Earlier this week I hopped on the Red Line in the middle of the afternoon to attend a screening of the education reform documentary Waiting for Superman at the Gallery Place movie theater downtown. It’s a resonant, skillfully made film, a pitch-perfect representation of education reform in 2010. And arguably the most striking aspect was the near-total absence of No Child Left Behind, which is mentioned only in passing as one more failed federal plan.
This reinforced an idea that’s been nagging me for a while now: Some time in the last two or three years, we moved into the post-NCLB era of education reform.
It didn’t used to be that way. When I began working on education policy full-time in the early 2000’s, the center of gravity in education reform sat with the coalition of civil rights advocates, business leaders, and reform-minded governors of both parties who pushed NCLB through Congress in 2001. To find that same hum of ideas and influence today, you’d head straight for the annual New Schools Venture Fund Summit and its confluence of charter school operators, TFA alumni, urban reformers, philanthropies, and various related “edupreneurs.” It’s a different world with a different mindset, and this has real implications for public schools.
Why did this happen? First, because NCLB didn’t work very well. The federal government is good at distributing money. It can fund research, provide information, and set standards. It has a significant if limited capacity to prohibit people from doing bad things. But it is very difficult for the federal government to make state and local governments do good things they don’t want to do. And that’s where NCLB fell down. You cannot create a regulatory apparatus that mandates, via adherence to enforceable rules, the transformation of bad schools into good ones.
Enter New Schools, Teach for America, KIPP, and the rest. The civil rights advocates were reluctant to jump on board the charter school movement, because it smacked of right-wing voucherism and they were having a hard enough time managing the intra-liberal politics of opposing organized labor. This turned out to be a serious strategic error. While NCLB turned out to be sadly ineffective at turning bad schools into good ones, the best charter school people figured out how to create good and occasionally great schools from scratch.
Philanthropists and journalists began to visit these schools, which tended to be staffed by TFA corp members or people cut from a similar cloth. Education is complicated and people get frustrated by the seeming hopelessness and ambiguity of it all. The best charter schools had a galvanizing, clarifying effect. In a confusing world, people knew–knew–that here, at last, was something that worked. So they began to open their pocketbooks and their notebooks and inject financial and reputational resources into the new education organizations, valorizing their leaders as heroic figures in the struggle to help children learn.
Teachers unions, meanwhile, also miscalculated on charters. They largely got away with opposing NCLB by positioning themselves against business interests and a Republican president. Fighting the heroic personae of the Dave Levins and Mike Feinbergs of the world was much harder, because it meant being against the great charter schools that people knew in their bones were making the world a better place. The parallel rise of mayoral reform efforts in heavily Democratic cities like New York and D.C. meant the unions had to engage simultaneously on two rhetorical and policy fronts. Over time, the mayoral control people and the New Schools people got to know one another and figured out that even if their respective approaches to education reform sat at opposite ends of the centralized / decentralized spectrum, they had many common convictions–and enemies. It was only a matter of time before, in the form of people like Michelle Rhee, the two groups would converge.
The New Schools approach also had the great benefit of being an open system that invited new organizations and ideas into the fold. There’s a great deal of personal and intellectual cross-pollination among these organizations. Relatively low start-up costs and a flood of new philanthropic money from information-age rich people who prize exactly this way of thinking meant that dollars could be found to back ideas, energy and purpose.
The civil rights / business / gubernatorial model, by contrast, has roots in the morally-charged advocacy of the civil rights movement and operates through a combination of direct lobbying and high-level rhetorical suasion. A surplus of organizations, ideas, and people is actually a hindrance to the focused advocacy this approach requires. A certain respect for experience–and an expectation of toeing the party line–is assumed.
All of this is playing out in the Washington, DC education policy environment today. Every attempt to move ESEA reauthorization forward has faltered, because it means having a brutal political argument over a set of accountability system design issues that people care less and less about as time goes by. And while I doubt he would put it this way, U.S. Secretary of Education (and mayoral control alumnus) Arne Duncan has embraced a post-NCLB vision of federal education policy. In his implementation of ARRA via Race to the Top, SIG, I3, etc., as well as in his “blueprint” for reauthorization of ESEA, Duncan has shown little interest in continuing the project of federal accountability for every child nationwide. Instead, he has focused on identifying the worst schools in America and replacing them with better ones while injecting accountability and talent into the teaching profession. These are precisely the collective aims of the organizations that convene at the New Schools Summit every year. The Department of Education itself is full of high-level staffers whose way of thinking was formed in the New Schools culture.
