Author Archive
Four More Things Washington Shouldn’t Do
Today AEI’s Rick Hess and Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond—two folks who don’t always see eye to eye—have a New York Times op-ed that decries federal micromanagement in education, then lays out four things they think Washington should do.
If only they’d stopped at lamenting micromanagement.
Let’s take their four should-do’s in order:
First is encouraging transparency for school performance and spending. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind’s main contribution is that it pushed states to measure and report achievement for all students annually….To track achievement, states should be required to link their assessments to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or to adopt a similar multistate assessment). To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending…
This sounds great, but the key is in the doing, and there is precious little evidence Washington can force real transparency. NCLB is exhibit A: Yes, the law required states to break out data for all students and numerous subgroups, but the underlying information was essentially a lie, with states setting very low performance thresholds and calling it “proficiency.” And despite what many NCLB supporters will tell you, when you break down NAEP data—as I have done—there is little support for the notion that traditionally underperforming groups, or anyone else, have done better with NCLB than without it.
How about requiring common standards, both for academics and spending?
Even if you started with excellent, challenging academic standards, they would quickly be gutted at the behest of teacher unions, administrator associations, and probably even parents if many kids and schools didn’t meet them and were punished as a result. We’ve seen it many times, and there’s nothing about being federal that inoculates government against concentrated benefits and diffuse costs; the people most directly effected by a policy having the greatest political power over it. And financial data? As Adam Schaeffer has found, there are countless ways to hide the truth about district finances, and there’s little reason to believe that Washington will be either willing or able to sustainably force clarity.
One last thing: Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to demand “transparency”? Nowhere.
Second is ensuring that basic constitutional protections are respected. No Child Left Behind required states to “disaggregate” assessment results to illuminate how disadvantaged or vulnerable populations…were doing. Enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring that dollars intended for low-income students and students with disabilities are spent accordingly have been parts of the Education Department’s mandate since its creation in 1979.
Here there’s a slight connection to the Constitution: under the Fourteenth Amendment Washington has the duty to ensure that states and districts do not discriminate. But the presumption underlying what Darling-Hammond and Hess argue—that test data can reveal discrimination—is dubious. Can and should disparities in group scores really be laid exclusively at the feet of schools, districts, and states? Aren’t myriad factors involved in academic outcomes, many of which are outside the control of government?
Third is supporting basic research. While the private market can produce applied research that can be put to profitable use, it tends to underinvest in research that asks fundamental questions. When it comes to brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring, federal financing for reliable research is essential.
We hear this one a lot, and in theory it makes some sense: people won’t risk their money on research that has no discernable payoff. The problem is few people ever contemplate the full cost of government funding “basic” research, or the unintended consequences.
The main concern is that putting money into things with no discernable payoff might yield just that—no payoff. So we hear about successes—government got us to the moon!—but rarely about how much has been lost in failed efforts. People don’t shy away from funding basic research just because they’re shortsighted. It’s also because they factor in risk.
Then there’s this: while we would like to think that all scientists are superhumanly selfless, they are not. They are as self-interested as the rest of us. Perhaps that’s why Austan Goolsbee—yes, Obama administration Austan Goolsbee—found in 1998 that much government R&D funding translated not into more breakthroughs, but higher wages for researchers.
Little Evidence for Either
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) or Common Core? NCLB and Common Core? If you look at the evidence, the answer to both questions is “no.” There’s precious little evidence that NCLB has worked, and just as little that national standards will do any better.
Despite all the fine sounding talk about the federal government demanding “accountability” and forcing states to improve, NAEP data for long-struggling groups reveals many periods before NCLB with equal or faster score gains than under No Child. In other words, the federal government’s own measure of academic achievement provides no support for the idea that accountability – or anything else under No Child – has translated into better performance.
But hasn’t the problem been the lack of a common measure of “proficiency,” which has allowed states to dodge the hard work of getting all kids up to speed? And isn’t that precisely what the Common Core will fix?
No again. What we’ve learned from not just NCLB, but decades of failed federal education intervention, is that politicians and administrators at all levels will find ways to take federal money while avoiding meaningful consequences for poor performance. And there’s little reason to believe that the Common Core will change that.
