President-elect Barack Obama’s first and hardest task on education will be to “restore the broad bipartisan support it took to pass the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act,” says the Washington Post’s Maria Glod. “That consensus has splintered, with people on both sides of the aisle souring on the law as it is overdue for reauthorization in Congress,” she writes
“Forget the details of No Child Left Behind. The big challenge there is having to rebuild that bipartisan coalition,” said Gary Huggins, director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, an independent effort of the Aspen Institute. “On the Democratic side you have people walking away from it because of union pushback. On the GOP side you have people walking away because this is too large a federal footprint.”
I’m not sure I agree with Huggins’ broad-brush analysis. Among educators, the consensus tends be “good goal/bad bill.” In the main, teachers remain supportive of the laudable aims of NCLB, but live day-to-day with the law’s unintended consequences. Contrary to popular opinion, teachers are not accountability-averse. But the narrowing of curriculum that has occurred under NCLB has too often made school a content-free, joyless grind for teachers and students. The key to restoring bipartisan support and getting teachers on board is getting accountability right.
A spokesperson for the family confirms future First Daughters Sasha and Malia Obama will enroll at Sidwell Friends School, the Washington, DC private school where Chelsea Clinton also matriculated. So this means President-elect Obama will back school choice initiatives in Washington, right?
The current economic climate make it unlikely that President-elect Obama can enact the full range of education intitiatives his campaign promised, but one pressing issue cannot be deferred, writes Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com. The reauthorization and redesign of NCLB. Six years after its bipartisan passage, she notes, we have nothing to show for it.
NCLB has turned every school into a test-preparation factory, focused solely on reading and mathematics. They are the only subjects that count in a school’s ranking, so teachers routinely reduce attention to history, science, foreign language, literature, geography, the arts and other non-tested subjects. With this narrowing of the curriculum, students may be getting dumbed down even if their scores go up. Do we really want a society where our fellow citizens know nothing of history, literature, science and the arts?
First, Ravitch says, the Obama administration should “eliminate the goal of universal proficiency by 2014, because it is unattainable. Period. No state or nation has ever achieved 100% proficiency.”
Second, it should recognize that the federal government is best at providing accurate information, such as what children in each grade need to know to be abreast of international standards (that is known as the curriculum) and whether our children are meeting those standards (that is, testing); third, the administration should expect states and districts to fashion appropriate reforms and remedies for their schools.
Congress, Ravitch concludes, is not the right place to decide how to fix our schools. And more money isn’t the answer if we don’t have the right vision for improving education.
It’s common knowledge that President-elect Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for over a decade. We’ve also read quite about about the career of Jill Biden, the wife of the future V-P, who teaches community college English in Delaware. But this almost certainly the first time that the President, his Vice-President, and their spouses all have direct experience working in education. Michelle Obama works for University of Chicago Hospitals, while Joe Biden has also taught constitutional law for many years as an adjunct professor at Widener University School of Law.
Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli at Fordham survey the new education landscape under Obama and find reasons to cheer. “In a year when the Democratic nominee was practically guaranteed to win the White House, the most reform-minded Democratic candidate won,” they note. “Barack Obama’s positions on charter schools, merit pay, and even No Child Left Behind point toward a thoughtfulness and willingness to buck the status quo that were strikingly different from the postures of his closest competitors.” They also note that the unions were not major players in the victory, so in theory he’s not beholden to them and can pursue programs they may not support.
As the first African-American president, Obama will be uniquely positioned to use his bully pulpit to exhort parents, particularly minority parents, to uphold their responsibilities to foster their children’s moral and intellectual development. Done right, this could be a powerful complement to whatever formal policies he puts forward.
On the hand, given what else is going on in the world, “education is likely to loom no higher on Washington’s agenda than it did during the presidential campaign,” say Finn and Petrilli. Meanwhile tout le monde has a take on who is going to be the next ed secretary. Lots of interesting names, but this strikes me as a lot of anxiety looking for a place to affix itself, as folks with various agendas look for proof that the new President is on their side.
Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who seems to have turned all his thoughts of late to the machinations of a future Obama administration’s education policy, raises an interesting question about the place of Teach for America and other reform efforts in Obama’s pantheon.
On the one hand, Barack Obama has praised Michelle Rhee, the poster-child for Teach For America’s impact on American education. Several of his advisors are drawn from the group’s alumni and friends….So why on earth is the campaign allowing Linda Darling-Hammond to play surrogate for the Senator and say nasty things about TFA in high-profile events?
Darling-Hammond is TFA’s most notable critic, and has long argued that alternative certification programs ill-serve poor and minority children.
