Debating NCLB with Progressives

I'm late in getting to this interesting conversation that Ganesh Sitamaran and Jason Spitalnick have been having over at TPM Cafe about NCLB and the future of education reform thinking. I don't know whether to think that AFTie Ed's and many of their commenters' conclusions that the posts are somehow teacher or union-bashing is a reflection of narcicism ("it's about me and my issues, damnit") or a reflexive defensive posture that so many teachers have taken on--sometimes with good reason--in response to the growth of NCLB, accountability, and to some extent choice.

But whatever it is it's a little goofy because Ganesh and Jason actually seem to share many of teachers' typical concerns with NCLB: it's too complex, it's overly simplistic, it doesn't address the underlying social problems that really account for achievement gaps, etc, etc. In their broader critiques of the law, Ganesh and Jason are both onto something and missing an important points here.

They fail to give NCLB adequate credit because they lack a historical sense about what a radical shift NCLB, and even the 1994 IASA, really represented in thinking about education reform generally and the federal role in education in particular. The standards and accountability movement's shift in policy focus from dictating inputs and processes to accountability for student results is a big deal, as is the idea that we actually should expect most students to reach high standards. That Sitamaran and Spitalnick don't fully get that is actually a reflection of how dramatic the seac change in thinking has been. And this change is an absolutely essential precondition for both the thinking in their posts and the policy shifts that would move education reform to the next level.

The truth is that NCLB hasn't been able to actually deliver on its eponymous promise. Sure, the technical aspects of testing problems, measuring student achievement and AYP that dominate current debates are a part of that. More significant is the fact that NCLB never delivered fully on either the increased resources or--and this was a much larger-scale failure--flexibility that were supposed to accompany greater accountability to get the job done. It's also true that the consequences in the law and the incentives they provide probably aren't as powerful as needed to be effective. But the core issue beyond all these--and I think this is where Sitamaran in particular is onto something--is that NCLB shows pretty devastatingly the limitations of a pure accountability and incentives strategy for student achievement. Don't get me wrong: NCLB's success in getting schools to focus resources and attention on struggling and previously ignored student groups shows incentives make a difference. But all the incentives in the world don't do a hill of beans of good if you don't know how to get where you want to go. The horror movie victim getting chased by the lunatic with a chainsaw has a hell of an incentive, but it can't save her if she doesn't know how to get out of the funhouse. And unfortunately that's the situation a lot of low-performing systems feel like they're in. (FWIW, this limitation is also the fundamental problem with pure market-based education reform proposals like vouchers and tax credits.)

Of course, schools were never supposed to be left on their own to figure out how to improve student achievement, but the reality is that a lot of school districts and states that were supposed to help them don't have any more capacity than they do. It's pretty safe to say that no one really knows right now how to build large-scale, effective urban school systems that serve all kids at the level they deserve and society requires. That should scare the bejeezus out of all of us. But it should also get us hopping to invest in R&D and capacity building so schools, districts and states can start doing what we do know works.

More fundamentally, we need to rethink how we structure and deliver public education so that we can replace existing failed institutions with better ones designed to be able to meet the educational comitments we've made in NCLB and other standards documents. I don't know what this looks like, but there's plenty of interesting thinking going on here, though none of it is ready quite yet for national policy prescriptions (an idea that itself might not be all that useful here, I don't know). My biggest disappointment with Sitamaran and Spitalnick is that they don't engage with these issues at all; they just offer vague statements about universal health care and addressing underlying social conditions. These issues are tremendously important and, as this week's Washington Post magazine noted, some school districts and community groups are doing really powerful and innovative things to address them. But just talking about social issues doesn't kick the can further down the road. In fact, it doesn't even remain stagnant in today's debate but regresses to the pre-NCLB liberal position in a way that's ultimately not helpful to education reform, kids, or progressives.