For one thing, if the Common Core truly is controlled by states – which, given the Race to the Top, waivers, and federal funding of national tests it clearly isn’t – then states will ignore the standards whenever they’re inconvenient. And if the federal government tries to put the screws to states that underperform? All the teachers’ unions, administrators’ associations, and other groups representing those who would be held accountable will mobilize and have the system gutted. It’s the clear lesson of history.
But isn’t the Common Core so good, and having national standards so important, that we must adopt them?
Yet again, no.
There’s essentially no meaningful evidence that, other things being equal, countries with national standards perform better than those without. And there is serious disagreement over the quality of the Common Core, including powerful critiques from well known English language arts expert Sandra Stotsky, and the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, R. James Milgram.
Common Core, No Child Left Behind – both are cut from the same, moth-devoured cloth: top-down government control. In light of decades of costly failure, it is well past time we stop entertaining such fixes and move on to something different. It’s time to focus on fundamentally changing the system so that educators have the freedom to tailor teaching to the needs of unique children, while parents are empowered to hold educators truly accountable. It is time for school choice, which, unlike NCLB and national standards, the evidence very much supports.
C/P from the National Journal’s “Education Experts” blog.
Democracy – Whatever That Is – and Education
Democracy is inherently good, and since public schools are democratically controlled they, too, are inherently good. Right?
You’d think so from the way many people invoke “democracy” when championing government schools, but thanks to a recent blog post from the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli, we might have a rare opportunity to actually scrutinize that assumption. A few days ago, Petrilli questioned the value of local school boards in light of what seems to be frequent capture by teachers unions, and was immediately accused of attacking “democracy” by historian Diane Ravitch.
“Gosh, Mike,” Ravitch wrote in the comments section, “it sounds as though you have identified the real problem ‘reformers’ face: democracy.”
With that the battle was on, and it’s one I’m happy to join: A huge problem we face in education is, indeed, democracy.
Before I go further, the first thing that’s necessary to do is define “democracy.” Unfortunately, that’s something rarely done by those who wield the term like a rhetorical chainsaw, swinging it wildly at anyone who might question government schooling. Typically, it seems the word is employed to just vaguely connote some sort of action by “the people” — whoever they are — as opposed to “elites,” or to indicate that popular voting is in some fashion used to make laws.
That said, the most basic definition of democracy — the one you probably learned in grade school – follows these lines: “Control of an organization or group by the majority of its members.” You might also assume the word means representative democracy, where people vote for their representatives and majorities of reps make the laws, but usually the word’s use isn’t even that precise.
Is Cato Taking the Faculty Productivity Debate National?
From some of the coverage of the release of the new University of Texas report on the productivity of its faculty, you might get the sense that this Friday’s Cato/Center for College Affordability and Productivity conference will be the national coming out party for the faculty productivity debate. As the The Daily Texan writes, echoing an earlier Texas Tribune article:
with elected officials like Florida Gov. Rick Scott praising Texas’ controversy as good for higher education reform and with the Cato Institute hosting a conference called “Squeezing the Tower: Are We Getting All We Can from Higher Education?” this Friday in Washington D.C., this is very much a national debate.
This is—and must be—a national debate, because huge amounts of taxpayer dollars from all levels are at stake, not to mention oodles of bucks from students and parents. But don’t expect the sides to be well settled. Speakers on Friday are likely to offer a variety of opinions on how to hold schools and their faculties accountable, and there will be no simple left/right breakdown. I telegraph a bit of what I’ll be saying in this new Education News interview.
Cato and CCAP certainly want to take this crucial discussion national, and I hope you’ll join us on Friday. Register here!
No Compelling Evidence ‘No Child’ Worked
Over the last few days the Wall Street Journal has run two articles suggesting that the No Child Left Behind Act has been somewhat successful. But that’s not supported by the federal government’s own measure, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The WSJ’s first article appeared on Saturday, and while focusing on the stagnation of high-achieving students, it asserts that NAEP exams show “dramatic progress—sometimes double-digit increases—for the lowest achievers over the last two decades, especially after No Child Left Behind.”
