National Education Policy, part 1

For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the Obama Administration’s “blueprint” for the re-authorization of ESEA (known formerly as No Child Left Behind). Their proposal has generated a lot of conversation about what direction school reform should be taking – which has, to me, the look of the proverbial seven blind men trying to describe an elephant: many people have a piece of the puzzle, but we seem to lack a vision of a coherent whole.

This is important because it will probably be another seven years before we get another shot at this.

Among educators, the general consensus appears to be “encouraged but cautious”. The President and Secretary Duncan have said the right things - they’ve acknowledged the need for balanced assessments, and the importance of the arts and sciences – but there’s a concern that the federal role will continue to be more coercive than helpful. However well-intentioned, no one’s quite sure that they can trust the Obama plan.

Hold that thought.

For starters, the administration appears committed to promoting “charter schools” as a key component of school reform. I’m not opposed to this conceptually - on the theory that relieving charter schools from some bureaucratic requirements allows them to explore educational innovation that could replicated elsewhere.

A well-designed charter school encourages parental involvement, is run by a relatively small group of committed educators and has the appeal of being smaller, and more manageable, than most urban public schools.

But we haven’t thought this through. Suppose Chicago were to create 1,000 charter schools, all of them excellent. (We know this won’t happen because the research is pretty clear that charter schools are not a panacea; some charter schools have been very successful, but many have not. But just suppose.) Under the best scenario, you will have drained financial resources (vouchers?) educational resources (the most motivated teachers) as well as the most engaged parents away from the public system – leaving what? Separate, but unequal?

The problem is that there’s no mechanism for taking what you’ve learned from these experiments, and bringing them to scale. (Under Pennsylvania law it’s not even possible.) This suggests a missed opportunity. There are a lot of successful public schools that have the resources and will to innovate. Why not give them the same freedom?

And then there’s this problem: when given the charter school option, relatively few parents make that “choice”; they don’t want their kids to go to another school, they want their school to be better!

Finally, a lot of people have pointed to KIPP charter schools as a great success story, particularly noting that KIPP does not “select” their students – which conveniently overlooks the fact that KIPP is actually very selective: only students having the good fortune of highly engaged and committed parents are admitted. That’s a big deal.