I’ve been trying to wait until the spin dust from the State
of the Union message settled, before I did my own end-of-the-year
evaluation of the Administration’s work thus far on education issues.

In all fairness, the President has had quite a few major
issues to juggle in his freshman year, and I, for one, did not expect education
to race to the top of that list. I did hope to see signs that groundwork for
some meaningful and significant change would be forthcoming.

Craig A. Cunningham at the Education
Policy Blog approached this assessment with a thoughtful and open
reflection on his Dec. 2008 predictions on then Education Secretary-in-Waiting,
Arne Duncan. Sort of a pre-and post-test. 
In it, Cunningham reaches a somber conclusion about the person charged
with leading change public education: “The primary group that Arne does not
appear to be listening to (much) are education professionals.”  Sounds distressingly like most of Duncan’s
recent predecessors.  Craig also notes,
as I have, that “Duncan’s closest advisors are also not education professionals.” 
Not spelling
relief, so far (pun absolutely intended). 
Some of my teacher colleagues distress over this continuing
marginalization of teacher voice at the federal level led to a public letter
writing campaign to the President spearheaded by  fellow TLN member Anthony Cody.

So far, the most noticeable change in education policy has
been to remove Bush’s NCLB nameplate from ESEA, and to distill some of the
worst aspects of it into a high-profiled sprint for desperately needed funding,
Race-to-the Top.  One of the concerns
here, is that RttT gives budget-axe wielding state authorities more incentive
to close struggling schools, than to do the work of correcting why they were
low-performing in the first place. This poses a special threat to poor
rural students for whom multiple school options do not exist. But this
Administration has a decidedly urban tilt. Still, it’s curious why Duncan
appears to be putting more stock in the policies that produced only
questionable results in Chicago’s public schools, as opposed to pushing for a
wider range of options, including one of the few truly effective turnaround
strategies in the country also found in Chicago, the Strategic
Learning Initiative.  In this interview with Public School Insights, John Simmons shares this tasty bit of
advice:

[School improvement] is like baking a cake. If you include
all of the essential supports, you get a great cake. But if you leave out one
ingredient, like the salt or the eggs, you are not going to get anything that
tastes like a cake. That is what we found as we put together the best
strategies from education research and the best strategies from high-performance
systems research. So now we have a systemic approach to school improvement. But
it is not a silver bullet.

Unfortunately, silver bullets still appear to be Washington’s tool of choice for school reform. There is growing concern that NCLB reliance on flawed standardized testing and weak data systems
will become even more entrenched through RttT criteria and incentives.  Among those wondering about the potential for
misuse of test data is Chester
Finn of the Fordham Institute who recently told EdWeek:

He worries that the Obama administration’s ambitious goals
for the assessment funding—which include generating information about both
school and student performance as well as data about teacher
effectiveness—could prove to be irreconcilable. “If all the glitterati…remains
in the grant competition, anyone that wants to win the competition is going to
have to pretend they can do all those things….but since we know that they can’t
all be done by the same assessment, in the same period of time at a finite
price, something will get left in the dust.

That same Edweek article also revisits the ongoing concerns
about the inaccuracies and inadequacies of current standardized tests,
especially the flawed attempts to make them more authentic raised by people
like former testing industry insider, Todd Farley, which he also shared via Edutopia. Farley
supports, as I do, that assessment, particularly high-stakes, is better handled
by classroom teachers. I also agree with 
CyberEnglish
teacher, Ted Nellen, that “fixing"
the tests is the very least we could do if we are going to continue to use them
or expand their use for high stakes decisions. Better, as Nellen and others
suggest, is to reduce our dependence on them in favor of more comprehensive
evaluations of student growth and performance. But both these options presume
we actually care more about the students than those who are profiting from the
tests.

Of course, there are
those, like Andy Rotherham, who think NCLB deserves credit for “making
school performance more transparent.” 
More transparent, I suppose, to those who actually didn’t know that
minority students have consistently received an inferior quality of education.
Those would be the same people who for years have refused to listen to the
parents or teachers of poor and minority students as we have complained loud
and long trying to get Federal policymakers to end inequities in allocation of
resources, assignment of teachers, and application of policies by state and
local officials (and that’s not just here in Mississippi).  Incredibly, Rotherham wants to see NCLB
strengthened by among other things “giving [more] political cover to state and
local elected officials…”

Still, the optimist
in me would like to think that there is yet time for the President and his
team to rethink some of these issues, and to engage us all in more thoughtful
discussion before and during the reauthorization of ESEA (formerly known as
NCLB).  I thank another TLN friend, Mary Tedrow, for reminding us that so often learning is a messy and recursive
process, not a linear one.  She suggests
that the raucous and revealing debate around healthcare reform may be a preview
and a omen of what the ESEA process may hold. When a healthcare bill finally
arrives on Mr. Obama’s desk, I’m waiting to see how closely he will hold the
lawmakers and himself to the promises he made about what such a bill would and
would not contain. Yet, I respect him for allowing the democratic process to
run its course (unseemly as it may have been along the way).

If he and the
Secretary do as much with ESEA and other education issues, then I’ll be ready
to pull out my own scoring criteria from just before the election and give them
a passing grade.