(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Yet you can count the voucher programs on your fingers.
Wow! Checker Finn has TWENTY-FIVE FINGERS!
(P.S. Congrats to FEC on the rockin’ new website.)
[Update: Just realized I should have added a link to Matt’s outstanding demolition of Checker, below.]
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vouchers | Tagged: Bat Boy, Best of Greg, Checker Finn, Greg Forster | 
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Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Checker Finn wrote a response to the eight or so of us incurable skeptics of Common Core Standards. I will address a few points. Checker wrote:
Yes, it would have been better if the voluntary move by states to develop and consider adopting common standards hadn’t been entangled in a competition for federal money. Yes, it would be better if more of that same federal money weren’t paying for development of new assessment systems to accompany the standards. Yes, it would have been lots better if President Obama had never hinted at harnessing national standards to future Title I funding. Yes, the long-term governance of the standards and tests remains to be worked out.
But good grief, folks, do you really want to preserve the meager academic expectations, crummy tests, and weak-kneed accountability arrangements that currently drive—or fail to drive—K-12 education across most of this broad land? Are you so risk averse and change resistant as to see no merit in trying to do this differently in the future?
So other than that, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln? The final point about long-term governance alone is more than enough to reject Common Core. Checker quickly moves the discussion straight into a straw-man argument. Do I want to preserve a status quo of meager standards? No thank you. Good standards and tests are a vital part of a comprehensive reform package.
No one who supports Common Core can seem to muster anything better than a “yeah, we’ll figure that out later” on long-term governance. Let’s just say that I’d happily bet my left big toe that Common Core has already reserved a final resting place in the failed education fad graveyard. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Tick tock.
Checker goes on to very odd paragraph:
Third, much as I wish otherwise, conservatives’ preferred alternative ed ucation-reform strategies haven’t gained the traction or scale that advocates (myself included) hoped for, nor have they delivered reliably better academic results. Yes, the principle has largely been accepted that kids need not necessarily attend the district school in their neighborhood. Yet you can count the voucher programs on your fingers. And charter-school enrollments, while respectably up, don’t amount to more than 3 percent of all kids. The parent marketplace isn’t causing bad schools to close. (Only Catholic schools, many of them fine, seem to be closing.) One can keep beating this drum—and you’ll find more and more people snapping their fingers in time with the beat—but, mostly for political reasons that aren’t going away, it hasn’t produced a lot of marching.
Oi vey- again with the magic bullet straw man. Let’s get this straight once and for all: within real world political constraints parental choice programs are not a panacea to the ills of public education. Neither is anything else. Let’s all pull up our big boy pants and have everyone admit there are no magic bullets in K-12.
It is not the case however that a reform needs to either be a cure-all, or we don’t do it at all. By that logic, Massachusetts should abolish all student testing because there are still illiterate children in Boston. Florida may as well abolish their reforms too- after all, 27% of 4th graders still score Below Basic in reading!
Parental choice programs have been demonstrated to have positive academic effects on participants, and positive impacts on district schools. So far as I know, no one else has come up with another decentralized system of accountability that allows parents to hold schools directly accountable. Please let me know when someone does- and sign me up. Until then, it is worth bearing in mind that no system of schooling will ever be as effective as it could be in the absence of parental choice. Top down command and control efforts have their limits. Comprehensive approaches are the way to go- and the one state that has tried it succeeded in vastly improving student learning.
Checker is frustrated with the trench warfare pace of the battle for parental choice. So am I, but let’s not lose sight of what has been accomplished. Nationwide, 25 percent of students attend schools other than their zoned district school. Figure at least that many parents have exercised “check-book choice” by paying a premium for housing in neighborhoods with desirable district schools. I’d guess it is more than that, but it would be just that, a guess. Half down, half to go. Don’t give up yet, Checker.
In any case, none of this discussion about choice this has anything to do with whether states should adopt Common Core. Back on task, Checker writes:
So yes, I’ve partly changed my mind about national standards and tests. I’m mindful of the risks and unknowns that lie ahead. I’m not totally satisfied with the Common Core. (Our raters gave it honors grades but not straight As). It troubles me that we’re so narrowly focused on just two subjects within the school curriculum. I’ve no idea what “cut scores” will be established for the forthcoming tests nor whether colleges and employers will take them seriously. I’m alarmed that one of the new assessment consortia doesn’t seem serious about accountability. I’m wary of what Congress will do to the Common Core when it finally gets around to reauthorizing NCLB. I’m nervous about the administration’s political backbone as electoral stakes rise. I’m skeptical about the stick-to-it-iveness of states that pledge their troth to Common Core but are rejected at the Race to the Top altar. (This may get clear fast. On Tuesday, a dozen states that had already adopted the new standards—more than one third of all adopters—were omitted from Secretary Duncan’s list of RTT finalists.)
