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No Profile in Courage Here, Either
Yesterday, speaking at Facebook headquarters, President Obama assessed the guts of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and other congressional Republicans and concluded that their deficit reduction plan isn’t “particularly courageous.” That might be accurate – their plan lacks specificity and could target a lot more for elimination — but it’s pretty rich for the President to throw out such a conclusion. After all, his whole strategy appears to be the bankruptingly lame-but-safe crying of doom for cute kids and other supposedly defenseless people no matter what the size of the proposed cut to a social program or how ineffective the program has been. That, and the constant lamentation that “the rich” – a small and therefore electorally weak group of voters – don’t pay their fair share. (And the constitutionality of federal programs? That doesn’t even get a mention.)
Representative of this cowardly course is the President’s mantra about “investing” more in education-related programs despite blaring evidence that the programs don’t work or, as is the case with federal student aid, actually make the problem they’re supposed to solve much worse. But the President wants votes — like most politicians, he wants lots of people to think he’s giving them great stuff for free – so he’s not doing the mildly courageous thing and telling people “look, these programs don’t work, we have a titanic debt, and I’m going to cut things that might sound good but aren’t.” No, he’s doing things like going to community colleges and, in front of cheering groups of students, talking about mean Republicans and how he wants to protect students just like them by keeping the federal dollars flowing.
That’s no profile in courage, nor is it a responsible way to deal with the federal government’s gigantic problems.
All You Have to Do Is Let Go of the Monopoly
I don’t have to prove my bona fides when it comes to opposing top-down, standards-based education reforms. I’ve been highly critical of the No Child Left Behind Act; very aggressive in attacking the reckless drive for national curriculum standards; and have repeatedly noted the importance of educator autonomy. So when you read the following, keep in mind that it is definitely not coming from a command-and-control aficionado: The weakest position in today’s big education war is the one opposed to both standards-based reforms and school choice. It’s the one enunciated yesterday by the Washington Post’ s Valerie Strauss, but which is most firmly staked out by historian Diane Ravitch. It’s the position that essentially boils down to “don’t touch my local, teacher-dominated monopoly!”
Why is this so weak? Because it gives parents and taxpayers — the people who pay for public education and whom the system is supposed to serve — the fewest avenues to get what they want out of the schools.
Outraged over your neighborhood school because it is dangerous, the staff apathetic, and the building crumbling? Too bad — you get what you’re given and can’t even appeal to a higher level of government. And as we’ve seen in far too many places where the residents aren’t rich enough to exercise choice by buying expensive homes in better districts — the District of Columbia, Compton, Detroit, etc. — Ravitch’s utopian vision of school districts as places where “people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors” is just so much gauzy rhapsodizing. Reality is much harsher.
Of course, there are gigantic, fatal flaws with the standards-and-accountability movement, and people like Ravitch and Strauss have very compelling reasons for concern.
The standards movement, for one thing, is completely reliant on standardized testing. Indeed, it is heading for a single, national test, despite well-established evidence that tests are highly constrained in what they can tell us about learning.
In addition, as Ravitch and others regularly lament, the standards movement seems to be dominated by present and former business leaders who have tended to treat education as just another uniform-widget production problem. But children are not uniform; they are individual human beings with widely varied interests, rates of maturity, educational starting points, and life goals. But that never seems to enter into the standards equation, rendering it wrong from the start. Add to this that standards-based reformers tend to treat the education system as a single entity to be engineered, rather than an industry in which schools are the firms and competition is essential for sustained innovation and improvement, and standards-based reforms are as hopeless as teacher-dominated mini monopolies.
Unfortunately, top-down standardizers seem unlikely to join the fold of the one reform that includes both necessary educator autonomy and powerful accountability to parents: educational freedom. Yes, they often like school choice as long as government dictates what chosen schools teach, but they don’t embrace real freedom. Perhaps, though, the Ravitches and Strausses of the world can be brought on board. They won’t be able to keep the local monopolies they cherish, but they’ll be able to get most of what they want: much less stultifying uniformity; considerably more freedom for teachers; and the flourishing of communities, though communities based on shared norms and values, not mere physical proximity.
The flimsiest position in our great education debate is the one held by opponents of both top-down accountability and educational freedom. But if they’ll remove the rose-tinted glasses through which they see local public schooling, there is an option that should appeal to them, one that injects essential parent power and competition into education while giving educators the professional autonomy they crave. It is school choice — educational freedom — and it is the reform that wins the great education debate.
