Everyone knows that Internet plagiarism is a big problem, but now it looks like it has infected the education policy world.
To what do I refer? The Alliance for Excellent Education, which is always trying to rip off Fordham's best ideas!
Let me provide three examples. First, their name. I mean, come on, our website is edexcellence.net; we are the successor organization to the Educational Excellence Network. Couldn't they come up with something more original?
Next,??there was the Education Olympics fiasco. Longtime Flypaper readers should remember our fortnight-long celebration of America's lousy academic performance last summer, but they might also recall Bob Wise standing in front of the Bird's Nest Stadium??in a track suit, working the "Education Olympics" angle too.
And now this: The Alliance's brand-new policy brief, Reinventing the Federal Role in Education: Supporting the Goal of College and Career Readiness for All Students, which, according to its press release,??argues:
...that federal education policy needs to be flipped on its head if the nation is to graduate all students from high school, prepared for college and careers....the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is too lax where it should be firm and too rigid where it needs to be more flexible...As the brief points out, having fifty different sets of standards and assessments leads to fifty different expectations about what students should know....Instead, the brief argues that federal policy should establish college and career readiness as the goal for all students and support collaborative state-led efforts to define those expectations through common standards and assessments.
But that is not the only problem with NCLB, as identified by the brief. It notes that current law mandates how educators should address low-performing schools by requiring a specific sequence of one-size-fits-all interventions that are not informed by the problems unique to the individual schools. In the alternative envisioned by the Alliance, federal policy would permit state and local policymakers, administrators, and educators to make data-driven decisions about how to improve student achievement-provided that federal policy leaves the "what," "when," and "how" decisions to the educators who are closest to the students and schools, and then holds them accountable for the results.
As presented in the brief, NCLB's approach to high school reform is backwards. Where the nation needs commonality-expectations for students and the system, measures of college and career readiness, and definitions of vital indicators like graduation rates-there are fifty different standards. Similarly, where sharp instruments are needed to guide instructional and school improvement actions, there is a reliance on crude tools, like Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). And where individualization based on local circumstances is needed, such as interventions for low-performing schools, there is only uniformity mandated by federal policies.
Hello? Tight-loose? Upside-down? Fordham and its president Checker Finn have been talking about this for years. See, for example, Finn's Congressional testimony from 2007:
"Flexibility," properly conceived, shouldn't be considered an "add-on," a separate program, or a sideshow. Rather, it is at the heart of the most important question the Congress must answer with respect to the next iteration of NCLB and ESEA. Namely: in elementary-secondary education, what should the federal government be "tight" about, and what should it be "loose" about. When should Uncle Sam be prescriptive, and when should he be flexible?
And:
Let me propose three pragmatic rules to determine when Uncle Sam should be "tight" (i.e., prescriptive) and when he should be "loose" (i.e., flexible):
1. Whenever possible, the federal government should be tight about results and loose about process.
2. The federal government should figure out what it's good at, where it's most apt to be effective, and only do those things.
3. The federal government should encourage states, districts, and schools to "earn" even more autonomy on the basis of strong performance.
For a more updated version of this argument, see our open letter to Congress and the Obama Administration (from last December).
Well, you know what they say about imitation and flattery. We could be bitter. But instead, we'll say: The Alliance, welcome to the club!
