Three sides of the same debate

Choice, accountability, and autonomy

In the opening acknowledgments to Dr. George H. Wood’s Schools That Work, he concedes that he found out “how hard it is to sell a book on what is good about American schools.” His purpose, however, is clear: “Could every American school work so well for every child?” (1)

For the past decade, the debate over school reform has been fragmented into three debates: one of choice, one of freedom, and one of accountability. Choice remains dominated by the championing of voucher programs - an approach that this paper believes only serves to stratify the education system into schools of the poor and privileged. The continual rejection of voucher initiatives - most recently in Utah - speaks to the movement's ineffectiveness. Freedom has reached the forefront most specifically in the debate over charter schools - and with it, concerns over accountability. It is accountability, undoubtedly, that has been at the center of these three debates: it is a shorter word for the No Child Left Behind Act.

Rather disconcertingly, these ideas have remained more as points of disagreement than being embraced, as this paper sees it, as complementary. As this paper has argued, the No Child Left Behind Act is failing precisely because it lacks the flexibility (and incentives) necessary to enable schools to extend their efforts beyond the test alone. The result is an environment that avoids risks - and potentially great returns.

This paper is undoubtedly unwelcome and uncomfortable at the extremities of each sides of this debate. Its purpose has been to unite the underlying promise of choice, accountability, and autonomy. It must first confront the skeptics.

Rage against the machine
The first line of argument is the failure of federal oversight. "Since the [federal government] has been seriously involved in education 'we have suffered…a catastrophic decline in educational productivity, analogous to buying 1970s cars today and paying twice their original selling price,'" Neal McCluskey writes in Cato@Liberty, the public-policy institute's official blog. "So what’s the solution to all this?" Mr. McCluskey asks. "Universal school choice. Give parents control over public education money instead of giving it to the educrats, and make the schools compete ... Only then will the catastrophic flaw in top-down control at any level be eliminated, and the power structure for real accountability be in place." (2)

The source of his frustration is test-based accountability - which he argues, continues to diminish standards. Richard Rothstein writes in The American Prospect that this system "corrupts schooling in ways that overshadowed any possible score increases." One such consequence, he writes, is the goal distortion of undue emphasis placed on particular subjects and metrics. Even the specifics can be distorted: the No Child Left Behind Act demands proficiency of all subgroups, but by the very nature of statistical accuracy, the margin-of-errors spread farther— in short, “inaccurate accountability.” (3)

Kansas responds to this line of thought through part agreement and part argument. Mr. Rothstein’s questioning of goal distortion is more or less the same as this paper’s frustration with “entropy as the result of specificity” - and addresses it on several fronts. First, agreeing with Mr. Rothstein’s assessment of goal distortion, the paper’s understanding of a school’s effectiveness incorporates more than test scores.

It also agrees with Mr. McCluskey that accountability alone has and will continue to fail, but asks how will choice alone manage any better if schools cannot truly differentiate themselves from one another? Autonomy, too is needed. It is here that schools can move beyond merely teaching to the test, but transcending it, through curriculums and policies that are truly competitive.

This paper strongly disagrees that the federal government should not be a force in education—and questions how much so it truly has been ‘seriously involved’ in public schooling. The No Child Left Behind Act has failed precisely because it lacks assertiveness: without universal national standards—with which Mr. Rothstein supports, if proposed by a third party—it is in the states interest to limit standards to meet compliance.

The federal government must remain involved in the nation’s education, but it must transcend the ill-conceived frameworks in which it has been content with. In a nation wrecked by inequalities of funding and standards, it is the position of this paper that quite simply, the federal government must become a stronger force in this nation’s education. But it must be a focused force — uniting standards to reflect a united economic and democratic interest, and ensuring equality of opportunity, no less through guaranteed payment of tuition.

The opportunity is present, quite simply, to transcend beyond this wretched system of inherent inequality—and federal policies ineffective precisely because it accepts this as an unquestionable reality—to embrace a system that is truly both comprehensive and effective.

