning to boost literacy by targeting schools’ accountability for improving individual pupils’ test scores.

It is striking how these countries, especially the UK and the US, have followed parallel paths: starting from a sense of crisis, precipitating a distrust of teachers and schools, and proceeding to more central direction and increased accountability. The result has been more pressure on teachers to perform and less freedom to choose what and how to teach. Is it any surprise that shortages are now being felt in these countries?

Yet in France, Germany and Sweden there is no sense of crisis over school standards, no rush to increase accountability and, at least compared to Britain and the US, no serious teacher shortage.

So is the shortage due, in part at least, to the demoralising effect of the twin drives towards greater accountability and reduced professional autonomy? After all, being held to account for your achievements, while also being told how to do your job, does not create a sense of professional worth.

Policy-makers may argue that they had to act because the teaching profession failed to come up with its own solutions to the problems in schools. There was a need for those outside to kick-start reforms.

These were the days of the “secret garden” curriculum. Teachers fiercely guarded the gate and outsiders could not check how well the plants were growing. There was little testing of pupils below the school-leaving age and no league tables or Office for Standards in Education. Teachers had high autonomy and low accountability. Maybe the see-saw has tilted too far the other way. Teachers should have both high autonomy and high accountability.

Parents are also starting to wonder whether accountability has been pushed too far. In America parents are increasingly concerned that their children are being over-tested. In England the introduction of AS-levels brought similar worries.

There is also the side-effect of “teaching to the test”. Parents do not want production-line schools where output is measured by test scores alone.

Above all, they want enough good teachers in their schools. If accountability measures are discouraging some from entering, or staying in, the profession, then it is time to reassert teacher autonomy.

Mike Baker is education correspondent at the BBC