Bipartisanship

This post isn't specifically about education, but the lack of political comity in Washington these days will impact the prospects for solidifying education reform and reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (not in 2010, maybe in 2011 or 12, if ever)....

I finished reading the late Senator Ted Kennedy's autobiography, True Compass, on the plane ride back home from California yesterday. It reminded me that Teddy Kennedy was no blind partisan. Sure, he called Republicans on the carpet when they deserved it and campaigned vociferously for fellow Democrats, including President Obama. But he also looked for bipartisan opportunities to pass legislation to strengthen education and further social justice. His work on the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) with two different Presidents Bush are testament to his legislative accomplishment and his focus -- especially in the latter part of his career -- on being a policymaker first and a partisan firebrand second. His Senate colleagues, Democrat and Republican, agreed. But he also leaves a legislative legacy in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993), his work with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to expand SCHIP, and his tireless effort which resulted in the Edward M. Kennedy National Service Act of 2009.

Sadly, Kennedy seems to represent a bygone era. There are too few honest brokers left in Congress, willing to reach across the aisle and put in the hard work to build something rather than destroy it. Among the 535 congresspersons and senators, sure there are some legislative diehards. But there aren't enough of them. And they are overshadowed in our modern, media-driven politics by the bomb throwers, would-be (and actual) talk radio hosts, rhetorical empty vessels, obstructionists, partisan extortionists, and finger-to-the-wind moderate extortionists.

Being a hard-working legislator doesn't seem to pay off, at least not politically.

In a quest for ideological purity, the Republican Party currently seems most interested in purging its elected officials who dare even speak to members of the other party, let alone hug them. Just ask Lindsay Graham or Susan Collins -- or Florida Governor and U.S. Senate candidate Charlie Crist. Currently, congressional Republicans are staking their immediate political future on a legislative strategy that consists of little more than just saying 'no' and obstructing nominations and votes in the U.S. Senate. Now, Democrats certainly have been complicit of similar conduct in the past, but far more selectively and less brazenly, I believe the congressional record will attest to. Sadly, this political strategy appears to be working, at least for the moment.

Sarah Palin may be the personal embodiment of this ethos. She chose to quit as Alaska Governor in July 2009. Strangely, in the current political context, while seemingly disingenuous and typically unintelligible, her comments actually make a bizarre kind of sense, despite the fact she might run for President (which would be a title, wouldn't it?)

I’ll work hard.... But I won’t do it from the governor’s desk. I’ve never believed that I nor anyone else needs a title to do this, to make a difference, to help people.

Short of changing Senate rules (an unlikely band-aid, at best), I am not sure that there is an easy solution to changing the current political culture in Washington or in much of America. What really needs to happen is for the American people to stand up and demand that their elected officials do their jobs, legislate, and focus on the nation's problems, dealing honestly with disagreements on the issues. Perhaps the President's proposed health care summit will provide a narrow opportunity to do that. Perhaps more attention need be paid to "Congress behaving badly" stories to shame them into changing their ways.

But we can't rely on summits and exposés to deal with all of the problems and issues that need addressing. The whole political dynamic needs to change, as James Fallows argues in the January/February 2010 Atlantic magazine and in this blog post. Summon the spirit and example of Teddy Kennedy! Some how, some way, the bipartisanship that existed in generations past needs to be reborn. In the end, it is going to come down to the leadership of the folks in power, to build and leverage personal relationships with their colleagues in the other party -- some risking thoughtless and unfair political recriminations in doing so -- to make life better for the American people.

But on this score, sadly, I'm just not all that optimistic.

UPDATE: Neither is Senator Evan Bayh apparently....

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Musings on Kennedy, Obama

Not that I think that this means that NCLB will be reauthorized this session, but what a tremendous sight it was to see Senator Ted Kennedy walk into the U.S. Capitol yesterday to cast a vote on Medicare legislation.

On the presidential front, Dan Balz tries to put Obama's ideology into context in today's Washington Post ("Obama's Ideology Proving Difficult To Pinpoint"). All in all it's a pretty flat article. William A. Galston, a former Clinton White House domestic policy adviser, gets it mostly right:

Galston cited three strands that he regards as helping to define Obama-ism. First is an "all of us together" approach that rejects "diversionary interests and short-term gains." Second is an effort to bring people together across partisan lines. Third is his effort to broaden participation in politics and his use of modern technology to do so. This appears to be a marriage of Obama's roots in community organizing and his willingness to tap the power of technology to open the processes of government to more than the traditional cadre of experts.

What does this mean for education? There's been lots of chatter in the blog-o-sphere about whether Obama is a traditionalist or a reformer when it comes to education policy. With issues such as teacher pay, it is clear that Obama is willing to push the envelope and challenge union orthodoxy. The real question is whether he can and will prioritize these issues should he be a resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue next year.

As an unnamed Clinton White House official was quoted in the Balz piece:

"His tone is very much post-partisan and post-ideological. The challenge will be coming up with the ideas to go with it. If you drop the same agenda into the same Washington petri dish, you'll get the same results."