Dismal pickings
“School choice seems simple, straightforward,” editors Edith Rasell and Richard Rothstein write in School Choice, “but despite the apparent consensus, critics of school choice have raised a number of troubling questions. Will all parents be equally able with sufficient time and sophistication to choose the best school for their children? Will choice further stratify an already stratified educational system? In the past school choice led to segregated schools; will outcomes be better this time?” (4)

Amy Stuart Wells’ study of the choices of parents of inner-city African American students found that: Several factors, including expectations, racial attitudes, sense of efficacy, and alienation and isolation from the larger society, affect the amount of information parents and students have access to and the kinds of decisions they make. These factors … lead to educational decisions far removed from tangible measures of school quality. (4a)

Douglas Willms and Frank Echols offer an interesting insight on Scottish schools, where families are allowed to choose schools outside their neighborhood—the schools required to publish information on their curriculum, school discipline, and examination results. “Many families,” the summary reports “choose schools based on factors unrelated to achievement or academic quality.” They include, Jon Witte writes, geographic location and disciplinary climate as well. (4b,c)

Even the Scottish families who sought the highest academic quality were susceptible to a lack of meaningful information. Parents, Mary Driscoll writes, are also vulnerable to self-deception: adamant that their chosen schools were superior, in defiance of a reality that suggests otherwise. (4d)

Choice, Rasell and Rothstein believe, cannot be a “single factor solution.” They are right. Without an effective framework responsible for accountability—clearly and fairly assessing schools on all relevant factors so that parents may be truly informed, and thus empowered — choice is meaningless. The editors are correct—that unless an effort is made to unite standards by dismantling the unequal fifty-tier system of standards—school choice will only compound this fifty-tier mishap into a one-hundred tier monstrosity.

Without autonomy, schools cannot truly differentiate themselves—and will be continually bound to an uninspired approach to education that has continued to plague this nation’s schools.

What’s missing
This paper acknowledges that performance—no matter how defined—is not the sole influence in determining which school a child is sent to—nor should it be. This paper is not written in the interest of having students “pushed out of their neighborhood schools and onto a bus heading for the suburbs by an assertive parent.” (4) The failure of poor, urban and rural schools will not be fixed by outsourcing their children to better performing schools elsewhere.

School improvement must be organic, continuous, and close to home. It is achieved by giving school leaders the flexibility to embrace innovative programs such as KIPP as their school’s groundwork, and affording them the power to enforce. This power— ranging from what teachers to keep and recruit (and how much to pay them) — allows them to compete for talent.

With control of funding, school leaders can invest in their resources and facilities on which an environment that fosters education so fully depends upon. Thus empowered, no longer must school buildings be decrepit and void of books—not only because parents are equally empowered to move elsewhere, but because that there are no more excuses.

Think—but think clearly
This paper has not been disillusioned by either argument that education is in too much of the public interest to deny private (preferably, not corporate) interest, or too eager to embrace the fanciful notion that complete privatization can effectively regulate itself. John Kenneth Gailbraith sees the conclusion clearly: “I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that… I’m in favor of whatever works in the particular case.”

This is a unique case— for, Jim Horning is right, “nothing is as simple as we hope it will be” — one that is at once faced with enormous responsibility and immense complexity. The government must exist in education to ensure the equality of standards and funding, to see to it that at minimum, all schools are fulfilling their responsibilities; the market exists to encourage schools, parents, and student to demand more of themselves, and be empowered to seek it.

John Chubb and Terry Moe of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools finished their work with the conclusion that “private control means less bureaucratic influence; less bureaucratic influence leads to better school organization; and better school organization leads to higher student achievement.” (4)

This debate is a question of words—all of them political, and all of them polarizing. It need not be so. Private, autonomous, charter are all the same: independence. Choice is nothing more than the proper fit for school, student, and parent. The aim is to continue to diminish the variance in performance between schools - and now to address the large variance in performance within them without compromising diversity. This paper has recognized and addressed the very real risk of disillusioned parents by encouraging a greater transparency in total performance and satisfaction, while also encouraging schools in turn to work further in the students’ and their own, to indulge in unspeak, enlightened self-interest.