Last month I debunked the idea that historically struggling groups have seen dramatic improvements under NCLB, laying out the data from numerous NAEP tests. Quite simply, looking at score gains per year, there were many periods before NCLB that saw faster improvements. Below are two more tables from the latest NAEP scores, released a couple of weeks ago. These are for the so-called “main” NAEP, which is not nearly as valuable as the long-term trends exam for seeing historical patterns, but the WSJ cites it and it does contain new information. The results are for the bottom 10 percent of performers.
As always, at what year one could start crediting results to NCLB is debatable. (Actually, you can never simply look at NAEP scores and attribute them to one factor because so many variables influence outcomes.) That date cannot be earlier than 2002, the year the law was enacted, and probably should be 2003, by which time most of the regulations were written and the law began to take real effect. To deal with this problem, the tables include only years that fully include NCLB or do not include it at all. Also note that there are two pre-NCLB time bands for reading because there are no 2000 8th grade reading scores.
Mathematics, 10th Percentile
Reading, 10th Percentile
Once again, there is is no pattern of faster improvement under NCLB than before it. Highlighting periods with greater growth than under NCLB, you can see that in 4th grade math improvements were faster before NCLB than after. In 8th grade math, it’s essentially a dead heat. In 4th grade reading, there’s sizable improvement under NCLB, and in 8th grade reading there’s an appreciable advantage before NCLB.
The second WSJ piece that gives NCLB undue credit is an op-ed from Kevin Chavous. Chavous, a tremendous advocate for school choice, implies that NCLB supplies “accountability” needed to make American kids competitive with their international peers. But as we’ve seen, there’s precious little evidence that NCLB has done anything to improve educational outcomes. Meanwhile, it has cost us a mint, with Department of Education k-12 spending rising from $27.3 billion in 2001 to $37.9 billion in 2011.
Unfortunately, Chavous’s piece seems more aspirational than reality-based, as is often the case in education policy. “We must try to make schools and teachers accountable,” he seems to be saying. “Heaven knows the states won’t do it!”
The need to deal in reality is why Mr. Chavous’ main concern—getting school choice—is so crucial. Government schooling will never be fundamentally changed because those who would be held accountable—teachers, administrators, bureaucrats—have by far the most motivation to be involved in education politics, the greatest ability to organize, and hence the biggest store of political power. Their livelihoods, after all, are at stake. And what do they want? What we’d all probably like: as much pay as possible with as little accountability.
The only way to end employee domination of education is to fundamentally change the system: instead of having politics control schooling, let parents control education money so they can take their children out of schools they don’t like and put them into those they do. Don’t force them to undertake the endless, hopeless warfare of having to form coalitions, try to get politicians’ ears, spur politicians to move and, if they can ever get decent changes, then force them to constantly fight to keep the reforms against opponents with full-time lobbyists and political machines. No, let them vote with their feet, right away, and get their children the education they need.
NCLB is, by most indications, an abject failure, and the very nature of government schooling doomed it to be so.
Is This What PA Taxpayers Shelled out $279 Million For?
Though I could probably pull something out of the Penn State scandal to illustrate the excesses of college sports, that’s not the real story as far as I can tell. This strikes me as first and foremost a sad legal matter, not a higher education policy story, so I haven’t had anything to say about it. Until last night.
As you probably know by now, following the announcement of Joe Paterno’s firing throngs of Penn State students took to the streets, either in anger or just to go out and be rowdy. Parts of the coeducational mob ripped down street signs, toppled over a TV news van, and hurled rocks and fireworks at police.
Now, this was absolutely not the Arab Spring, with decades of brutal dictatorship finally overthrown. This was over the firing of a football coach who, while no doubt beloved, did not ensure that the proper authorities were notified when children were victimized by one of his staff members. Yes, he passed the information up channels so he did the minimum, but it’s not like he is being fired for protecting the children. One might disagree with the PSU trustees’ actions, but they certainly didn’t do anything outrageous.
