Ed reform wheel goes ’round and ’round
Thursday, March 13, 2008Written by: Uncle Charley
“Dog bites man,” in today’s Rocky Mountain News, as we’re treated to the not-so-startling story of local educators frustrated by No Child Left Behind. You can’t report what isn’t there, though, and it sure sounds like Margaret Spellings’ right-hand man received an earful yesterday while he was in town:
President Bush’s signature education law hurts schools by interfering with local decision making and by wrongly stigmatizing some schools as failures.
That was the message a dozen
Colorado education leaders gave Assistant Education Secretary Ray Simon Wednesday.
I wasn’t there, so I’d be glad to see a comment from someone who attended the morning enclave at the Colorado Department of Education. But it doesn’t seem like there was much good to be said about NCLB. Not surprising: Feedback sessions like this one tend to magnify the gripes and criticisms. It’s not likely you’ll find many people going out of their way to come tell the assistant secretary how wonderful the federal government program is.
Since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) — of which NCLB is just the latest iteration — was enacted in 1965, and most especially since A Nation at Risk in 1983, it seems like the federal government has been on the education reform Ferris wheel: traveling around and around but seemingly ending up where it started.
Don’t get me wrong. NCLB has done a limited amount of good, though more of it has gone awry with good intentions. Attentive observers should see by now that federally-driven education reform (devised so far from the locus of action) tends to be inefficient and ineffective. Yet why am I persuaded that so many of the NCLB critics simply will seek answers in a new federal education reform package (or in the NEA’s case, demand large no-strings federal budget increases targeted directly at across-the-board salary increases for education employees)?
It would be interesting to see the critics quoted in the News piece, for instance, distinguished between those who have consistently argued against prescriptive federal intervention in public education and those who just dislike the accountability pressures of NCLB (as weak and uneven as they may be).
Color me skeptical, but it seems that principled constitutional federalism has a lot less to do with the complaints than the culture of excuses embedded in the bureaucratic systems we’ve constructed. Accountability is needed, but getting it right has been a lot harder than it looks.
Politically and practically speaking, NCLB has hit the wall, raising expectations and failing to deliver on much. Still, Congress can’t get its act together to fix it or renew it. And no one is holding their breath to wait for the bill that would abolish the Department of Education, so states can flourish more as laboratories of innovation.
The education reform wheel keeps spinning ’round and ’round.