‘You’re Crazy’: What Edu-analysts Say to Avoid Reality
Over the last few days the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has been blogging about one of his favorite topics: “tight-loose” coupling of education power. Basically, the federal government should be “tight” on performance requirements and “loose” on how to meet them. I don’t, though, want to get into that right now. Next week, Fordham will be releasing a proposal for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that, Mike promises, will show how to be simultaneously tight and loose, and I’ll have much to say then. But today I want to use a New Republic article by Education Sector’s Kevin Carey, which Petrilli critiques in his tight-loose tipoff, to illustrate what those of us who’d like to actually apply the Constitution to federal education policy are up against: the assumption of craziness.
This paragraph from Carey’ s piece – which cites not one word from the Constitution, nor deals with so much as an ounce of the arguments against federal intervention — pretty much captures the essence of his assault on constitutionalists:
[House Education Committee Chairman John] Kline is, by all accounts, not a crazy person when it comes to education. But he leads a committee whose members include North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who is noted for bizarre statements on the House floor and has publicly asserted that federal funding for education is unconstitutional. (Foxx chairs the subcommittee on higher education.) Other committee members include Tim Walberg of Michigan and Joe Heck of Nevada, both of whom support abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. The larger Republican caucus appears to have little interest in or knowledge of education—the word does not appear in the Republican “Pledge to America.” Caught between rationality and the House Republican caucus, Kline has offered virtually no details of his plan for NCLB, other than support for “innovation” at the state level. This is code for “letting states do whatever they want.”
You see, anyone who believes such things as federal funding for education is unconstitutional is simply crazy. End of story.
How convenient! Rather than dealing with the absence of education in Article I, Section 8, which lays out the federal government’s specific powers, you just dismiss as nuts those who think the Feds should be bound by the document through which their powers come. And don’t worry that the Federalist Papers dismiss the notions that the general welfare, necessary and proper, and taxation clauses actually give the Feds unlimited power — only loons are against federal control. And ignore why the Framers of the Constitution first and foremost feared national concentration of power; that they knew people with access to such power would eventually use it for their own ends, not the vaunted “public good.” Only a kook would think that could actually happen. Finally, ignore what has come of not listening to the crazy people, such as this:
And this.
And even this.
Obviously, you don’t have to be a little touched to see that the case for getting Washington out of our schools is a powerful one. Unfortunately, some people would rather dismiss it as delusional than deal with it on its hugely important merits.
Obey the Constitution
The following is cross-posted from the National Journal’s Education Experts blog. This week’s topic: The Race to the Top program and the FY 2011 budget deal:
Having the advantage of writing this after the CR deal has been made, it appears that Race to the Top will get $700 million but still work through states. So no regional or direct-to-district grants, at least from what I’ve been able to divine.
Unfortunately, the root issue here isn’t Race to the Top — it’s federal involvement in education at all. As long as Washington spends money on education it will call the shots, whether that’s through competitions like Race to the Top, or rules attached to IDEA, or Title I, or student-aid programs. Washington will be the puppet master, and it will waste taxpayer money on programs that do not work.
We know this well from the four, wallet-emptying decades in which we’ve had major federal involvement in education. Yet we are still having the same, misguided arguments: Not whether Washington should be setting education policy at all, but what sort of policy it should set. And the two sides continue to come down, basically, to whether Washington should spend lots of money with copious “accountability,” or spend oodles without as many rules.
Both are wrong. The Founders purposely gave the federal government only specific, enumerated powers, and none of them include the authority to make education policy. And as I have laid out many times, the “general welfare” clause, the “necessary and proper” clause, the taxation clause — none of these gives Washington the authority to do anything in education. Only the 14th Amendment gives it a role in education — to prohibit unequal provision of education by states and districts — as well as Article I, Section 8, which gives the Feds exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia.
Of course, the Founders didn’t give Washington only very limited, specific powers for no reason. They did so because they knew that the strong tendency is for government to be captured by small groups and used not for the public good, but the good of those who wield governmental power. Today, that means politicians often using “the children” as pawns to win political games — spending money to show how much they “care” — while special interests employed by our schools lobby and politick for ever-more dough, weak accountability, and hamstrung competition. And some wonder why federal spending on education has skyrocketed while outcomes have stunk.