This encourages schools to actively recruit students—and also offers them the incentives to seek out and develop poor-performing students just as much so as the talented. It is then that schools embrace the challenge of an empowering education—and if such an equilibrium can be reached, this paper has succeeded.

(1) Schools That Work: America’s Most Innovative Public Education Programs. George H. Wood, Ph.D. Penguin Books. 1992.
(2) George's Will be Done on NCLB. Neal McCluskey. Cato@Liberty. The Cato Institute. 11 December 2007. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2007/12/11/georges-will-be-done-on-nclb/
(3) Leaving "No Child Left Behind" Behind. Richard Rothstein. The American Prospect. 17 December 2007. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles;jsessionid=acp1XfueERQdql6HVB?article=leaving_nclb_behind
(4) School Choice. Ed. Edith Rasell, Richard Rothstein. Economic Policy Institute. 1993.
a - The Sociology of School Choice: Why Some Win and Others Lose in the Educational Marketplace. Amy Stuart Wells.
b - The Scottish Experience of Parental School Choice. J. Douglas Willms, Frank H. Echols.
c - The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Jon Witte.
d - Choice, Achievement, and School Community. Mary Driscoll.

The cast of characters

The people of schools reform
[You can view the PDF here.]

As a senior at Princeton University, Wendy Kopp proposed a national teacher corps in the aim of eliminating educational inequality. Shortly thereafter, with $2.5 million in funding and a “skeleton” staff such a corps came into being. Ms Kopp’s corps, Teach For America, began its first year in 1990, with 500 men and women serving six low-income communities across the country. Seventeen years on, the acclaimed program has reached some 2.5 million students, in now 25 regions, with 4,400 current members and 12,000 alumni.1 “We believe that all children have the potential to achieve,” the corps’ mission explains, “and that all educational inequity stems from broader structural and societal problems.”2

That something is terribly amiss is a shared sentiment among the political and intellectual divide. Strong American Schools, a nonpartisan public awareness and action campaign, is promoting as its centerpiece Ed in ‘o8. The group, funded by the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Bill & Melinda Gates and Eli & Edythe Broad Foundations, declares that “America’s students are losing out,” and hopes that presidential candidates offer much more than “empty rhetoric” in elaborating on their three foci on education standards, effective teachers, and giving students more time and support for learning.3

Indeed, for better or for worse, it is in politics where the greatest power is wielded. There are plenty who look upon power as promise, and just as many who would rather see it fail. First, the protagonists.

The ayes of Roll Call 145
“I strongly condemn an achievement gap that exists in this country,” President George Bush passionately explained after a “fascinating” spring meeting with the nation’s education, civil rights, and business leaders. True to form, the President went on to deadpan that he believes his signature No Child Left Behind Act needs to be reauthorized “because it's working.”4 The program’s May 2001 passage was a striking bipartisan feat, united in broad agreement with “what the law is trying to do,” writer Linda Perlstein explains.5,6 “Glum ‘buts’” soon followed.

The ‘buts’ are wildly, and distressingly contradictory, in lamentation of impossible rigidity, a view shared widely among educators, and illogical flexibility, shared by commentators.[i] President Bush straddled a delicate argument in securing the bill’s first passage with what many conservatives viewed as a distressing impediment by federal government into their revered states’ rights. The vote is telling: Republican votes managed only 5 ½ votes in favor for every dissenting one, where the Democrats achieved nearly 20 to one.

The law finds its origins in the standards-based reform movement. It began in the 1990s with an emphasis on “having clear and high content and performance standards for students” with curriculum and assessments in line.7 Students, the thinking has it, will rise to meet high expectations, just as easily as they will effortlessly fall to meet lower ones.