Someone—probably Barack Obama himself—is going to have to make a decision about whether to embrace reform (and in this case, TFA) or embrace the union-and-ed-school establishment (and in this case, LDH). If he wins the election and appoints Darling-Hammond to a senior position, we’ll know which way he’s decided to go.
Back in 2005, Darling-Hammond said of TFA, “While a band-aid on a bleeding sore is helpful in a crisis, healing wounds of inequality and poverty is also a policy problem worth solving.” Thus it’s likely that the scenario described by Petrilli will be portrayed as a false dichotomy. Still it’s safe to say there will be people with very different views of the world vying for a place at the table.
Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli drops a bombshell. He was on a talk show this morning with, among others, Greg Toppo of USA Today and Melody Barnes of the Obama campaign.
We discussed the candidates’ education proposals, and all went according to plan until about halfway through the segment when Melody said that Obama wanted to look at different kinds of student assessments, including portfolios. Portfolios? As Greg and I said on the air, this was news. We’re not aware of the Obama camp ever saying before that portfolios might be part of the mix. I’m pretty sure I could hear Kati Haycock screaming from a few miles away.
As Mike points out, portfolios were found to be completely unreliable as large-scale accountability measures years ago. “Let me make a prediction,” writes Petrilli, ”either the Obama campaign will clarify that the Senator would consider portfolios on top of tests, not instead of them, or the McCain campaign will pounce on this issue and argue that it shows Obama to be weak on reform. Because one thing is for sure: embracing portfolios is a clear signal of an intention to roll back accountability.”
Portfauxlio Update: Michele McNeil at Campaign K-12 says Obama talkin’ about alternate assessment is nothing new and no big deal.
Update II: More from Petrilli. “I respectfully disagree with McNeil,” he notes. ”It still sounds to me that Barnes is talking about portfolios instead of standardized tests..” He suggests the Obama campaign could clarify: are you in favor of continuing standardized testing under NCLB, or not?
Update III: Over at TWIE, A-Rus has a fairly persuasive Obama quote from earlier in the campaign that sheds light on the Portfauxlio affair: “This doesn’t mean that we won’t have a standardized test, I believe children should master that skill as well and that should be part of the assessments and tools that we use to make sure our children are learning. It just can’t dominate the curriculum to the extent where we are pushing aside those things that will actually allow children to improve and will accurately assess the quality of teaching that is taking place in the classroom. This is not an either/or proposition, it is a both/and proposition, and that’s what we will be working on by fixing NCLB.”
TeachersFirst asked U.S. teachers what they would tell Barack Obama and John McCain about how to improve American education. The top priority is not money but equity–ensuring that all schools have equal access to adequate facilities, equipment, and materials. Next, teachers want the next President to develop “meaningful alternatives to standardized testing.” The third biggest priority is encouraging parents to work with schools so their children will succeed.
A nonprofit site that offers lesson plans and other resources for teachers, TeachersFirst says it polled “thousands of members, representing all 50 states, almost half of them with 20 or more years of experience.” The survey, which is a non-scientific straw poll, asked the teachers to choose their top three priorities from a list of twelve, including strengthening teacher preparation; improving physical safety; emphasizing math, science, and information literacy; and strengthening early learning and pre-K programs.
USA Today’s Greg Toppo takes note of the presidential candidates’ debate on education, or lack thereof, and sounds the same tone of non-surprise as the rest of us. “The USA’s teetering economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have all but squeezed out education,” he notes, “a topic important to previous elections.”
Still, the paper produces a nice chart detailing the various stands and pronouncments by the McCain and Obama camps. “The two split most notably on how much federal funding they believe schools can expect in 2009 and beyond,” Toppo writes. “They also have different visions of what drives schools to improve. Obama focuses on improving teacher quality. McCain cites competition from taxpayer-supported private schools along with independently and publicly funded charter schools.”
A teacher at a Kansas City charter school has been suspended for posting a video of his students marching and chanting in praise of Barack Obama on YouTube. At one level, the video can be seen as uplifting, with the students, all African-American middle school boys, chanting how Obama has inspired them to want to become lawyers, architects and entrepreneurs. At another level, the chants about Obama’s policies feel forced, scripted and more than a little inappropriate. Utterly unsurprising are the complaints about the overtly partisan nature and appropriateness of the video, which was recorded last May and only recently posted online.
The teacher in question has not been identified in media reports. The school’s director, Joyce McGautha, says she has been “advised by legal counsel to make no more comments about the video while the school investigates.”
Meanwhile, another Obama-related school controversy has been rattling around the edusphere. A Florida teacher has been widely branded an idiot and a racist for writing an inflammatory acronym on his blackboard for the word “CHANGE.” What was he thinking? wonders Joanne Jacobs. I don’t know, responds Matthew Tabor, and that’s the point.
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