We can keep on bickering about Race to the Top and other proposals to twist a few screws on the dilapidated federal machine, or we can get Washington out of education altogether. Both the Constitution and educational success demand we do the latter.
Negotiators Wield the Emery Board against Massive Education Waste
Now that details of the please-no-shutdown budget deal are emerging, at least one thing is clear: Republicans caved on education spending. Rather than demand meaningful cuts to the absurd panoply of federal education programs that succeed only at sucking money out of taxpayers’ wallets, GOP negotiators agreed to mere token trims. Quickly adding together the education programs in the list of cuts put out by Republicans, the total comes to only about $1.6 billion, from an FY 2010 Department of Education appropriation of $64.1 billion. That’s a measly two-percent shave.
And Republicans didn’t just surrender on big cuts that any reasonable analysis screams should be made post-haste. They actually handed President Obama additional money and power with $700 million in new funding for Race to the Top, the supposedly one-time “stimulus” program that the President has used to bribe states into adopting, among other things, national curriculum standards.
If the goal of budgeteers is to cut programs that don’t work and are unconstitutional – as it absolutely should be — education is the first area in which they should start swinging the spending axe, or better yet, the chainsaw. But no: Because few in Washington have the political fortitude to eliminate spending done in the name of “education” — think of the children! – all the negotiators took were a couple of half-hearted strokes with a worn down emery board.
This is terrible news on its own, and it sure doesn’t bode well for negotiations yet to come.
Standards Overreach, or According to Plan?
Over on his Education Week blog, Rick Hess senses that the “broad but shallow coalition” of national curriculum standards true-believers and folks who just like the idea of a common academic metric might be fracturing. The cause: The Albert Shanker Institute’s national curriculum manifesto released last month, as well as lingering concern about impending national tests. Suddenly — and seemingly against the wishes of Common Core leaders – the national standards push is starting to appear much less ”voluntary” and much more micromanaging than advertised.
I hope that Hess is right that alarm is spreading over the oozingly expanding national-standards blob, but I disagree with how he seems to characterize what’s happening. Hess appears to see these developments, especially the Shanker manifesto, as overreaching by just some of the more zealous nationalizers, much to the consternation of the main Common Core architects and advocates. But as I have pointed out before, if you reach into the bowels of what would-be nationalizers have written, as well as the logic behind national standards, it is hard to see this as anything but planned.
At the very least, the main advocates haven’t wanted standards adoption to be truly voluntary, by which I mean states are neither rewarded nor punished for adopting or bypassing the standards. The Obama administration intentionally and openly coerced adoption with Race to the Top, for one thing, without eliciting any loud opposition from Common Core creators. But the administration was really just doing what the Common Core-leading National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc., called for back in 2008. As stated on page 7 of their publication Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring Students Receive a World-class Education:
The federal government can play an enabling role as states engage in the critical but challenging work of international benchmarking. First, federal policymakers should offer funds to help underwrite the cost for states to take the five action steps described above [including "adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts."] At the same time, policymakers should boost federal research and development (R&D) investments to provide state leaders with more and better information about international best practices, and should help states develop streamlined assessment strategies that facilitate cost-effective international comparisons of student performance.
As states reach important milestones on the way toward building internationally competitive education systems, the federal government should offer a range of tiered incentives to make the next stage of the journey easier, including increased flexibility in the use of federal funds and in meeting federal educational requirements and providing more resources to implement world-class educational best practices.
If you have federal “enabling” and ”incentives” you cease to have truly voluntary state adoption — or movement to the “next stage” — of curriculum standards. And that is exactly what the core supporters of Common Core have wanted.
But aren’t standards just, well, standards, not curricula?
This is largely semantics. True, you can pinpoint what you want children to learn and when they should learn it without identifying how that goal should be reached. But just by defining the goal you are driving curricula, stating what must be taught. Indeed, there would be no point to the standards if the intention weren’t in some way to affect curricula — what is actually taught in the schools.
Of course, there is another part to this: the two federally funded national tests currently under development, which Hess is hearing some in Washington would like to see become just one test. But whether we have a federally backed testing monopoly or duopoly ultimately won’t matter: For the tests to have meaning they will have to include concrete content, and assuming performance on those tests will impact how much federal money states and districts get — which appears to be what the Obama administration wants, and is the only thing that makes sense for people who back federal “accountability” – you now have a de facto required, federal curriculum.
I hope Hess is correct and the Common Core coalition is fracturing. I am dubious, though, that any major fissures are being riven by a faction of zealots that has just gone too far. Based on both the evidence and logic, going too far has been the widely held goal for several years.
