Carrots, Sticks, & the Bully Pulpit
by Frederick M. Hess • Feb 3, 2012 at 9:23 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareInteresting day at AEI on Wednesday. Hosted a lively discussion on "Education 2012: What the Election Year Will Mean for Education Policy," looking at what the year ahead holds for education in Washington and nationally. I was joined by a wickedly smart crew that featured Democrats for Ed Reform chief Joe Williams; ED's Peter Cunningham; Katherine Haley, key aide to House Speaker John Boehner; influential GOP pollster and policy advisor David Winston; and Ed Week's crack political reporter Alyson Klein. The occasion for the event was the official launch of my new book (edited with my colleague Andrew Kelly), Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America's Schools. (You can find ithere). Here are some highlights:
Regarding the Obama administration's proposal to grant NCLB waivers to states who shift from subgroups to "super-subgroups"--allowing schools to make AYP based on the overall performance of their most vulnerable kids, rather than by requiring specific performance levels for a laundry list of demographic groupings--Williams wryly said he's hoping to duck the hullabaloo because the emphasis on racial subgroups is the "linchpin" that
