The White House is not making the grade on education reform
As one of the chief architects of No Child Left Behind, Sandy Kress wishes that when it comes to education reform, President Barack Obama offered more hope and less change. The longtime Democrat wanted the administration to continue George W. Bush's attempts to hold schools accountable for the academic progress of children typically underserved by the public schools, i.e., Hispanics, African-Americans, English-language learners and the disadvantaged.
A former president of the Dallas school board who is now an Austin-based attorney, Kress initially liked what he saw. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan were making enemies of teachers unions by suggesting merit pay for good teachers, applauding the firing of bad teachers, and announcing that the administration's $4.3 billion Race to the Top program would use student test scores to evaluate teachers. Duncan added a scathing and dead-on criticism of the nation's 1,450 teachers colleges for doing a mediocre job of training future educators.
In fact, Obama and Duncan have created an environment through their laserlike focus on teachers where it is now socially acceptable, even in liberal circles, to ask not only how much students are learning and how well schools are performing but also how well teachers are teaching. It's about time. Since the release of the blockbuster 1955 book, Americans have spent billions trying to figure out Why Johnny Can't Read. But we haven't spent enough time or money trying to figure out why Johnny's teacher can't seem to teach him to read.
So far, so good, thought Kress. But then he took a closer look at what the Obama administration has planned for NCLB, which is due to be reauthorized this year. And he considered the impact that those changes would have on efforts to hold teachers and schools accountable for student performance.
What Obama is offering, Kress told me, is a watered-down version of education reform that lets most schools off the hook.
"I think there is a huge flaw in the blueprint," Kress said. "And it's in the part that relates to accountability."
For Kress, making schools accountable means putting them on notice that they're being watched by the federal government and expected to do a better job of educating minority and disadvantaged students.
"That's why we're here," Kress said. "We're not here for everybody to do great or to solve every problem. The historic role of the federal government, ever since Lyndon Johnson, is that the United States has an
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