And while I’m sure Duncan also wouldn’t put this this way, he’s actively contributing to the steady and increasingly successful rhetorical and political attack on the various maddeningly stupid personnel practices that teachers unions continue to defend. Weakened by their unapologetic opposition to the heroic and defense of the indefensible, teachers unions are struggling with the famously difficult task of managing an organized retreat.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I think the federal government is shifting toward a role in education that fits better with what it can plausibly accomplish: creating and catalyzing standards, investing in information systems, research, and innovative practices, focusing its limited (in the grand educational scheme of things) resources on the students and schools that need help the most. And I, too, have been galvanized by great charter schools. If you honestly believe that helping non-profit organizations give a high-quality education to impoverished children is a bad idea, we have little to discuss.
At the same time, the short- and mid-term implication is little or no attention to students in roughly the 20th to the 70th percentile of school quality, however defined. Charter school networks are unevenly distributed geographically, and even the best can’t grow exponentially over a sustained period of time. Many state departments of education balked when they were legally required to improve the worst schools. How many are going make hard choices when they simply have the option of improving mediocre schools?
In any event, the education world has changed and it’s not going back. I suspect it will take some time for people to internalize this and decide what comes next.
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09/03/10 | Kris Amundson gives Virginia policymakers a true/false quiz on the condition of K-12 public education in the state.
09/02/10 | Elena Silva compares two proposals for the next generation of computer-based assessments funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
09/01/10 | Forrest Hinton explains why consumer choice and market forces are currently weak influences on higher education quality. 
09/01/10 | Chad Aldeman's and Kevin Carey's thoughts on value-added teacher evaluations are featured in The Atlantic
[...] into the post-NCLB era of education reform, says Kevin Carey. It didn’t used to be that way…more» Carpe Data: In Defense of Common [...]
I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with Yong Zhao, distinguished professor at Michigan State University and author of “Catching Up or Leading The Way”, a radical book that challenges the premise that our educational system has a serious achievement gap that needs “fixing” via test-driven education reform. He contends that we are producing a generation of test-takers, not high achievers. He further contends that we have to rethink the very meaning of “achieve” and redefine what we want our children to “achieve” before we try to close a “gap” that may not even exist. I went to hear him speak and he was phenomenal!
What happened to “No Child Left Behind” isn’t that it disappeared; it morphed into other movements that are still standards-based. So, at its roots, it has not gone away. What’s vogue now is “Differentiated Instruction” … where the focus is not on the MANDATE of leaving no child behind, but the METHOD by which no child is left behind. Teachers are expected to adapt their teaching WITHIN a classroom of diverse, heterogeneous students, day by day, lesson by lesson, to successfully reach ALL of his or her students at whatever point in the learning process they are, to move them forward in their learning. In order to accomplish this, the school districts provide teachers will LESS funding, LARGER classrooms, and FEWER teachers, and LESS planning time. Sounds like a winning combination, don’t you think?
[...] tweeted Kevin Carey’s insightful post earlier, but Whitney’s blast reminded me that this deserves more circulation. Remember when [...]
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Just a few days ago, Kevin wrote here that “the education world has changed and it’s not going back.”
It’s always nice to have those moments of inspiration about “what’s really real” after seeing a good film. But sometimes shortly thereafter we get a good, cold splash of water in the face to wake us up to reality.
I wonder if Kevin felt that way yesterday when the anti-reform crowd (that would be anti-NCLB, as well) in the House announced their education spending decisions to CUT $100 million from charter schools, to CUT $200 million from teacher incentive funding, and to CUT $500 million from Race to the Top funding.
The world hasn’t, after all, changed forever.
And it will take a deeper and very different dive than Kevin’s to get to the real answers to the question, “Whatever Happened to No Child Left Behind?”
Getting to those real answers may be vital, I would suggest, to preserving the latest round of reforms. You see, Kevin, the folks who say NCLB “didn’t work” are the same folks who say charters “don’t work” and the same folks who say TFA “doesn’t work” and the same folks who say Michelle Rhee “doesn’t work.” I’m a little surprised, this far in, that you haven’t made the connection.