But students all too often don’t need anything even close to grave injustice to fuel rampaging and property destruction. Usually all they require is a sports win or loss. At the University of Maryland they take to the streets and burn things over big basketball games, win or lose. At West Virginia University, they seemingly have couch conflagrations at the drop of a hat. And they are not alone.
Is this what taxpayers are shelling out hundreds of billions of dollars for every year? (Pennsylvania taxpayers handed $279 million to PSU this year.) Is this what higher education is supposed to be?
Of course not, but rioting is just the most glaring part of the unstudious college iceberg. The mass of it includes infamous partying that has largely replaced tedious stuff like studying. Indeed, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that the average time per week spent studying for a full-time student has gone from twenty-five hours in 1961, to twenty in 1981, to an anemic thirteen in 2003. Then there are the atrocious college completion rates — from what federal data show, maybe 60 percent of all students finish their programs – and the numerous majors of highly dubious value. In other words, as taxpayers have poured more and more money into the ivory tower, it seems to have just added more bars, jacuzzis, and hangouts.
Taxpayers have to subsidize higher education, we’re told, because doing so promotes the “public good.” Well, as you watch Happy Valley turn decidedly unhappy, contemplate all the rot and waste that runs throughout the ivory tower. Then tell those people who talk up the public good that, clearly, it would be best served by letting taxpayers keep their higher ed bucks.
Indignant over Free Speech Trumping Bullying Protection? Support Choice
Yesterday, the Michigan Senate passed anti-bullying legislation that has anti-bullying legislators, activists, and sympathizers outraged. Why? Because at the insistence of some in the legislature, it includes a provision protecting religious speech.
A video of State Senator Gretchen Whitmer (D-East Lansing) has already gone viral, with the senator railing that ”as passed today, bullying kids is okay if a student, parent, teacher or school employee can come up with a moral or religious reason for doing it.” Similarly, Time columnist Amy Sullivan asks ”why does Michigan’s anti-bullying bill protect religious tormentors?”
I’ll tell you why: because as odious as one might find the religious beliefs of many people, they are entitled to freedom of speech the same as anyone else. That is a basic American right, and all the desire in the world to protect kids from hearing things that might make them feel badly must not change that. Abridge that right, and any speech becomes imperiled if a majority simply deems it unacceptable. And the legislation in question does not protect bullying—if that is defined as physical assaults or threats of such assaults—for religious reasons. It only states that the legislation ”does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil’s parent or guardian.”
Of course, being on the receiving end of constant pronouncements that you are doomed to Hell or something similarly hideous would almost certainly become difficult, if not impossible, to bear. It shouldn’t be something that any child is subjected to in school. But how do you balance protecting children against people’s fundamental right to speak?
The answer is that despite all the lofty talk of “democracy” and other empty rhetoric behind public schooling, you cannot protect everyone equally in a government school. No matter what policy a public school or district adopts, government will pick winners and losers. That’s why the only solution to a quandary such as this is educational freedom: Give control of education funding to parents, let them choose among independent schools run by free educators, and enable people to choose schools that share their values. Then all people can select educations for their children that comport with their values and needs, and without government deciding who is more, or less, equal than whom.
The Light Don’t Shine on Higher Ed
I’m accustomed to a standard response when I propose removing government from some part of education: it’s not gonna happen, so forget about it. Often, a popular counter-proposal is then offered: Have government require “transparency” from schools, either of the k-12 or higher variety. Transparency, apprently, is something we can get.
Except, it seems, we almost never do.
A couple of weeks ago I provided numbers exposing the likely failure of transparency in elementary and secondary education. Today, in a surprising twist, someone else reveals transparency futility in higher ed: Education Sector’s Kevin Carey, in a joint report with AEI’s Andrew Kelly. It’s surprising because Carey is one of the people who has dismissed my arguments for removing government as unrealisitc, and instead championed transparency as an achievable solution. In light of this, all credit to him for publishing his study.