As for whether the program is working, the evidence, while fleeting, aligns itself decisively in the President’s favor. The Center on Education Policy’s June 2007 report, Answering the Question that Matters Most, details that states with three or more years of comparable test data have shown increased student achievement in reading and math since 2002 – the year No Child was enacted. Further, achievement gaps between students have been narrowing, if remaining undesirably “substantial.” Most tellingly, nine of the thirteen states with sufficient data to determine trends before and after the law was enacted shows that average yearly gains in scores were greater after No Child took effect than before.[8],[ii]

Yet the trouble arises as the report concludes that it is “difficult, if not impossible” to determine the extent that NCLB has caused these trends as states and schools have all simultaneously released different, but interconnected policies to raise achievement. All the same, the law – loftiest goals aside – was no more than the spur for states to carry out such initiatives. The conclusions, then, are encouraging. Tracy McDaniel, a national board member for the Knowledge is Power Program, is clear: “I think the greatest impact of No Child Left Behind has been to serve as a catalyst for innovation and excellence in public education.”[9]

The ink barons
A survey of major newspapers would find broad agreement with the duality of a federal framework and greater autonomy for schools. The Washington Post editorializes its fear that No Child is “in the crosshairs,” analogizing that one would not “demolish his home because it had a leaky basement or it needed new carpeting.” Were it not for the law, the paper goes on to say, failure would continue without consequence, the achievement gap would remain irrelevant, and parents would remain powerless to ensure their children a better education where their schools have failed them. Strengthen the law, the paper argues. No one claims it won’t be hard.10,11

It is The Wall Street Journal, founded in the interests of “free markets and free people,” that advocates for school choice.12 It champions economist Milton Friedman’s belief that “empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done is so many other areas.”13

Both the New York Times and Washington Post have supported their respective mayor’s moves for school reform; the Times particularly impressed with the City’s “impressive strides toward the goal of replacing large and often dysfunctional factory-style high schools with smaller schools.”14 The Economist, commenting particularly on British schools, but its principles universal, believes that “competition and freedom in education, as elsewhere, are the way to encourage innovation and raise standards for all.”15 That four of the nation’s most influential newspapers are so strongly aligned with the duality of education reform speaks to a strong reservoir of support that is awaiting a thoughtful comprehensive reform plan.

Enter the foils
“Republicans voted for No Child Left Behind holding their noses,” a critic of the legislation told the Washington Post.16 With the executive branch’s political capital severely marginalized, legislators are beginning to, in the words of an old folk song “making their own kind of music.” The tune would be to allowing states to opt out of the law’s testing mandates; the lyricist being suburban and exurban districts that look upon the law’s mandates with dismay – seeing the crippling of programs for the gifted and talented and the discouragement of creativity in their schools.

A recent report by the Center on Education Policy finds that 62% of districts have increased time for English and mathematics classes since No Child was enacted; it is the 44% percent of districts that have reduced time in social studies, sciences, arts, physical education, lunch, and recess that has elicited such ire.17.iii Their frustration is merited – and captured frequently within this paper. The No Child Left Behind Act succeeds precisely because it is not a reckless, crippling expectation of “legislated excellence.”18

Elsewhere, others disdain the increasing unrealism surrounding demands for 100 percent proficiency by 2014. It is an understandable, but not respectable criticism. Muddling the clarity of the law’s aim of adequate yearly progress through variables that essentially “let schools off the hook” through different measures, as Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust writes, threatens to obscure what the law has “uncovered” Secretary of Education, Margaret Spelling concurs in a Washington Post symposium.[19]

Yet, as the threats ceaselessly mount against the law, an opportunity, consistent with that of this paper arises. If the act is looked upon as the first venture into a nationalized framework for reform, the discontent arises not out of hostility to its aims, but out of a desire to move forward in bringing about the duality of a national framework and autonomous schooling. It is here that the small but crucially necessary reforms, especially relevant for students for whom English is a second language, can be made.

The law, as a transitional framework, parallels that of the short-lived Articles of Confederation. The increasing desire for further reform reveals the law’s role as an interim means of furthering this duality.[20] It is an audacious effort, but not inconsistent with the pursuit of an equitable, lively, meritocratic education.

Indeed, amidst the discontentment, it is the ideal time to begin repositioning the education debate towards autonomy. The risk of abandoning states and schools to their own means threatens to impede the fulfillment of a lasting platform for intellectual development. The risk of returning to decades more of idle reform – teetering back and forth between empty rhetoric and vacuous technique – is not one to entertain.