It’s All In How You Define ‘Community’
Every week, the National Journal’s Education Expert blog tackles a different issue, and from hereon out I’ll be weighing in on many of them, crossposting at Cato@Liberty. I sent in my first entry today, which appears as a “guest response” while they set me up to appear as a regular. It’s on my favorite topic — education and social cohesion — so hopefully I’ve started with a bang.
Enjoy, and thanks to the National Journal for bringing a libertarian perspective on board:
Looking at the evidence suggests that school choice is the best educational system to build strong communities. A lot, though, depends on how you define “community.”
Diane Ravitch essentially defines a community as a “neighborhood,” and certainly neighborhoods can be a form of community. But neighborhoods are hardly close to the only type of community, and to the extent that neighborhoods – or, given education reality these days, school districts, states, and the federal government – often include people with very diverse backgrounds, desires, and norms, public schools can be very destructive to social cohesion.
Start with simple logic: If diverse people are required to support a single system of schools, is it more likely to result in unity or conflict? The answer, of course, is conflict. If people cannot agree on what math curriculum to use, they have to fight it out politically. If they cannot agree on whether or not there should be school uniforms, they have to fight that out. Indeed, any disagreement has to be resolved in a political arena, and the term “arena” certainly does not connote cohesion.
We see this forced conflict manifested constantly in education. States and communities are regularly inflamed over the teaching of human origins, whether we’re talking Scopes Monkey or Intelligent Design. We have disputes of which religious groups will get their holidays off from school. And then there’s the ever contentious teaching of U.S. history.
And conflict is only one manifestation of the division caused by trying to bring diverse people under a single government umbrella. Renowned social capital theorist Robert Putnam has found that where there is significant diversity there is also major atomization – people “pull in like a turtle” – quite possibly because they have few recognized, shared norms to hold onto. So not only don’t you have cohesive – but separated – groups, you have seriously compromised intra-group cohesion as well. Communities of all types are weak.
How do you overcome these very real problems through the education system? Let people choose schools – especially private schools – with the money that currently all goes to public schools. Then, not only can you phase out the inherently adversarial system that is public schooling, you can empower people to choose schools based on their shared norms and values.
But won’t this “balkanize” Americans? Maybe, in that many people will choose to attend schools with people like themselves. That, though, is certainly preferable to forcing us at each others’ throats. Moreover, there is evidence that allowing people to choose schools helps to meaningfully overcome serious divisions. Research by Jay Greene and Nicole Mellow, for instance, found that lunch tables – where students sit by true, voluntary choice – at private schools were better integrated by race than those at public institutions. Why? There could be many explanations, but a very reasonable one is that the ties that bind kids at private schools – common religious values, perhaps shared interest in a particular curriculum – help to overcome divisions such as race.
Does more work need to be done to prove that choice is crucial to building communities? Absolutely. Unfortunately, for the most part we haven’t even considered that government schooling might be more divisive than unifying, despite the very real – and painful – evidence that that could indeed be the case. Well, we need to seriously consider the possibility that choice is better mortar for building communities than government schooling because, respect for “neighborhood schools” notwithstanding, the evidence in favor of choice – and against government schooling – is both real and mounting.
No Foolin’: Tell the Feds to Butt Out
I probably shouldn’t do this on April Fool’s Day — it would be the one day they might go along with it, only to renounce it as a joke later — but Jay Greene’s recent exchange with the Fordham folks reminded me of my call a few weeks ago: Fordham and other national standards supporters should declare publicly and loudly that there should be no federal involvement in “common” standards or anything associated with them. If they really mean what they say — that they want adoption of national standards and curricula to be ”purely” voluntary for states — they should not only stop asking for federal involvement, they should declare any federal meddling utterly unacceptable.
Unfortunately, Jay had to repeat that call because, so far, Fordham hasn’t heeded it:
The claim that Kathleen and Fordham want no more than to nationalize standards without touching curriculum, pedagogy, or assessment is simply disingenuous. For example, Checker once again made common cause with the AFT, Linda Darling-Hammond, etc., … in backing the Shanker Manifesto, which calls for “Developing one or more sets of curriculum guides that map out the core content students need to master the new Common Core State Standards.” Checker may claim that this effort is purely voluntary, but that would only be credible if he and Fordham clearly and forcefully opposed any effort by the national government to “incentivize,” push, prod, or otherwise require the adoption of national curriculum based on the already incentivized national standards.
