There's a lot of talk about bipartisanship right now, what with the stimulus bill making its way through Congress and President Obama obviously yearning for Republican support. GOP leaders, after providing not a single vote in the House of Representatives, are making it clear that they will play ball if the president addresses some of their substantive concerns-which has certain liberal pundits worried that Obama will give away too much.
What a difference an administration makes. Dial back the clock eight years and there was another president seeking bipartisan support for the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. But rather than hanging tough on his principles and negotiating away as little as possible, he seemed almost eager to give away the store.
That's the thesis, at least, of a new Policy Review article by Rick Hess and me: "Wrong Turn on School Reform: How to get back on track after No Child Left Behind." We argue that NCLB should be seen as a triumph of liberal education reformers in the mold of Education Trust rather than a conservative victory. While the law has paid important dividends-particularly in galvanizing a left-of-center reform movement epitomized by Democrats for Education Reform-there have been significant costs, too. Here's the heart of the piece:
Just days after his inauguration, President George W. Bush released his blueprint for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a blueprint he called No Child Left Behind. In many ways, its 28 pages foreshadowed his willingness to work with the left. "Bipartisan education reform will be the cornerstone of my Administration," read the opening lines. Later it said, "Bipartisan solutions are within our reach." And, sure enough, the blueprint cribbed generously from New Dems' proposals for esea, including the Clinton administration's draft bill released in 1999. There was attention to the bipartisan tenets of more testing and greater accountability, as well as a focus on a key progressive priority that Bush had championed in Texas: closing the racial achievement gap.By and large, this document sketched a vision of reform informed by conservative intuitions and insights. It promoted transparency, disciplined accountability, parental choice, greater flexibility for states and school districts, more rigorous standards for educational research, using federal funds to encourage states to experiment in areas like merit pay and regulatory reform, and envisioned a federal role that was tight on results and loose on how those results were achieved. But by January 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act that Bush actually signed into law had morphed into a melange of grand aspirations, race-conscious program design, regulatory expansion, and invitations to federal micromanagment. In short, the bipartisan bill looked a lot less bipartisan and a lot more at home in the annals of the Great Society.
And what about going forward?
The question for conservatives now is not whether they should have chosen to work with liberal reformers in the first place (the past is the past), but whether they can renegotiate the terms of engagement. Like a pimply teenage boy desperate for a prom date, conservative school reformers circa 2000 had to beg credible liberals to join their education-reform cause. Now, with Democrats in ascendance, and a substantial share of the Democratic rank-and-file supportive of the teachers' union agenda, liberal reformers need conservatives, particularly if they hope to reauthorize nclb??and keep intact its accountability focus.And conservatives should work with liberal reformers when their interests overlap. Teaming up on urban school reform, for example, offers a wealth of opportunities for liberal and conservative reformers. Both camps agree that many inner-city schools are dysfunctional and in need of an overhaul - and sometimes require total replacement. And a case can be made that smart federal action is appropriate in the big cities. Working together, reformers in both parties can put recalcitrant union leaders on the defensive by pointing out the burdensome collective bargaining agreements, single salary scales, and ridiculous job protections for wayward teachers that exist in so many districts. But conservatives should also be willing to draw a principled line in the sand with liberal reformers. After all, conservatives are justified in regarding as suspect much of nclb's approach to accountability, especially its obsession with race, its narrow focus on low-level math and reading skills, its fairy-tale treatment of students with disabilities and English language learners, and its pie-in-the-sky dream of universal "proficiency."
Want to hear more and join the debate? Register to attend Thursday's panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, Left at the Altar: The Bush Legacy on K-12 Education, featuring Rick Hess, yours truly, and reactions from Eduwonk Andy Rotherham, civil rights leader Dianne Piche, and former Bush administration official Bill Evers.
