Poor George

Poor George Miller. The chairman on the House education and labor committee seems to need a new friends and family plan in the wake of his proposed revisions to NCLB. First one of his closest confederates during the drafing of NCLB in 2001, the Education Trust , attacks Miller's plan as "flawed, flimsy, and phony." And now the California Teachers Association, the mega-powerful union in Miller's home state and a natural ally of the liberal Democrat, is launching a media campaign savaging NCLB, Miller's proposed revisions, and Miller himself.

The Trust is bent out shape about Miller's proposal to base NCLB's school-rating system on more than statewide reading and math skills tests, and the CTA has gone nuclear because Miller wants to experiment with performance-based pay for teachers.

Miller deserves better. He has acknowledged NCLB's many flaws and is making a determined effort to fix them.

It would be nice if the good folks at the Trust--and they are a great group of people--did the same thing. Their man George could use the support.

The CTA, on the other hand, may be a lost cause. Trashing Miller is a truly self-destructive exercise. There's no one in the Congress who cares more about teaching and teachers. And it's not his fault that he gets the fact that only if we find ways to make teaching more attractive work are we going to draw the sorts of people into the nation's classrooms who can make traditional public schools worth attending, preserving teachers' jobs and teacher unions in the process. The CTA's honchos should read Rick Kahlenberg's new biography of Al Shanker. Shanker figured out the basic union reform calculus two decades ago.

Lost in fray is a smallish provision in the new Miller NCLB blueprint that may have the biggest impact on the direction of public education. It's one that gives states incentives to craft new, tougher standards and tests pegged to national and international benchmarks. If it survives the NCLB firefight in the coming months, it would move the nation's badly fragmented public education system one step closer to the sort of coherent national system that has produced so many well-educated citizenries in Europe and Asia. For reasons that are explained here, Miller's NCLB plan is exhibit A for why we need national standards and tests.