Come to think of it, even if it were an April Fool’s stunt, having Fordham and other national-standards crusaders renounce federal arm-twisting to get their way would be a big step forward. Heck, at least then everyone would acknowledge that it was a joke.
Postscript: It would be a joke, by the way, sort of like this, which I saw Fordham put up right after I initially submitted this post. I mean, my vocab is always certified family-friendly!
Those Fordham folks — you just never know when they’re being serious…
Let’s Not Lose Sight of a Real Education Market
Over the last few days Jay Greene, the Fordham Institute’s Kathleen Porter-Magee, and several other edu-thinkers have been arguing about whether national curriculum standards would destroy a competitive market in education, and a market that already provides the uniform standards Fordham wants Washington to impose. But let’s be very clear: We haven’t had a real market — a free market — in education for a long time.
Sadly, I’m afraid Jay started this whole mess, though he certainly knows what a free market in education would look like and I don’t think he intended to confuse the issue. Indeed, he doesn’t use the term “free market,” but mainly writes about the “competitive market between communities.” His argument is that Americans over time picked standardized curricula and schools by moving to districts that provided such things. He is no doubt at least partially right, though the case is hardly open and shut. Indeed, there is strong historical evidence that district consolidation and uniformity was often pushed on small districts from outside, especially in urban areas. It is also quite possible that many people moved to districts with uniform offerings not in search of such offerings, but in search of something else that happened to coincide with them. Most notably, industrialization brought many people to cities in search of employment, and school uniformity often came with that. Finally, the economist whose work inspired Jay’s post notes that while he believes small rural districts died largely due to residents abandoning them, he concedes that there is a “lack of direct evidence connecting rural property values with local decisions about consolidation.”
Those caveats aside, Jay’s point is a still good one that I have made before, most notably when discussing schooling and social cohesion: People will tend to have their children learn many ”common” things because that is the key to personal success. People will learn what they need to in order to work effectively and successfully in society. Moreover, people will simply tend to gravitate toward things that work.
So the main problem in the Greene-Fordham debate is not that Jay’s points are necessarily wrong, it’s that “competitive market between communities” is too easily misconstrued as “free market,” and it fails to acknowledge the gigantic inefficiencies that come from government monopolies, whether controlled at the district, state, or federal level. Those include the massive, expensive waste that fills the pockets of special interests employed by the system; constant conflict over what the schools will teach; and at-best very ponderous competition — if you want a better school you have to buy a new house — that quashes crucial innovation and specialization. Worse yet, it leads to the following kind of crucial, damaging misunderstanding by Porter-Magee:
For more than a decade we have been conducting a natural experiment where we let market forces drive standards setting at the state level. The result? A swift and sure race to the bottom. A majority of states had failed to set rigorous standards for their students—and had failed to create effective assessments that could be used to track student mastery of that content. In fact, the whole impetus behind the Common Core State Standards Initiative was to address what was essentially a market failure in education.
This is wrong, as they say, on so many levels!
Obama’s Little Evidence Problem
Last month I wrote a post on President Obama’s selective citation of evidence when debating which education programs to kill and which to keep. Well yesterday the administration struck again, issuing the following statement opposing a bill that would revive DC’s bleeding-out voucher program:
STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY
H.R. 471 – Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act
(Rep. Boehner, R-Ohio, and 50 cosponsors)
While the Administration appreciates that H.R. 471 would provide Federal support for improving public schools in the District of Columbia (D.C.), including expanding and improving high-quality D.C. public charter schools, the Administration opposes the creation or expansion of private school voucher programs that are authorized by this bill. The Federal Government should focus its attention and available resources on improving the quality of public schools for all students. Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement. The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students. Rigorous evaluation over several years demonstrates that the D.C. program has not yielded improved student achievement by its scholarship recipients compared to other students in D.C. While the President’s FY 2012 Budget requests funding to improve D.C. public schools and expand high-quality public charter schools, the Administration opposes targeting resources to help a small number of individuals attend private schools rather than creating access to great public schools for every child.