[1] Our history. Teach for America. 5 July 2007. http://www.teachforamerica.org/about/our_history.htm.
[2] Theory of change. Teach for America. 5 July 2007. http://www.teachforamerica.org/mission/theory_of_change.htm.
[3] About us. Ed in ’08. Strong American Schools. 5 July 2007. http://www.edin08.com/AboutUs.aspx.
[4] President Bush Discusses the Reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. The White House. 12 April 2007. http://whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070412.html#.
[5] Final Vote Results For Roll Call 145. United States House of Representatives. http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll145.xml.
[6] The Issue Left Behind. Linda Perlstein. The Nation. 21 October 2004. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041108/perlstein.

[7] A Call for High Standards & Systemic Reform. American Federation of Teachers. 6 July 2007. http://www.aft.org/topics/sbr/index.htm.
[8] Answering the Question That Matters Most. Has Student Achievement Increased Since No Child Left Behind? Center on Education Policy. June 2007. http://tinyurl.com/38o4rg.
[9] Leaving No Child Behind. Tracy McDaniel, et al. A symposium. The Washington Post. 10 September 2007.
[10] ‘No Child’ in the Crosshairs. Editorial. The Washington Post. 2 July 2007.
[11] A Vote for ‘No Child’. Editorial. The Washington Post. 7 August 2007.
[12] Our philosophy. About Us. Opinion Journal. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. http://www.opinionjournal.com/about/philosophy.html.
[13] School-Choice Strategy. Howard S. Rich. Opinion. The Wall Street Journal. 16-17 June 2007.
[14] Smaller, Better High Schools. Editorial. The New York Times. 6 July 207.
[15] The S-word. The Economist. Leaders. 26 May 2007.
[16] Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush’s Prized ‘No Child’ Act. Jonathan Weisman, Amit R. Paley. Washington Post. 15 March 2007. http://tinyurl.com/2r9v4f.
[17] Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era. Jennifer McMurrer. Center on Education Policy. 24 July 2007. http://tinyurl.com/35pkne.
[18] Schools That Work: America’s Most Innovative Public Education Programs. George H. Wood, Ph.D. Penguin Books. 1992.
[19] Leaving No Child Behind. Margaret Spellings, Reg Weaver, Kati Haycock, Jack Dale, Michael R. Bloomberg, George Miller, Jason Kamras, Andrea Peterson, Tracy McDaniel. The Washington Post. 10 September 2007.
[20] Several prominent schools superintendents are now disclosing their support for national standards. Jack Dale, superintendent of Maryland’s leading Fairfax county schools, “would advocate for a federal testing system that allows comparison across states and … school districts. … Unless we create a quality, integrated system with clear roles and responsibilities, we will instead create an incoherent, contradictory and inconsistent educational system in the U.S.” Schools Chiefs Suggest Fixes for ‘No Child.’ Jay Mathews. The Washington Post. 1 October 2007.

[i] “In May, two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s superintendents signed a statement protesting the law’s rigidity, and seven in ten Connecticut superintendents said the law’s sanctions harm struggling schools instead of helping them, according to a survey released last week. National organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the NAACP, echo the concerns.” The Issue Left Behind. Linda Perlstein. The Nation. 21 October 2004. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041108/perlstein.
[ii] The report also concluded, “more attention should be given to the issues of the quality and transparency of state test data.” It recognizes that tests are an “imperfect measure” of achievement.
[iii] The report notes a 31 percent reduction in the total instructional time devoted to social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess since 2001-02. The report recommends staggering testing requirements to include more academic subjects and encouraging states to give “adequate emphasis” to the arts.

First

A brief analysis of American education
[You can view the PDF here.]

To venture into the heap of quotations that education has amassed over the years offers little hope for those who think kindly of the accelerating progress of thought and mind. It is by far not a tragedy – the ends sought have remained remarkably constant: to enlighten Plutarch’s “internal dank gloom” of a mind that has neither “dispelled nor dispersed” in the world’s symposium.

What is unfortunate is that the means of achieving this enlightenment – schooling, as Mark Twain put it, has managed only to “interfere with my education.” It is the predicament of this gap between education and schooling with which the reformer is faced with today – its forms capable of manifesting only too easily with the advancement of time.

