Last Thursday, the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program unveiled a new paper by Sara Mead and Andrew Rotherham, Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation . I was asked to respond to it, surely because of my role helping to create the Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement , which Mead and Rotherham want to rename the Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation. (Now that's progress!)
As I said at the release, the paper is at once both underwhelming and incredibly audacious. First the underwhelming part: strip away the lofty rhetoric, the (annoying) "game-changing" language, and the Brookings panache, and what Mead and Rotherham are proposing is to steer federal funds to organizations they like. (This through a new program, the "Grow What Works" fund, which would allocate dollars for the "scaling up" of reform organizations such as KIPP or Teach For America.) Or, put less generously, it's pork for their friends. At least that's how the media and critics will depict it, I would guess. That's what happened to those of us in the Bush Administration when we used the "Secretary's Discretionary Fund" to support worthwhile school reform organizations. (The reaction was fierce .) I have nothing against giving TFA or KIPP dollars to help them grow, but it's surely not a new idea, nor is it without complications. Which brings us to my second point.
Part of the proposal's audacity is its desire for federal officials to pick winners and losers (those "entrepreneurs" that deserve federal largesse, and those that don't) and to expect everything to just go swimmingly. I know Sara and Andy haven't slept through the past seven years, but have they learned any of the key lessons of the No Child Left Behind era? Did they notice what happened to Reading First officials who dared to suggest that some of the reading programs available on the open market weren't any good and didn't deserve federal funding? Did they notice how "losers" in the process were able to push their claims through the media and the political process? If Edison gets "Grow What Works" funds and the National Heritage Academy does not, what exactly do Sara and Andy think will happen? They propose various ways to protect the new program from political interference, but I'm still skeptical.
But even more audacious is their claim that the federal government will magically be able to sweep aside the hurdles that are keeping the KIPPs of the world from growing faster: the charter school caps in so many states; the restrictive teacher certification requirements; the uneven funding for charters, etc. I'm sorry, but what gives anyone the hope that the federal government has or could have these abilities? If there's anything we can glean from the NCLB years, it's this: While it's possible for the federal government to coerce states and school districts to do things they don't want to do, it can't force them to do those things well. And in the complex world of school reform, doing things well is an imperative.
Want another example? See what happened to NCLB's "supplemental services" provision (a.k.a. free tutoring), which was energetically implemented by us Bushies but which failed miserably in most big cities. That's because it required school districts to do a number of things well--informing parents, cooperating with tutoring companies, pay contractors, etc. And lots of districts decided to just go through the motions. They followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit. And there was nothing the feds could do about that.
It's looking very likely that Barack Obama will be our next president, and I'd suspect that both Mead and Rotherham will serve in his Administration. That's good news--they are both smart and dedicated policy wonks. But if they think that merely getting a smarter group of people working in the Department of Education will turn that agency into an effective change agent, I am guessing that they will be sorely disappointed. We don't need another "game-changer" in education at the federal level--we're still coping with the current game-changer, NCLB. What we need is more humility and some realistic expectations. But it looks like we'll have to wait at least another four years for that.
*Update 10/21/08: Education Week article about the Brookings Institution report here .