So, as I wrote last month, while the Prez. has no problem calling for heaps of dollars for such proven failures as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers — $1.27 billion, to be exact — he won’t support $20 million for something that rigorous research actually works, quoting Andrew Coulson’s recent congressional testimony:
that students attending private schools thanks to this program have equal or better academic performance than their peers in the local public schools, and have significantly higher graduation rates. This, and very high levels of parental satisfaction, com[ing] at an average per pupil cost of around $7,000. By contrast, per pupil spending on k-12 public education in the nation’s capital was roughly $28,000 during the 2008-09 school year.
And such positive results, again in contrast to the President’s statement, are not an aberration for school choice. The highest-calibre research on choice has almost always found clear benefits stemming from it, and has never found negative outcomes.
Obviously I can’t read the President’s mind — he might oppose the voucher program but otherwise love big education spending for philosophical reasons, or he might just be appeasing teachers’ unions — but one thing I do know is that a fair examination of the evidence simply cannot support killing DC vouchers while spending lavishly everywhere else.
Tough Breaks for the Blame-Cheap-States Crowd
An explanation for explosive college prices that’s very popular with ivory-tower apologists is that state governments have been ruthlessly “defunding” higher ed for years, forcing schools to raise prices. Two new reports help to make clear — as I have argued many times in the past — that this simply doesn’t hold water.
The first report is the annual State Higher Education Executive Officers’ State Higher Education Finance Report. While it shows that on a per-pupil basis state and local funding has declined over the last few years, total amounts have risen pretty steadily since 2000. Adjusted for inflation, total state and local support dipped from $81.3 billion in 2000 to $78.0 billion in 2005, ballooned to $87.1 billion in 2009, then dropped just a bit to $85.5 billion in 2010. Helping to put it all in perspective, SHEEO reports that in 1985 state and local funding totalled just $65.5 billion. In other words, the general trend line has gone steeply up. But don’t believe me? Take it right from the report:
Some observers have suggested that states are abandoning their historical commitment to public higher education. National data and more careful attention to variable state conditions strongly suggest that such a broad observation is not justified by the available data.
Of course, if total taxpayer funding is generally up but per-student funding is down, increases in enrollment must be significant. And indeed they are. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that that’s very likely not a good thing.
The other bad news for the blame-the-taxpayers crowd is a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity that illustrates that external factors such as decreasing state subsidies are not the main culprit behind skyrocketing prices. Student aid is, because it allows colleges to increase their prices with impunity. Evidence of this includes college prices considerably outpacing overall inflation; hugely declining faculty productivity; tuition growing far beyond instructional costs; and ballooning financial aid that hasn’t been accompanied by decreasing net costs.
Unfortunately, much of this will likely either be dismissed out of hand or just ignored. But the evidence, when you examine it, is awfully compelling: Subsidies, not pennypinchers, are the big problem in higher ed.
Help Break My Common Curriculum Fever
Over at Flypaper, Chester Finn suggests that people like me are either crazy or on the verge of it for fearing that the Shanker Institute’s “common content” manifesto might very well be another step toward federal control of American education.
“Over in the more feverish corners of the blogosphere, and sometimes even in saner locales,” he writes, ”the Shanker Institute’s call for ‘common content’ curriculum to accompany the Common Core standards has triggered a panic attack.”
Now, I wouldn’t say “panic attack.” To panic is to “be overcome by a sudden fear,” but I’ve been watching the move toward federal curriculum control for some time. Back in 2008 many of the groups behind the Common Core called for Washington to “incentivize” adoption of national standards. In 2009, the Obama administration made adopting common standards critical to compete in the so-called Race to the Top. In 2010, the administration put common standards front-and-center in the accountability piece of its No Child Left Behind reauthorization blueprint. Finally, that same year the U.S. Department of Education chose two consortia to develop national assessments to go with national standards. So when I read the Shanker Institute’s proposal, with its recommendation that the federal government spend taxpayer money to help implement ”purely voluntary” curriculum ”guidelines,” I didn’t panic. I saw the same obvious movement toward federal curriculum control I’d been observing for years.
But maybe I am a bit “feverish.” Maybe I do need to chillax a bit. Thankfully, I know just the thing to help me do that: National-standards fans should pronounce publicly and unequivocally — perhaps issue another manifesto! — that they do not want federal money in any way connected to common standards, and state that they will oppose any effort to “incentivize,” “support,” “cajole,” “threaten,” or do anything else to states or districts to push them to adopt common curricula. Were national-standards champions to do that – you know, just demand that all this be as purely voluntary as they say it is – and I and others like me would no doubt be well on the road to recovery.
Somehow, I don’t expect my forehead to cool off anytime soon.
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