Schooling, where education enables, at its essence manages to best bring out the natural aversion to the disabling dogma of fact without purpose. It is an all too necessary aversion – the essence of innovation is dependent not on contentment with improving within the bounds of one’s current lot, but extending beyond it entirely to further collective progress. Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins implores us that is an all too natural one as well – the framework of thought and creativity is brought about through the mind’s ability to establish analogies between otherwise unrelated aspects of life.[1]

Yet, if the mind is only a model of reality, then education is the broadening of this model by uniting disparate experiences – facts and figures included – to forge a more complete representation of our existence. The emerging science of the mind is quickly bridging the gap between philosophies' light. Much less encouraging words can be said about the state of the system.

Move on up
From the original colonies, education in America has created an impressive history for itself – the preeminent Harvard University, opened in 1636, predating the nation. The prided Ivy League was all but set by 1764, with the exception of Cornell University in 1865.

Initially, most schools were private and – in another mark of time gone by – churches established early universities to train ministers. Following the national government’s Land Ordinance of 1785, a portion of every unincorporated township would be turned over for schools.[2]

Not until the 1840s was the arc from private to public schools firmly set in motion under America’s Second Great Awakening. The most prominent of these education reformers was Horace Mann. Born into poverty, he had been one to make the most of the promise of education: he graduated as valedictorian from Brown University in 1819, going on to study law, and soon afterwards tutoring Latin and Greek. Practicing law in Dedham, Massachusetts, Mann was part of the town’s school committee – the nation’s first free and tax-underwritten school. He invested his life from 1827 to 1837 in the Massachusetts House and Senate.

In 1837, Mann became Massachusetts’ secretary of education, where he set about creating a statewide network of common schools. Tellingly, his agenda focused on equipping schools with necessary resources, seeking out higher pay for teachers, implementing a broader curriculum, and extending education to 16 years of age. Indeed, not much has changed.

By 1900, some 31 states required 8- to 14- year old students to attend school, and by 1918, every state required students to complete at least elementary school. McGuffey Readers, memorization, and corporal punishment were the norm. Secondary education remained less attainable – in 1870, two percent of 14 to 17-year olds graduated high school, reaching ten percent in 1900. Of note, aside from schools integration in 1954, the Supreme Court in 1925 upheld a student's right to attend private schools to meet compulsory education laws.[3]

In search of progress
Amidst this, progress remains elusive. Schools have long succeeded in establishing a basic workforce and groundwork for college, yet it lacks the flexibility for its charges to break beyond this stifling, all be it in a betrayal of both words, ambiguity. Trying – and failing – to blend disparate philosophies and techniques to meet every child's needs, schools have managed to do neither. Mandatory courses indifferent to individual aims and gimmickery are the norm.[6]

Much the same, high expectations and lax standards for admission to advanced courses make for stagnation and deterioration of quality – and a submission to bare note and fact. This burden, more often than not, results in an apathy and restlessness that works against the pursuit of empowerment. For the students who give up out of boredom or frustration, the response, paradoxically, is a further dilution of standards. Do less and think less are not the mantras of innovation.

Soon an extreme polarity forms – pervasive throughout mindsets and scores. Resistance between student and teacher – each ignorant of the other – diminishes the classroom to the doldrums of simple worksheets and drills, and sooner or later uproar out of boredom. For the bright few, such an atmosphere is at best a game for those already adept at pushing paper, and at worst, an imprisonment. It is much the same for the less gifted. Schools are not the meritocracy where rigor necessitates passion. No, they are the houses of vacuous ability.

To illustrate this point, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has reported that United States has a rather low variance (29.1% of the international average) in science-performance between schools, but a gap of an astounding (94% - versus an international norm of 68%) within them. (7) Schools, at their essence, suffer from a lack of substantive ends. They do not aspire to be mere centers of rote and drill and are far removed from a liberal course of study. In this in-between, everything for everybody state, progress ceases.

