Er...

The K-12 blog topic du jour is clearly the "Broader, Bolder" education agenda that was released today via large ads in the Post and Times. A lot of the agenda items are very worthwhile in their own right, and the signatories include many smart, thoughtful people from across the ideological spectrum. But the individual ideas aren't what really matter here--you can find them all elsewhere. The framing is the thing, and in this respect I think the agenda falls short. The key sentence comes at the beginning of the second paragraph:

"Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning."

I think this incorrect. Rather, education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that education policy can help poor children primarily by improving education. Similarly, labor policy is often crafted around the idea that American families, including schoolchildren, would benefit from higher wages for working-class households; health policy has focused on extending coverage to the uninsured, etc. In each of these fields people tend to stress the importance of their agenda to a point of some exaggeration. But nobody seriously claims to have the single solution for poverty, and this no less true in education than anywhere else.

So the real question is what the signatories mean by the "er" in "Broader" and "Bolder." This suffix implies differentiation, but it's not clear what kind. Broader in the sense of "in addition to"? If that's the case, I have no quarrel, other than to say that there's probably some value in having experts in discrete fields focus on policy issues aligned with their expertise. The agenda calls for an increased investment in health services, for example, which I wholeheartedly support. But I also recall a gigantic battle over exactly this issue last year, featuring massive advocacy efforts, newspaper headlines, Presidential vetos, and all the rest. So it's not like people don't understand this is a problem. And, per Eduwonk, where was this statement then, when it might have mattered? Perhaps the signatories felt like their energies were best confined to education? Moreover, it's not like those policymakers who actually have multiple jurisdictions don't understand that poor children need more than a good school. Ted Kennedy and George Miller, if I'm not mistaken, support NCLB and SCHIP and EITC and WIC and a higher minimum wage.

If, on the other hand, the "er" means "instead of," then I'm opposed. Again, this brings us back to framing--the first big subhead says: "The NCLB Framework Cannot by Itself Meet the Challenge," implying a certain kind of side-taking relative to many well-understood controversies and decision points involving NCLB reauthorization, particularly given the subsequent nods toward concerns about curriculum narrowing, the impossibility of 100% proficiency, etc. But the agenda itself basically ignores these and all other accountability issues, other than to say that "new accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods," a perfectly reasonable goal that's also vague to the point of near-meaninglessness.

There are reasoned positions on both sides of the NCLB and larger school accountability debate, and the signatories all know what they are. By failing to address those issues or weigh in on the knotty decisions that must be made, the reader is left with the sense that the real message here is that students would ultimately benefit from less hard attention to the quality of their schools--a dispiriting idea coming from education experts and a wrong one as well. Yes, the first bullet point is "continue to pursue school improvement efforts," and the ideas mentioned are perfectly legit. But if you're going to frame your agenda in terms of the accountability elephant in the room, you have to tell the world where you think that elephant should go.

Further commentary from Mead , Colvin, Petrilli and Hoff.