Two Visions of the Federal Role
by Frederick M. Hess • Jan 29, 2014 at 9:57 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
Last night, in the State of the Union, President Obama played it pretty safe when it came to education. He was for more college affordability, higher expectations and performance for K-12, and more pre-K. Not much that anyone is going to object to. Even his oblique reference to "more challenging curriculums" was pretty darn discreet, so much so that I was a little surprised to see analysis so immediately flag it as a veiled reference to the Common Core.
Obama's remarks highlighted two essential truths. First, even today, there is a surprising depth of agreement on the broad strokes of what we want in schooling. I've never met a "reformer" who wanted schooling to be just about reading and math scores, or a skeptic who didn't concede that we need to do something to ensure that a given kid isn't perpetually stuck in a dead-end classroom in a lousy school. I know no reformer who believes that teacher evaluation systems will "fix" education, or any skeptic who won't concede that we need better teacher evaluation. Heck, I don't know any conservatives who are opposed to "high-quality" pre-K--though I know many (including me) who are skeptical that a massive infusion of cash will amount to more than an ineffectual, bureaucratic mess. All the important disagreements are really about how to do these things, what we can do well, and who ought to do it.
That brings us to the second truth--which is that, even among those who broadly agree on the goals, there are big disagreements about how to get there. President Obama last night celebrated Race to the Top, credited the federal government with helping prod states to "raise expectations and performance," said the federal government would help with high school redesign and with partnering high schools with colleges, and again called for federal efforts to spur the expansion of pre-K.
In all of this, Obama has embraced the legacy of the Bush administration. Building on what Mike Petrilli and I once labeled the "Washington consensus," the Obama administration has aggressively upsized the notion that the feds need to police the states when it comes to schooling. The Bush innovation was the belief that the feds needed to require states to adopt tests, transparency, disaggregation, and particular remedies f