Building Consensus Behind ESEA Reauthorization

Originally posted at the National Journal's Education Experts blog, in response to the provocation: How can the Obama administration and Congress put together a winning majority for reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act? What should change, what should remain more or less the same, and why?

At the risk of over-simplification, here is how I see the landscape now:

Who likes NCLB:

• Business and education entrepreneurs like it because it puts the focus on results.
• Civil rights groups like it because it focuses attention on disparities in educational results (the achievement gap).
• Some parents like it because they associate it with greater performance transparency – they can see how their children’s schools are doing.

Who dislikes NCLB:

• Many parents are concerned because they are told by their teachers and principals that it reduces schools to test prep.
• Many affluent parents especially dislike it because they believe there is nothing in it for their children.
• Some conservatives dislike it because it represents an inappropriate Federal intrusion into matters that the Constitution reserved for the states.
• Some liberals (and liberal-minded) people dislike it because it seems to reduce public education to a focus on a relatively narrow set of basic skills.

(There are of course many more reasons that people like or dislike NCLB, I’m focusing on the big ones that might provide a clue as to how to build a new coalition.)

Based on these observations, here is my formula for renewing NCLB:

• Focus on making major leaps in the quality of standards and assessments. These new standards and assessments must be very carefully crafted to measure the skills that are the most important to the success of young people. This is primarily a technical challenge.
• Simultaneously focus on the potential of innovation in education and re-position NCLB as partly an ongoing “Innovation Fund” for LEAs and others who are prepared to demonstrate results. (And, as Sandy Kress suggested, focus more on secondary schools than the original NCLB did.)
• Then explain to parents and the public why these standards (and assessments) are valid measure of their children’s progress and their school’s quality. Explain why we need innovation to accelerate progress. It needs to be very clear how these news standards and assessments are strong measures of the skills that their children will need to succeed. This is primarily a communications challenge.
• Then, build the winning coalition from the bottom up by getting parents and the public to demand that their children get an education that provides them with these skills. Parents and others on the fence will also be attracted to the focus on innovation.

Finally, I agree with Tom Vander Ark that it may be wise to wait a little while to give time for Race to the Top and the Innovation Fund to begin to have impact and make the ground more fertile for this approach.

Comments

[anon on November 16, 2009 at 12:09 PM]

Funny someone paying $20,000 per year for a segregated school with no standards or accountability is ranting about high quality, high accountability, low cost public schools.

Sour grapes?

Or just profitable?