What, then, should be a schools aim? Preferably, it is one that realizes the necessity of schools specialization to overcome muddled thought and execution. And with these independent schools, comes a liberating multitude of choice that reaches a more dynamic end: Education would become, most succinctly, what one chooses to make of it. It is from this current lack of identity that the institutional predicaments one faces today have come. Testing cannot fill this lack of identity – it in fact only compounds it, by implementing an intensely narrow metric that results in entropy as the result of specificity. The effect is that of running in circles all the while shooting a shotgun's scattering of incoherent initiatives and policy. To draw upon Charles Dickens' “leprosy of unreality,” significant progress can be made from loosening the unyielding control of a wayward organizational structure and lack of centralizing ideology and returning it to the schoolhouse.

“I don't know the key to success,” Bill Cosby goes, “but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” Focus is paramount.

Idle reform
Invariably, problems come with a panel and report. Particularly interesting – and entrenched – problems make for dozens. Former president Clinton's Goals 2000 program, passed in 1994, reads wonderfully: by 2000, every child would come to school ready to learn; each adult literate and possessing the skills needed for the global economy.[8] Kids would learn to “use their minds well.” The others fall rather short. High school graduation rates have yet to surpass, let alone reach, 90 percent. A trip back to the future finds that American schools are not first in the world in science and mathematics “achievement.” Certainly, one wonders how the goal of all schools free of drugs, violence, and firearms found its way into an otherwise rational set of goals free of smirks – or worse, twinkled eyes.

Occasionally, progress, however haphazard, is made too. The No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be, as the White House proclaims, “the most sweeping reform of federal education policy in a generation.” Whether or not sweeping and successful are one in the same is debatable. The law is centered around a framework for achieving “adequate yearly progress.” Such progress is determined by annual testing of students in grades 3-8 on “challenging” state standards. Relative progress, rather admirably, must be achieved among all sub-groups of race, socioeconomic status, and disability. Schools that fail to progress sufficiently for two consecutive years begin a progress of restructuring and districts must offer failing students the choice to attend school elsewhere; three years of lagging growth opens up additional funding for tutoring and supplemental programs; four years subjects a school to “increasingly tough corrections” including the removal of staff and takeover.[9]

Not all is admirable. The law boasts of its unprecedented flexibility – perhaps too much of it. In the ode to states' rights, each is responsible for determining its standards and assessing them. The result, The Economist notes, is more or less a gaming of the system.[10] Among the inflexible, one principal interviewed for this paper frets that a school's progress can quite literally hang disproportionately in the balance of a handful of students in one of the various sub-groups.

Others criticize the disinclination to request the full funding allotted for the act and the vacuous scramble to teach to the test, taking recess away all the while. This is all well and good, but it does not discredit the policy as a whole.

It is by all counts much better than most propose. A liberal voucher program without equally liberal autonomy for all schools fails to account for the supposed “competition” that results. Without the incentives that privatization provides, what serves as the impetus for distressed schools to improve? The interest in a constitutional amendment for education is similarly misguided. By sheer influence of resource and well-crafted legislation, the federal government can tacitly achieve the same ends. And fights, after all, are best avoided.

Sources
[1] On Intelligence. Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee. Times Books. 9 September 2004.
[2] Land Ordinance of 1785. Indiana History Documents. Indiana Historical Bureau. http://www.statelib.lib.in.us/www/ihb/resources/docldord.html.
[3] Supreme Court Decisions. The Heritage Foundation. http://www.heritage.org/research/education/schoolchoice/SupremeCourtDecisions.cfm
[4] History of American Education Web Project. University of Notre Dame. http://www.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/.
[5] Philosophy as a Basis for Curriculum Decisions. Allan C. Ornstein. Contemporary Issues in Curriculum. 2003.
[6] Senior Year: A Teenage Wasteland. Mary Tedrow. Teacher Magazine. 1 August 2007. http://tinyurl.com/22hmz9.
[7] Between-school and in-school variance in school performance on the science scale. PISA 2006. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_39718850_1_1_1_1,00.html
[8] Goals 2000: Educate America Act. United States Department of Education. http://www.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct/intro.html.
[9] Fact Sheet: No Child Left Behind Act. The White House. January 2000. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020108.html.
[10] What chance co-operation? The Economist. 24 February 2007.