The paper, The Truth Behind Higher Education Disclosure Laws, is awfully clear: Transparency requirements in the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act have led to either rampant evasion or deception in reporting everything from Pell-recipient graduation rates to employment placement info. Indeed, the report says that “by creating an illusion of transparency and disclosure” the requirements are worse than having no reporting at all.
Sound familiar?
Based on what we know about transparency mandates in education, it seems at least as quixotic to expect regulations to work as to expect that we can begin to remove govenment funding. The reality is that regulations are often far too convoluted and endless for the regulated to comply with even a small fraction of them; they often stymie enforcement for the same reasons; and they are regularly ignored because those who would be regulated have a lot more political sway on their issues than the public.
Unfortunately, repeated failure doesn’t seem to deter those with an abiding faith in regulation, including Carey and Kelly, whose report largely recommends tougher rule enforcement. But go from regular push ups to those hand-clapping ones and you still won’t budge the Earth.
Or maybe I’m wrong (it’s theoretically possible). Maybe government actually can make colleges change for the better. Maybe it’s just that transparency isn’t the answer. Indeed, whether government can move colleges for the better will the subject of a terrific, full-day conference Cato will be hosting on November 18th with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Speakers will include CCAP founder and economist Richard Vedder; George Washington University President Emertius Stephen Joel Trachtenberg; Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein; and many more powerful analysts of the ivory tower. And the discussion, I assure you, won’t just be more regulation versus less taxpayer aid. There will be a wide variety of perspectives offered, and no doubt many surprising debates. I hope you’ll join us, and you can register here!
Little Student Loan Relief, and Never for Taxpayers
Today’s big news is that the Obama administration — thanks to those crisis-ignorin’ creeps in Congress — is going off on its own to reduce purportedly devastating student loan burdens. Well, that’s the message. The reality is that the proposals just tinker around the edges, meaning debtors are getting little relief while the notion that it’s okay to stick taxpayers with other people’s obligations is advanced.
What would the administration’s proposals do? There are several little wrinkles, but basically this: New, income-based repayment rules will be hurried a bit so that borrowers’ payments are capped at 10 percent of discretionary income (likely meaning income above 150 percent of the poverty line) rather than 15 percent, and remaining debt would be forgiven after 20 years rather than 25. In addition, borrowers with loans from both the now-defunct guaranteed loan program – loans through banks that are almost completely backed with federal money — and loans that come directly from Uncle Sam can consolidate those loans and get an interest rate reduction. In point of fact they could do the same thing before, only the administration is offering a .25 point interest reduction in addition to the .25 points that were previously offered.
Here, though, is the really miraculous part: According to the U.S. Department of Education, “these changes carry no additional cost to taxpayers.” Don’t ask how that can be – they don’t say – just rest assured!
For what it’s worth, these changes probably won’t cost taxpayers a whole lot, at least in Washington spending terms. Many borrowers don’t have both guaranteed and direct loans, and a normal federal loan has a ten-year term, meaning most borrowers probably aren’t still paying back twenty years down the line. Finally, while college prices are without question out of control, the average debt for a student graduating with any debt is still only around $27,000. That’s a heck of a lot closer to a car loan than a mortgage.
That said, the idea that any of this won’t cost taxpayers is bunk. They ultimately back all federal student loans, so unless Washington intends to send in the 82nd Airborne to force lenders with remaining guaranteed loans to write them off — which maybe I shouldn’t put past the feds – lenders will get paid. And any direct loans that get less money returned are immediate taxpayer losses. And yes, direct loans probably do make money for the federal government, but those receipts were pledged to Obamacare and deficit reduction when the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act was rolled into the health care bill to make the CBO numbers come out right. Change the revenue, and it means you’ve saddled taxpayers with more health care costs, or less supposed deficit reduction, than had been promised with Obamacare. And don’t even get me started on how any reduction or forgiveness of debt encourages students to borrow more and pay even higher tuition prices.
In light of all this, it looks like everyone is being sold a bill of goods by the administration: borrowers won’t get much relief, and taxpayers will indeed get saddled with additional costs.
