Last August, Mike Antonucci's Education Intelligence Agency reported the findings of an internal AFT "communications audit." Chief among members' gripes was their union's "nuanced" position on No Child Left Behind. (As Gadfly readers doubtless know, AFT leaders have endorsed many aspects of NCLB while grumping about others.) As Antonucci wrote, "[Nuanced is] a pretty good word for an intellectual argument, but a terrible word for a PR campaign."
We empathize. Ever since one of us wrote that "NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair," we've watched our "nuanced" position cause confusion and consternation, and be outright co-opted. We've even been accused of flip-flopping, a rare allegation at the Fordham Foundation where we are more often charged with stubborn devotion to well-worn positions.
Still, we ought not be surprised. NCLB is a high-stakes law that gives rise to a high-stakes (and sometimes high-volume) debate. One could fairly expect hard-line opponents of that law to seize upon our seeming defection to press their cause. The NEA, for instance, emailed our misgivings about the national NCLB Commission report to Democrats all over Washington, or so we hear. Even Fordham Foundation frequent critic Gerald Bracey approvingly cited our work. This was alarming if not surprising. Yet it was also puzzling. Did these defenders of the education status-quo actually read the entire essay? How do they feel about lines like this one?
"[W]hen it's time for reauthorization, can we overhaul the law itself without letting go of its powerful ideas? Two other outcomes are more likely. One is the tweak regimen: the law gets renewed but remains mostly unchanged, and we continue to muddle through.... The second is bathtub emptying: Throw the baby out along with the murky water and give up on the law and its ideals. Then we go back to the days when schools felt little pressure to get all of their students prepared for college and life and democratic participation, and we declare No Child Left Behind another failed experiment. That would be a disaster."
Still, the simplistic, take-sides but take-no-prisoners ethos of our over-politicized, hyper-partisan age is, "You're either with us or you're against us." Opponents of NCLB want to interpret our calls for substantial change in that statute as evidence of the need to abandon America's entire standards-and-accountability enterprise.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. They're wrong in what they're up to, and they're wrong in how they read us. So, let us again "clarify": We firmly believe that the United States is better off with NCLB than without it. It has brought greater attention (and data) than ever before to bear on the actual performance of our schools; it has focused us on closing unacceptable achievement gaps like nothing before; and it has brought the appearance of, if not always ardor for, accountability to every corner of the land. Knowing what we know today, we still would have supported the law (with all its imperfections) back in 2001 when Congress finished work on it, and in January 2002 when the President signed it. Like Hillary Clinton, we refuse to apologize. Unlike Hillary Clinton, we still believe in what we believed in then.
But the big question today is not whether NCLB should have been born, much less whether it should be killed, but what it should grow into. It's like a five-year-old kid. Plenty of shaping lies ahead. And here is where we fundamentally disagree with the NEA, Bracey, the dishonestly named "Forum on Educational Accountability," and all other apologists for the status quo in American education: We want to raise standards, not erase them; we want to do it nationally, and do it right. We want comparable data and high stakes attached to school, district, and state performance. In return, we want to empower school leaders and state/local leaders with the authority to get the job done. These stands place us firmly in the "mend it, don't end it" camp--and in profound opposition to those who would repeal or defang NCLB.
As for the flip-flopping allegation (see here and here), if those nothing-better-to-do bloggers had bothered to dig deeply enough, they would have discovered that we've returned to our original position: the federal government should do a few things in education (set standards, test students, collect data, distribute [and withhold] funds) and do them well. And states and schools should do the rest. Consider our eight-year-old essay "Washington versus School Reform" from the much-missed Public Interest. Way back then, we warned against Washington's "promiscuity" in creating new education programs and asked, "Do federal officials really know better than governors and mayors what the top education reform priorities of Utica or Houston or Baltimore should be?" We called for block-granting funds, attaching dollars to the backs of students, and providing an "independent audit" (our version then of what today we'd call national standards and tests) to overcome the "misinformation machine" that leads parents and communities to conclude that their own schools are just fine, thank you.
Three years ago, in yet another Public Interest essay, one of us wrote (with Frederick M. Hess) that NCLB got it exactly backwards. "NCLB today is too lenient about the skills and knowledge that young Americans must acquire and too prescriptive about calendars, state improvement targets, and school sanctions....Washington should instead offer stricter guidance regarding the essentials that students must master while being flexible with regard to how states, districts, and schools produce those results--and how they address failure."
Sure, it's a nuanced argument. But we also happen to think that it's right.
