Recalling the Spirit of September 2001
by Frederick M. Hess • May 2, 2011 at 9:38 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareHidy, all. I'm back. I'm sure you'd prefer to be left in the capable hands of Justin, Heather, or Greg a little longer--and I got some emphatic un-fan mail strongly encouraging me to make my blog vacay permanent--but life is full of these little disappointments...
Anyway, we were channel-surfing last night when we stumbled across the CNN scroll announcing that Osama bin Laden was dead. What particularly struck me, though, are two things that touch directly upon the edu-world. One, I recalled how goodwill and generosity of spirit back in 2001 helped speed through a flawed, troubled statute called No Child Left Behind. Cheerful "let's-get-it-done" collaboration tapped not into shared horse sense, but instead greased the skids for a pleasant-sounding, poorly assembled pastiche of good intentions and confused mandates.
Second, I was reminded how nasty, personal, and petty our edu-debates have gotten. Wisconsin's Governor Walker is called a Nazi and worse for wanting to alter collective bargaining rules for employee benefits. (Talk about defining Nazism down...). Proponents of merit pay and value-added testing are called fascist teacher-haters, while skeptics of those proposals are denounced as villainous child-haters. In a perilous world, wher