As You’ll See, Student Loans Hurt Us All
Suddenly, student loans are nearing the top of the nation’s public policy debate. Indeed, President Obama is expected to make a big speech about them on Wednesday. Why the sudden ascendance? Probably because the burden of student loans is one of the few things OWSers are clearly angry about, and that has raised questions ranging from whether such loans should be dischargable in bankruptcy, to whether they help fuel the Saturn V rocket of college price inflation. And last Sunday GOP presidential contender Ron Paul jumped into the fray, suggesting we eliminate the federal student loan program entirely.
Paul is right about phasing out federal student loans. Unfortunately, that’s likely the last thing President Obama will propose.
The first reaction to hearing such a proposal is that it’s Grinch-level heartlessness, stealing a better future from low-income kids. That is almost certainly what the president would say, and such a reaction would likely poll well. That’s why he’s expected to propose lowering interest rates, easing repayment, and other borrower-friendly measures. But as I lay out in a Cato Policy Analysis to be released imminently, by most indications federal student aid and other taxpayer-fueled subsidies aren’t good for anyone. (Well, anyone not employed by a college or university, the ultimate receiving end of all the forced largesse). By artificially—and hugely—boosting consumption, they ultimately lead to massive tuition inflation, encourage millions of unprepared people to take on studies they never finish, and pour H2O into already watered-down degrees. In other words, student aid—including federal lending—is likely a net loss to both students and society.
But I’ve already said too much. If you want to get a lot more on this—and more on the many unintended evils of federal college policies—stand by for the release of my study. And if you’re in DC, come to Capitol Hill Thursday for a briefing on the subject with me and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC). It should give OWSers, libertarians, conservatives, liberals, and anyone else lots to think about.
Splitting Hairs on the Cadaver
With the introduction of major Senate bills to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – aka, No Child Left Behind – the race is on to dissect the legislation and declare a winner. To my mind, however, both significant efforts are improvements over NCLB, ending many of its more absurd components. And the debates the bills are fomenting — more or less compulsion on teacher evals, firm progress goals or looser, and so on – are ultimately splitting hairs on a cadaver. The last nearly fifty years have shown that any federal involvement is doomed to failure, and the only rational response to that is to end Washington’s meddling.
First, a very quick history of federal involvement: In 1965 Washington enacted the ESEA, with the goal of equalizing resources between rich and poor students. For about twenty years the feds mainly just spent money, but that seemed to produce no significant educational benefits. In roughly the mid-eighties people started to get fed up with that, and slowly pressure grew to hold schools and states “accountable” for their use of federal dough. The pinnacle of that was NCLB, which was festooned in rhetoric about “annual progress,” “proficiency,” and “leaving no child behind,” but mainly appeared to produce bureaucratic demands and name-only proficiency.
Bottom line: There’s little evidence that either spending money or “accountability” has worked. Why the futility? Because federal policy is ultimately driven by what makes politicians look best, which at first was spending dough to show they cared, then making unrealistic, inevitably gamed demands to show that they cared in kind of a tough-guy way. And whether any of these things eventually translated into academic success has meant nothing for the politicians who voted for them because few voters connect failure to individual pols.
The good news is that in light of the NCLB debacle there seems to be pretty bipartisan agreement that it’s time to reduce the federal footprint. Nonetheless, there are still lots of assertions grounded in neither strong logic nor principle being made about what Washington should be doing.
To illustrate this I’m going to pick on AEI’s Rick Hess a bit. Rick, by the way, is overall very clear-headed and skeptical about federal policies, more so than most edu-analysts. He just happens to have published a blog post recently that offers a few, relatively constrained, examples of what I’m talking about, providing a target of opportunity. I quote from the end of his piece, where after comparing and contrasting the major ESEA-reauthorization plans he offers three things he thinks the feds should do:
First, it’s appropriate and helpful for the feds to insist upon transparency and clean reporting of performance and spending data as a condition for federal dollars. This entails special attention to the information regarding vulnerable populations and communities, including bright line guidelines regarding regularity of reporting, what gets reported, and so forth.