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I certainly did not mean to imply that there should be one model for schooling children! My concern is with those who promote KIPP and schools like KIPP as “the” answer for educating low income children, rather than investing in a decent public school education much like we provide for upper middle class children. Although… I do believe that there must be a better answer than KIPP for just about any type of student. – but of course the choice should be yours.
Liz W. wrote: “It would only be truly high quality, in my definition, if you or I would choose to send our own children there (remember that old John Dewey quote!.) I personally would not choose a KIPP style of education for my children, and my strong guess is that you would not either.”
Why should we assume that there is one school model that will work for ALL children? I will have 2 school-aged children this fall and each of them has very different educational needs. What works well with my DD would not work all that well with my DS and vice versa. My DS is perfectly bright but he needs structured, systematic formal instruction to learn things that my DD picks up simply through osmosis. With her, I’m constantly wondering how she knew X, Y, or Z. By contrast, with my DS I’m often surprised by things he does NOT know.
Just the other day he ran into difficulty with a rhyming exercise as he did not know the word “pan” (he identified the picture as a “pot”, which obviously does not rhyme with “can”). I don’t ever remember formally teaching my DD the distinction between a “pot” and a “pan”, but I had to do so with her younger brother.
My DS would probably do well in a KIPP school, while my DD would be better suited for a progressive school like Sidwell Friends. If two kids from the same family could have such different educational needs, why should we assume that kids from very different backgrounds would all do well in a particular type of school?
If you honestly believe that helping non-profit organizations give a high-quality education to impoverished children is a bad idea, we have little to discuss.”
I am going to write this comment fully understanding that you think we have little to discuss…..but here it goes:
Let’s focus on KIPP schools, as they seem to meet the definition – although they do not provide what I consider a “high quality education.” It would only be truly high quality, in my definition, if you or I would choose to send our own children there (remember that old John Dewey quote!.) I personally would not choose a KIPP style of education for my children, and my strong guess is that you would not either.
It is true that KIPP offers many impoverished children a better education opportunity than they currently have. However, many have happily entered the hallucinatory state that “KIPP it is the answer!” But before considering that KIPP is the answer, we should consider what is the problem – I believe that the problem is that the kids who go to KIPP do not have the option of going to the school my children attend – and they should have that option. I believe that these kids have the right to the type of education I want for my own children (and that I bet you want for yours!)
I guess that neither Obama or Duncan would be willing to trade their children’s schools for a KIPP school either. Not to say that my children attend a Sidwell Friends type of school. No, they attend a nice upper middle class neighborhood public school. Staffed by a combination of young and older professional teachers, who work hard to limit the emphasis on testing and give my kids a good well rounded education. There is little test prep, all children (even troubled children) are taken into the school, (without signing a contract,) and the teachers vary in age and experience. These teachers do not (I hope) work 70 hour weeks – they have their own lives, and families and I believe their teaching is better because of that.
KIPP is helping a lot of kids, doing good work etc. and the schools should continue – but, many accept them as a “solution” because they are “good enough” for “other people’s children.” However, they are not providing the kind of education I would want for children I know and care about, and if you think they are, then perhaps we do not have anything to discuss…..
for Sandy Kress — if the accountability movement is raising the achievement of kids in KIPP and other successful charter schools while the kids are also learning how to interact with the rest of the world in what we define as acceptable behavior…I have to ask…what is wrong with that? I also have to ask why aren’t traditional government schools doing the same thing? They try to do everything but truly education the children in what it takes to be successful both in school AND life.
[...] Education reform has taken a subtle but sharp turn in recent years, notes Kevin Carey of Education Sector in a thoughtful, lengthy blog post: [...]
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All of this argues for the principle of subsidiarity. People who have good ideas for improving public education need not– and should not– wait around for the federal government to take action when they are capable of doing it themselves.
Kevin, I don’t want to get into advocating for NCLB, though it would surprise no one that I think the Act made a big and positive difference.
The serious mistake you make in your analysis is that all the reform activity you rightly praise was born out of the standards based reform movement of which NCLB was a chapter.
Take away the foundation laid by the civil rights groups and the business groups. Take away the pressure imposed by standards and accountability. Take away the spotlight on achievement of
poor kids in all schools receiving federal monies. Take away all that, my friend, and let’s see whether the growth and vibrancy of these fine groups are able to be sustained.
I fear only then will some see how rooted all this recent innovation is in the accountability movement that helped drive it.
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