Will President Obama's Education Reformers Own Up to Their Failures?
By John Thompson.
Perhaps because I’m an incorrigible supporter of President Obama on almost every non-education issue, I grasped at straws hoping that his and Arne Duncan’s staffing of the Education Department with former Gates Foundation true believers in market-driven reform would not create a mess. Even though they flew in the face of a large body of social science and the professional judgments of teachers, I hoped the Race to the Top (RttT), School Improvement Grants (SIG), and other innovations wouldn’t be a waste of money – or worse.
Before turning to other recent criticisms of the Duncan administration’s alphabet soup of technocratic, top-down mandates, I must recall my most naïve response to the RttT, the SIG and, later, NCLB waivers. In 2009, the Obama administration was in the process of saving the nation’s schools and the entire economy from the Great Recession. It was (then) investing less than $10 billion on pilot programs, while pushing the $100 billion of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) bailout. In such a situation, the United States could afford a set of competition-driven experiments.
If the RttT and the SIG worked, that would be great. If they didn’t, we could learn important lessons. Such experiments, however, would require an objective evaluation of their outcomes, as well as a willingness of the administration to honestly confront the results. At the time, I couldn’t have known that Arne Duncan and his team of former Gates Foundation administrators would be so allergic to facing up to facts.
Now, we are getting the next best thing as conservative reformers, as well as educators, are calling them to task. One of the most recent examples of the pushback is conservative reformer Andy Smarick’s challenge to Joanne Weiss’s defense of the RttT. Weiss personified the administration’s overreach. As director of the RttT, she set out to impose corporate school reform on states and localities across the nation.
Weiss ignored the need for checks and balances of authority, and then she seemed to blame states and localities for the failures of her federal micromanaging of school policies. Smarick concludes, “even when federal education officials are pure of heart, their plans reliably underperform, as in the case of SIG, the backlash to NCLB and Common Core, the disappointing results of educator evaluation reform, and the disintegration of the federally funded testing consortia.” (I don’t agree that federal policies always under-perform, but it is a safe bet that grandiose federal social engineering always will.)
Some of the best critiques of Weiss’s spin can be found in the comments prompted by her article in theStanford Social Innovation Review. Almost all of the fifty-plus comments were negative, and many were Will President Obama's Education Reformers Own Up to Their Failures? - Living in Dialogue: