The Crossroads Of American Educational Politics

American educational politics has arrived at a significant crossroads, exemplified by the recent announcement of two new educational coalitions — a center-left group advocating a “broader, bolder approach to education” [BBE] and a more narrowly based, more conservative organization coalescing around the slogan that “education is a civil right [ECR].”

The BBE manifesto was endorsed by an impressive group of more than sixty individuals, including four former Cabinet secretaries [Surgeon Generals Richard Carmona and Joycelyn Elders, Attorney General Janet Reno and Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall] and four Assistant Secretaries of Education under three different presidents; civil rights leaders and elected officials Julian Bond [NAACP], Ernesto Cortés [Industrial Areas Foundation], Peter Edelman, John Jackson, Hugh Price [Urban League] and Norm Rice [long time African-American mayor of Seattle]; noted scholars Christopher Jencks, James Heckman [Nobel Prize winner in Economics], Glenn Loury, William Julius Wilson and Alan Wolfe; school district leaders Rudy Crew, Arne Duncan and Beverly Hall; and a number of America’s leading educators — James Comer, Linda Darling-Hammond, John Goodlad, Helen Ladd, Arthur Levine, Julianne Malveaux, Deborah Meier, Pedro Noguera, and Ted Sizer. Ladd, Noguera and the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel organized the coalition.

The ECR coalition was organized by NYC Chancellor Joel Klein, who co-chairs the group with civil rights activist Al Sharpton, and its statement appeared on the NYC Department of Education website. The list of signatories is much smaller than BBE, and they include Klein’s management proteges, Michelle Rhee of Washington DC and Andres Alonso of Baltimore; elected officials Corey Booker [African-American Mayor of Newark], Kevin Chavous [former Washington DC City Councilman], Peter Groff [Colorado State Senate], former Colorado Governor and Los Angeles Superintendent Roy Romer and former Oklahoma Congressman J. C. Watts, a very conservative Republican; long-time voucher and privatization advocates Howard Fuller [former Milwaukee Superintendent] and Joe Williams; Education Trust’s Kati Haycock and Ed Sector’s Andy Rotherham. Former Chicago Superintendent Arne Duncan is the sole signatory of both manifestos. Notably absent from ECR are prominent educators.

There are two policy fault lines that separate the two coalitions. The first involves the relationship of school reform and change to other issues impacting on the well-being and educational achievement of children and youth. The “broader” component of the BBE manifesto is its insistence that to be effective, school reform and change must be wedded to early childhood initiatives, to programs to improve the health of children, especially those living in poverty, and to programs that focus on the time students spend outside of the classroom — longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records. It is certainly true, as Sara Mead notes, that educational gains from early childhood programs such as Head Start fade out over time if they are not combined with quality K-12 schooling, but far from being a criticism of the BBE approach, this confirms the need to combine these efforts.

By contrast, ECR is notable for its single-minded focus on schools alone. It is not an oversight that ECR avoids all mention of the reforms which BBE would join with school reform, but a deliberate political choice. At the beginning of April, I spoke at a Teach for America conference in Washington DC, and sat in on an earlier panel which was moderated by James Forman Jr., founder of Washington DC’s Maya Angelou Charter who has blogged at Extra Credit in the past. [The education blogosphere misses your voice, James.] On the panel was Michelle Rhee and the Superintendent of Prince Georges’ County, John Deasy. In a friendly way and before a sympathetic audience, Forman asked them how the movement for school change should be linked to other social reforms and other movements for social justice. Given an opportunity to discuss any one of a number of reforms that are clearly vital for the well-being and education of youth living in poverty, both Rhee and Deasy avoided the question altogether, providing not a single example.

There is an educational politics at work in the ECR coalition, emanating from an analysis that sees the public character of public educations as the source of the problems and shortcomings of American schools and that puts forward privatization and corporate model of school reform as the solution. Without question, there are some supporters of ECR, such as Ed Sector’s Andy Rotherham, who support many of the reforms advocated by BBE, but there are also others like Rhee who can not bring themselves to even provide lip service.* What the ECR signers have in common is that they see issues such as health care for children living in poverty as having little to do with an education reform agenda, even when they support significant improvements in that health care. By contrast, the BBE coalition believes that the health of children living in poverty has a direct impact on their educational achievement, such that their health care must be dramatically improved if we are serious about closing the achievement gaps.

Related to this difference is another division over No Child Left Behind. The BBE manifesto commends NCLB for having drawn attention to the racial and socio-economic achievement gaps, but criticizes its premise — the very same premise of ECR — that school reform alone can close those gaps. It notes that NCLB has produced a series of negative unintended consequences: excessive testing, a narrowing of the curriculum and an instructional focus on students who are just below the passing point, at the expense of both lower-performing and higher-performing students. With this understanding, it makes a number of suggestions on how the accountability regime of NCLB should be improved:

test scores alone cannot describe a school’s contribution to the full range of student outcomes. New accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods, and they will be considerably more expensive than the flawed accountability systems currently in use by the federal and state governments.

By contrast, ECR includes a number of NCLB hawks, such as Ed Trust’s Haycock, who are outspoken in their defense of the current NCLB accountability regime, with its overriding focus on standardized testing. The accountability language of the ECR statement reflects this outlook. The AFT’s NCLBlog reports that at the ECR inaugural press conference, Michelle Rhee took the same stance as Bush’s Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings: NCLB needs a few minor tweaks.

These contrasting directions for American education are not so much a battle for Obama’s soul — like the great majority of Democratic politicians, he has staked out a position far more critical of NCLB than ECR would allow — as it is over which analysis, which conceptual framework, sets the terms of American education politics in coming years.

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* Having provided a steady drumbeat of criticism, over a number of years, of BBE signer Richard Rothstein on precisely his argument for the need of a broad array of reforms on behalf of children living in poverty, Rotherham’s assertion that ECR supporters “are much more vigorous in their support of things like expanding access to health care for children, better social services for low-income Americans, expanding access to pre-K, etc.” is not only wrong, but has a distinct “he doth protest too much” quality.

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