Second, the feds can offer support for leaders who choose to step out front, without trying to dictate just what those policies should look like. Hence, better to award Title 2 funds to states pursuing ambitious plans for teacher evaluation than to lay out a particular system of evaluation or mandate its adoption. Providing competitive funds for those state and district leaders willing to tackle the tough task of upending century-old routines focuses those dollars in useful ways and makes it more possible for those leaders (and the union chiefs with whom they’re working) to present efforts to rethink tenure, pay, evaluation, and the rest to affected teachers as a potential win-win.
Third, basic research is a public good, and one that demands an active federal role. In principle, I’m supportive of Senator Bennet’s proposed amendment to create an ARPA-ED. That said, the focus must be on cultivating new tools and technologies that will fuel problem-solving. If it’s designed to focus on “reforms” and implementation-dependent strategies, then I’m going to jump off the bandwagon real quick.
So, point 1: transparency. It is in vogue these days to condemn NCLB, but quickly add that the law deserves huge credit for forcing districts and states to disaggregate testing results to reveal how various student subgroups are performing. Presumably, we knew nothing about these kids before NCLB.
Accepting for a moment that we really did know nothing – an assumption belied by decades of education civil rights actions before NCLB — did all this new attention do any good?
Beating Back Big (Ed.) Brother?
It certainly seems quixotic to try to reverse the federal invasion of American education—it’s “for the children,” for crying out loud!—but there are signs that the forces of constitutional and educational good might be making progress. The fact of the matter is that people seemingly across the ideological spectrum have had it with the illogical, rigid, and failed No Child Left Behind Act, and very few people want to keep that sort of thing in place.
What’s the evidence of this?
For one, both Senate Republicans and Democrats are putting out NCLB reauthorization bills that would significantly reduce the mandates the current law puts on states, including the hated and utterly unrealistic full-proficiency-by-2014 deadline. On the House side, Republicans have for months been advancing bills aimed at reducing the size and prescriptiveness of Washington’s edu-occupation. The White House, too, has been arguing that NCLB is far too bureaucratic. Finally, GOP presidential candidates are returning to what was, before the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush, an obvious Republican position: there should be no U.S. Department of Education whatsoever.
So perhaps NCLB will be remembered as the high-water mark of federal school control.
Perhaps, but we’re nowhere near the promised land yet.
First, there is the extremely troubling way the Obama administration is pushing NCLB aside: issuing states waivers from the law, but only if they implement administration-dictated measures, including ”college and career ready standards,” a euphemism for federal curriculum control. But even if they were demanding that states adopt universal private school choice, this would be extremely dangerous, and far beyond just education. The administration is for all intents and purposes unilaterally making law: no separation of powers, no Congressional approval—nothing! Essentially, the rule of law is being replaced by the rule of man, and no one should stand for that even if they think, as I do, that No Child Left Behind is an absolute dud. It reminds me of of one of my all-time favorite movie scenes.
And then there are those federal standards, the supposedly “state-led and voluntary” Common Core standards that Washington just happens to have repeatedly shoved onto states, whether through Race to the Top or waivers. They are perhaps the greatest threat to educational freedom we’ve yet seen, holding the potential to let Washington dictate what every child in America will learn, no matter how controversial, or unproven, or unfit for any kids who are not “the average.”
Fortunately, resistance to these, too, seems to be gaining traction. Perhaps the most heartening evidence is Prof. Jay Greene having been invited a few weeks ago to testify on national standards before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. Jay terrifically summarized the myriad logical and empirical failings of national standards generally, and the Common Core specifically, and having his testimony out there is useful in and of itself. But more important is that at least some people in Congress are paying attention to this largely—and intentionally—under-the-radar conquest. Meanwhile, there is evidence that in at least some states that have adopted the Common Core people are becoming aware of it and starting to ask questions. At the very least, these happenings offer reason to hope that national standards supporters won’t keep getting away with just repeating the fluff logic of “a modern nation needs a single standard, and don’t worry, the Common Core has been rated as good by all us Common Core supporters.”
What has for a long time seemed impossible is suddenly feeling a bit more plausible: withdrawing the Feds from our kids’ classrooms. But there’s a huge amount still to do, and gigantic threats staring us in the face.
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