Ted Mitchell and Jonathan Schorr of the NewSchools Venture Fund take to the pages of Education Week to praise Sara Mead's and Andy Rotherham's new blueprint for promoting education innovation via the federal government. Now, I could lambaste Ted and Jon* for holding the same utopian views as Sara and Andy when it comes to Uncle Sam's ability to do right in education. But I'm just not in the mood today. Instead, let us celebrate the fact that Democrats are debating how to improve U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement , not how to eliminate it. Because when we created our little office six years ago, we worried a lot about whether another Administration would eventually try to kill it. If Team Obama wants to make it better, I'm ready to declare victory!
* But I can't help but make the ???Petrilli argument ??? one more time, with respect to the ???political futility??? of trying to harpoon the Historic Whaling Program . Don't get me wrong, this initiative is a boondoggle, through and through. (???Whales: The other white meat.???) But one of its key sponsors is Senator Edward Kennedy, so what exactly is your strategy? By all means, lure it to another office, but eradicating it entirely will take the single-mindedness of Ahab. And we all know how that turned out.
