Are Congressional Republicans Serious About School Reform?: Let’s start with this reality: The reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind is unlikely to happen this year. Forget the disagreement among congressional Republicans and their Senate and House Democrat counterparts over accountability and other aspects of the law (and even about whether it will be handled as one large document or in piecemeal). As Daniela Garcia, who advises congressional Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, admitted last week at the Education Industry Association’s legislative pow-wow, the committee hasn’t even begun fully considering the matter of reauthorization. With 12 new Republican members — many of whom are more concerned about reversing the Healthcare Reform law — on the committee, it will be months before they are well-versed enough to discuss No Child in a meaningful way.
But based on Garcia’s remarks, one thing is clear: Don’t expect much of anything serious out of the congressional Republicans on the committee when it comes to addressing federal education policy and No Child reauthorization. For all the talk about scaling back the federal role in education, they are currently consumed by the sort of simplistic, sometimes contradictory thinking that limits their ability to either advance their goal or deal seriously with the problems facing American public education.
Dropout Nation‘s interview with now-House Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline last year hit upon some of this. Garcia’s remarks this past week provide even more clarity. During the EIA confab, Garcia declared that “districts are capable of making good decisions” when it comes to using federal funding and in structuring their operations; from the perspective of the congressional Republicans on the education committee, the goal should be to “incentivize” districts to be more innovative instead of offering “heavy-handed” regulations. But when EIA members — most of whom are tutoring services that work on the ground — noted that the real problem lies not with the law, but with the fact that school districts seem focused on either evading the rules (in some cases, in order to keep federal dollars in their hands), Garcia couldn’t fully offer a compelling counter.
Garcia did say that Kline and others will try to balance accountability with flexibility (which essentially means allowing suburban districts to evade their responsibility to poor and minority children). But she also noted an unwillingness to actually hold districts to the fire. Declared Garcia: “The only power we have is to withhold funding. And nobody’s going to support that. We have to incentivize districts [to do their jobs].”
Meanwhile she noted that Kline’s desire to scale back federal policy stopped when it came to the matter of special education funding. The move by congressional Republicans earlier this month to reduce special ed funding by $500 million particularly irked Kline because “it was a bad signal, given his talk about ‘our failed promise'”. Especially for some of the school districts in Minnesota he represents. Seven percent of all students in the South Washington County district, for example, are labeled special ed cases; this includes 15 percent of the black males attending the school; most have “specific learning disability” which can mean dyslexia or other issues that really don’t require special ed participation. Kline should be asking serious questions about why so many kids in the districts he represents — and in others throughout the nation — are being diagnosed with learning disabilities. But chances are Kline and some of his fellow Republicans will go down a rabbit hole blinded by ideology and ignoring reality.
Consequences, Conclusions and School Reformers: The battles in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states over efforts to abolish collective bargaining rules has divided the school reform movement. Centrist Democrats argue that efforts by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and others have done little more than push the NEA and AFT into a corner, leading them to abandon any effort to nudge themselves toward reform. On the other side, conservative reformers who support ending collective bargaining (and some progressive critics of reform) have chided the centrists for either “keeping quiet” or taking “bizarre” positions against bargaining when the very direction of school reform essentially calls for weakening the two primary teachers unions in the first place.
The reality is a bit nuanced. The NEA and AFT will back away from some reform measures; but as Elena Silva of the Education Sector has pointed out (and it is clear from last week’s move by AFT President Randi Weingarten to float a rather weak teacher dismissal overhaul plan), the two unions will have to eventually move toward reform ideas if they want to survive in the long run. Meanwhile the impact of ending collective bargaining, as Dropout Nation and your editor have noted in the past couple of weeks, only means the weakening of some AFT and NEA influence; their vast campaign war chests, strong funding sources (including from state and district professional development funds), the opposition to reform among suburban districts and even some parents, and the presence of Baby Boomers in the ranks who want to protect their retirements, means that the unions will continue to wield clout in education policy.
The bigger issue has less to do with the back-and-forth. It’s about ideas and their logical consequences and conclusions.
The fact that centrist and progressive reformers are struggling to nuance their positions on collective bargaining points to a problem all reformers share: The reluctance to accept the full consequences of their ideas. Essentially, if you’re going to argue for more-rigorous teacher evaluations, call for overhauling teacher compensation and even support the abolition of state laws that govern such matters as pay scales, then you are essentially calling for the weakening of NEA and AFT influence. This also means you have to accept the abolition of collective bargaining, which all reformers have pointed out is one of the main reasons why teacher quality reforms die in uteri at the district level.
But this isn’t a problem just for centrist Democrats. Conservative reformers have been critical of the No Child Left Behind Act and other accountability measures in large part because in theory, they expand federal education policy (even though the laws actually fully acknowledge that states are the main architects and overseers). But now, they will have to deal with the presence of congressional Republicans such as John Kline, who (except when it comes to things that matter to his district such as special ed) even want to scale back the federal role even further than they desire. And among all reformers, the arguments for the use of value-added in evaluating teachers is such a wonderful idea until advocates and media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times actually goes out and uses the data to assess the performance of actual live teachers.
It’s easy for reformers in the Beltway to posit ideas and advocate for them. It’s harder to make them reality. And it’s even harder to execute them without there being consequences seen and otherwise. Given this reality, it is critical for the Beltway gangs to either accept the full logical ends of their ideas or just stop talking.
