Thursday, December 28, 2006
Where liberals and conservatives cohabit
Posted by Harold Henderson on 12.28.06 at 10:00 PM
President Bush's one big bipartisan legislative accomplishment will be up for reauthorization in 2007.
Alexander Russo at This Week in Education sees an "unholy alliance" between liberal critics of No Child Left Behind such as Gerald Bracey and conservative critics such as Checker Finn.
Andrew Rotherham at Eduwonk.com offers an "NCLB Tip Sheet" giving the odds on possible outcomes of the debate. Neither Bracey nor Finn will be pleased. The best odds are on "no reauthorization until after the 2008 election." And it's 35-1 against "National Education Association reasserts itself and rewrites the law to its liking."
It should be a boom year for education pundits, dueling researchers, heart-rending stories, and the like. How would you change the law, if at all?
Comments (4)
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As your book about Open Court demonstrated, the cartel of education textbook publishers is again to blame here. It lobbied the bureaucrats who enforce the excellent "Reading First" legislation -- which required proven good results before federal money could be spent on a textbook series -- into approving all their inferior textbooks. The result was a massive new slush fund for the very textbooks which caused the massive decline in K-6 reading competence in the first place.
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It's an odd subject, since the whole debate is founded largely on mythology: there is no serious data supporting the claim that American public schools have been declining in quality or results, and in the big picture they're clearly superior to those of my youth let alone my parents' youths. At the same time it's equally clear that they could by now be a great deal better given our national wealth, and that both ideological camps have valid points about why. Meanwhile NCLB is an infantile law, a poster child for the worst instincts of modern conservative and liberalism, mashed together incoherently. Fortunately it has made hardly any actual impact on the ground other than inspiring lots of overwrought editorializing; if it's just me talking I'd let the thing die but it wouldn't be on my First Day List if made king. (Regardless it will live forever in future historians' PhD theses as an example of governmental folly in action.)
Paul, the decline of American schooling is indeed largely a myth. But it doesn't follow that efforts to reform the status quo (even those sometimes based on that myth) are mistaken. Since Jameson kindly mentioned it, I'll quote a relevant paragraph from my book "Let's Kill Dick and Jane": American schools have not deteriorated -- they've never been good enough. As literacy authorities Lawrence Stedman and Carl Kaestle put it in Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880, "Even if schools today are performing about as well as they have in the past, they have never excelled at educating minorities and the poor or at teaching higher-order skills."
Oh I wasn't asserting that efforts to reform the status quo are all or generally mistaken, simply that the ones imposed by NCLB are. And while it seems quite clear that public education in the U.S not only hasn't deteriorated but has on average steadily improved, I'm also happy to agree that it should have been improving a good deal more. It's a matter of context: for example if we compare the public education being provided to the typical black kid today with that provided to those of 1965 or 1930, no rational parent would even consider choosing the earlier versions. Similarly as a white public-school kid whose son is the same it's clear to me that the education he just received from his fairly-mediocre primary school was superior to what I received from what was in the 1970s considered a top-notch one. And yet it is equally clear that the improvement in our educational system pales next to that of a variety of other critical large-scale aspects of our society. As a property-tax payer, let alone a parent, that pisses me off greatly. The Economist has in recent years repeatedly raised a more direct comparison: that American higher education has improved itself so drastically over the last half-century as to become without peer in the world while at the same becoming steadily less exclusive and vastly more accessible particularly for middle and working class families (thanks to radically-progressive pricing). Compared to that the improvement in our primary/secondary educational system is downright embarrassing, and those contrasting curves from say 1950 onward are worth pondering in terms of methods.
