I really enjoy Andy Rotherham as a colleague and friend (you know, the way Joe Biden loves John McCain), but in this recent post he sounds an awful lot like Greg Marmalard, the Omega President in Animal House who thinks he's smarter than everyone else.
First some background. Last week, Andy and Sara Mead released a Brookings Institution report that called for a new federal role in supporting education entrepreneurs. At the release event, in an Education Week story, and in this post, I criticized Andy and Sara for failing to learn key lessons from the No Child Left Behind experience. Specifically, I found them to be overly optimistic that the feds would be able to convince states and locals to remove obstacles to education entrepreneurs (Jay Greene thinks so too)*; those of us in the Bush Administration sure did try our darndest to do this, particularly in the case of NCLB's public school choice and supplemental services provisions, to no avail. That's because, as I argued, the feds have few tools to coerce states and districts to do things they don't want to do and do them well. And that's what it takes to open the door to "scaling" promising innovations. I also found Andy and Sara to be somewhat na??ve to believe that they could pick winners and losers in their "Grow What Works" fund and not be accused of favoritism or cronyism.
So what was Andy's responses to these concerns? In a nutshell: Don't worry, those of us who will serve in the Obama administration will be smarter than you dummies in the Bush Administration. Or in his own words: "Mike's argument...seems to boil down to a belief that because the Bush Administration really screwed up some things like Reading First and Supplemental Services it means federal efforts in innovation more generally are bound to fail.?? That's one possible explanation, sure, but it means turning the wheel too far one way??to??get out of a skid.**???? Instead, another explanation is that??the Bush Administration just??screwed some things up and that while there are cautionary lessons to be learned, all is not lost."
I know it's been convenient for Andy and other Democratic reformers to blame any NCLB problems on us dummies inside the Bush Administration and "poor implementation." But now that the keys of 400 Maryland Avenue are (most likely) going to be handed over to Team Obama, it's really, really important that Andy and his friends get the lessons of the Bush years right, lest they repeat our same mistakes. Take it from me: we should have been more humble and willing to learn some hard-earned lessons from the Clinton Administration and from career civil servants in the Department of Education. Now it's your turn. Implementation wasn't perfect, but there's a problem with "implementation was the problem." It papers over the real structural impediments that lead to so many unintended consequences when the feds try to do good in education. All is not lost, Andy, but all is not possible from Washington, either.
* Andy insists that he and Sara want to use incentives, not mandates, to encourage states and districts to get out of the way of promising entrepreneurs. But their paper gets very fuzzy on this point. As far as I can tell, most of the new money they are proposing would go to the entrepreneurs themselves, not states or districts. Yet they also want a new Office of Education Entrepreneurship and Innovation to "deploy funding streams at its authority to provide incentives for state and local policymakers to eliminate barriers." Which funding streams? A more promising approach might be that taken by the (Bush Administration's!) Teacher Incentive Fund, which basically bribes school districts to experiment with pay-for-performance programs in return for federal largesse.
** Andy also has some fun saying that I'm "like a teenage driver with a disconcerting tendency to over-correct in every turn." He's right that I've changed my mind about NCLB. Other issues too. In each case, what's happened is that new evidence has become available, and I've updated my views accordingly. Isn't that what all responsible analysts are supposed to do?
