Last week's 24-hour National Education Summit was surely pleasant. IBM's Lew Gerstner is a fine host and his company's conference facility is exceptionally comfortable. Though the President did not make it - there was general consensus that he had important things to do back in the Oval Office - there were almost enough governors (about 15) and journalists on hand to make it feel like an important event. Corporate tycoons jetted in on private planes. Security was tight. Secretary Paige spoke at dinner. And while some VIPs had to have their arms twisted to come (and some, such as Florida's Jeb Bush, California's Gray Davis and AOL's Steve Case, were last minute no-shows), hundreds of educators wished they could have been there.
This was the 4th such "summit" in a dozen years. The first - the famous 1989 Charlottesville confab - consisted only of governors and President. The three subsequent gatherings, under the aegis of the organization called Achieve, have engaged governors, CEOs and educators in joint pursuit of standards-based education reform. Gerstner has been the main sparkplug - as he is at Achieve - and has co-chaired these conclaves with education-minded governors (Michigan's John Engler this time). Last week's get-together came just two years after summit #3. Some thought there was no clear need for it, which likely worsened the attendance problem. The fact that pending federal ESEA legislation, which will impact many states, has not yet been finalized also added a touch of uncertainty. Still, this session served as a generally praiseworthy opportunity for busy, influential non-educators to rededicate themselves to standards-based education reform. Some, to be sure, were already quite dedicated. For others, it served as worthwhile tutorial and battery-charger.
Summits slope downward as well as up, however, and this one revealed a central weakness of this kind of gathering - and of this approach to school reform.
Though termed a "national education summit," it should, in truth, have been dubbed the "national summit on government-run public school systems." Nary a soul from the world of private schooling was present - never mind that they enroll 11 percent of the kids - and I spotted nobody from charter schooling, home schooling, out-sourced schooling or any of the other education options that loom with increasing prominence over the reform landscape. (OK, they're foothills, not mountains, but more and more people live in them.) Nor did bottom-up, market-style reform get any respect. Indeed, Gerstner and others dismissed that whole strategy as a sideshow, a distraction, something "not scalable." Nobody pointed out that charter schools alone have scaled themselves up to nearly 20 percent of the kids in several cities and that the competition they pose to "regular" public schools has emerged as a significant source of reform leverage on a number of systems (not to mention the good education they offer to hundreds of thousands of needy kids).
The summit acted as if none of that were happening. Rather, the only form of education it deemed legitimate was the government-run, bureaucratically managed kind. And the only type of reform on the table was the dirigiste kind that comes downward from the top, via mandates, government regulations and enforced uniformities - or, at most, government-sanctioned diversities.
These folks are very astute about that genre of reform, mind you. The statement of principles emerging from the summit ("Raising the Bar While Closing the Achievement Gap") is a fine set of guidelines for standards-based reform, well ahead of what states are now doing and well worth being taken seriously. It does an especially good job of setting forth guidelines for testing and accountability and is visionary with regard to teacher quality - including, for example, a wholehearted embrace of "multiple pathways" into the classroom.
Yet even this statement's adoption (by acclamation) offered a revealing peek at the summit's basic mindset. The staff draft had contained one tiny flicker of competition, in the section on "strengthening accountability," where states were told that "if a failing school is not able to make reasonable progress after an infusion of technical or financial assistance," they "should not hesitate to take more dramatic action - to change the management of the school, reconstitute its staff, or provide parents with the choice to transfer their students to other schools." An excellent formulation, I thought, suggesting how (as in Florida) standards-based reform and market-style reform strengthen each other. But this section precipitated the only floor amendment to the entire document, when the National Education Association's Bob Chase rose to propose that the word "public" be inserted into its final phrase. Without a murmur of dissent from anyone on the floor - including CEOs whose multi-billion dollar companies depend on the marketplace and governors whose states are fostering competition within K-12 education - the amendment was declared to have carried unanimously. And so it went, throughout the 24-hour event.
Part of the problem stems from equating "business leaders" with heads of vast corporate empires. Such folks think almost exclusively in "systemic" terms. They're accustomed to making high-level policy decisions that affect hundreds of production units and thousands of people. They are dirigiste to their cores. Their "theory of action" is light years from that of small businessmen and other entrepreneurs who grasp the value of dynamic start-ups, the virtues of lively competition among multiple providers - and the accompanying risks of failure. That sort of person is as scarce at these summits as charter and private school heads. In fact, nobody was there, at least nobody with speaking rights - several lurked among the "resource people" on the silent sidelines - who views change as coming primarily from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Hence the top down version of education reform got high quality attention from high quality people. And they left - many of them to view "Ground Zero" at Governor Pataki's behest - having renewed their erroneous assumption that it's the only kind of reform worth mentioning.
"Education Summit Tests Reform," by Michael A. Fletcher, The Washington Post, October 11, 2001.