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$29 Billion Buys You A New Education System?

On Wednesday the Forum for Education and Democracy released a proposal to "transform the federal role in education." The conveners are a group of high-profile academics and educators, including Linda Darling-Hammond, John Goodlad, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Deborah Meier, and Ted Sizer.

The cynic in me might call this a $29 billion spending proposal which would result in a 75 percent increase in federal education spending ... but I'm an optimist, so I'll call it a proposed investment. And, in many ways, it is. There are many policy ideas worthy of consideration. I'm not sure it's transformational however.

First, the bad news: What it is, is a tough sell politically. The authors were aware of this, and noted that its cost is equivalent to the monthly price tag of the war in Iraq. But they could have done much more to suggest ways to use current educational resources more efficiently. For instance, what about all the federal funds squandered on spray 'n' pray professional development? Gotta be some savings there. And it would drape at least a paper-thin cloak of fiscal austerity over an otherwise jaw-dropping spending proposal.

Now, the good news: The report is right to call for additional federal investments to build human capital--particularly in so-called hard-to-staff and low-performing schools. In my opinion, the No Child Left Behind Act's biggest failures are (1) its lack of a serious focus on developing highly effective teachers and (2) its focus on punitive sanctions for 'failing' schools and districts rather than the provision of capacity building assistance to turn those schools around.

Let's stipulate two things. Number one, teacher quality is the most important school-based variable impacting student success. Number two, educational accountability is not a silver bullet.

(1) The 'highly qualified' teacher requirement is a meaningless designation. In most states, every teacher is highly qualified. What NCLB lacks is a coherent and sustained vision to enhance teacher development during the initial years in the profession and beyond. To the Forum's credit, it offers up some worthy ideas to move us off the dime: induction programs and teacher residencies as well as stronger school leadership preparation.

New educator support programs currently are allowable uses of NCLB's Title II, Part A dollars, but few of those monies are spent in such impactful ways. In 2006-07, U.S. school districts received nearly $3 billion under Title II, Part A--but 79 percent of the funds were used either to reduce class sizes (47%) or for professional development (32%). [See U.S. Department of Education Survey on the Use of Funds Under Title II, Part A (July 2007)]

(2) Educational accountability alone cannot transform schools. As one of my colleagues like to say, "You don't know what you don't know." Indeed. But the inherent presumption in educational accountability is that educators need a kick in the pants--and kids will learn. This--plus school choice--was W's and many social conservatives' primary argument for NCLB. But that's not how it works.

A main reason why educators in low-performing schools are unsuccessful is because they don't know how to work better or work differently--not because they're lazy or feckless. Changing this requires not just strengthening individual knowledge and skills but also organization-wide transformations in the conditions and culture of teaching and learning. Some of the Forum's ideas would move us in that direction.

Harvard's Dick Elmore makes this point quite cogently in a 2002 Education Next article:

"The working theory behind test-based accountability is seemingly—perhaps fatally—simple. Students take tests that measure their academic performance in various subject areas. The results trigger certain consequences for students and schools—rewards, in the case of high performance, and sanctions for poor performance. Having stakes attached to test scores is supposed to create incentives for students and teachers to work harder and for school and district administrators to do a better job of monitoring their performance.... The threat of such measures is supposed to be enough to motivate students and schools to ever-higher levels of performance.

This may have the ring of truth, but it is in fact a naïve, highly schematic, and oversimplified view of what it takes to improve student learning.... The ability of a school to make improvements has to do with the beliefs, norms, expectations, and practices that people in the organization share, not with the kind of information they receive about their performance. Low-performing schools aren’t coherent enough to respond to external demands for accountability.

The work of turning a school around entails improving the knowledge and skills of teachers—changing their knowledge of content and how to teach it—and helping them to understand where their students are in their academic development. Low-performing schools, and the people who work in them, don’t know what to do. If they did, they would be doing it already.

Test-based accountability without substantial investments in capacity ... is unlikely to elicit better performance from low-performing students and schools."


In sum, I don't begrudge the Forum for setting forth these ideas for improving American public education. I just don't think that federal policymakers or presidential candidates are in the market for something with a $29 billion price tag. Targeted investments to strengthen teacher quality in high-need schools and districts--such as those proposed in U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman George Miller's TEACH Act or in U.S. Senator Jack Reed's School Improvement Through Teacher Quality Act--are much more likely to pass the political smell test and find their way into a reauthorized NCLB.

Further, during NCLB reauthorization (now likely to move forward in 2009-2010), one can hope that federal policymakers look toward capacity building strategies (such as those proposed in this report) to replace punitive sanctions and the use of external supplemental service providers. We have a good sense of what is takes to transform struggling schools and districts -- but it's gonna take more than cajoling, demanding and hoping to get the job done. It's going to require a financial and intellectual investment in strengthening the teaching profession and redesigning school leadership.

UPDATE: U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's proposed rules for NCLB utterly ignore the capacity building needs I have articulated above. It's more of the same old-same old accountability and contracting out of services without support. This will not address the capacity of districts or schools to improve. See Education Week story here.

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