Right, now we are getting somewhere. Checker forgot to mention that no one has any assurance whatsoever about the maintenance of the standards and tests, if they are any good to start with, which is in doubt.
But what’s the point of just fretting and biting my nails and issuing cries of alarum? The education status quo sucks, to put it bluntly. Conserving it is no fit work for conservatives. In most of the country, they—we—should demand something better.
I certainly can’t speak for all Common Core skeptics, but “conserving the status-quo” is not my cup of K-12 tea. I completely agree that the status-quo sucks out loud. That doesn’t mean I should support something as poorly thought out as Common Core.
My state (Arizona) received pretty good grades for standards from Fordham, but it is painfully obvious that nothing about the status-quo of testing has been driving improvement. Our state has 44% of 4th graders who can’t read according to NAEP, and 4% of schools labeled underperforming by the Arizona Department of Education.
Arizona’s system, in short, devolved into a cruel joke on kids.
So what did we do? Rather than dreaming about some implausible federal “solution” we fought back. We talked to our policymakers. Our governor called for Arizona to adopt the Florida method for grading schools based upon a combination of overall scores and student learning gains. Our legislature adopted the law with a bipartisan majority. There will be attempts to water this down. The fight goes on.
If Arizona adopts the Common Core standards, and they turn out to be unteachable mush, how do I seek redress? I know who to talk to here in Arizona. I get to vote for these people. Why should I want academic standards for my children drawn up by some faceless body of alleged grandees? Churchill’s had it right when he said that democracy is the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the other ones.
In 2005, Esquire ran an article about Donald Rumsfeld called “An Old Man in a Hurry.” As the United States continued to wallow in a full-blown Iraqi insurgency for which it had failed to prepare, the title of this piece became increasingly ironic. The title derived from an old English expression “Beware of an old man in a hurry.”
Checker isn’t old in my book, but is a highly respected veteran of the school reform movement. He’s earned the stars on his shoulder, and my admiration. He has an insightful intelligence and a knack for quickly getting to the heart of things. He may have forgotten more about K-12 policy than I’ll ever know.
Passion however can lead to impatience, impatience can lead to recklessness, and recklessness leads to suffering. David Petraeus ought not to have been forced to write the United States Army Counterinsurgency Manual on the field in Iraq in 2006. ( Hundreds of thousands of people in the military, but no one had time to write one before. Hmmm.) Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld ought not to have invaded Iraq without an occupation plan.
“Relax, don’t worry, be happy, we’ll figure out that stuff later” is an opening verse to a song that often ends in disaster. Rushing to adopt academic standards without so much as a reassuring fairy-tale of how they will be maintained over time is reckless.
Conservatism isn’t exclusively about preserving the status-quo. It also involves caution and a healthy respect for the law of unintended consequences. Rummy forgot this and it seems to come and go with Checker, sometimes within the span of a single essay. Checker circa 1997 seemed to have it figured out, Checker circa 2010 seems to have thrown caution to the wind.
12 Comments | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: Checker Finn, common core standards | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)
As the nation knows, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to adopt Common Core’s English language arts and mathematics standards on July 21. At least one Bay State English teacher is aghast at what the Board has imposed on the state’s English teachers. A member of the Blue Mass Group, she immediately blogged an open letter to Governor Deval Patrick, Secretary of Education Paul Reville, and Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester the day after the vote, explaining: “There is no way that I, as a high school English teacher with a Master of Arts in English Literature, am going to be either interested or particularly successful in teaching kids to read primary documents in American history or assessing the content of Physics II papers (after I’ve had my intensive five-year retraining program). The idea is simply preposterous.”
Apparently, none of the reviews generated by the Commissioner of Education’s own staff and appointed committees, or funded indirectly by the Gates Foundation to elevate the quality of Common Core’s standards and demote the quality of the Bay State’s own standards, addressed this teacher’s overarching question: Do Common Core’s ELA standards reflect what English teachers typically teach or are trained to teach? At any rate, the Board never saw fit to discuss the matter on July 21 or earlier, after I called national attention to the problem in an invited essay published by the New York Times online on September 22, 2009.
We don’t know if most Board members even took the time to read Common Core’s ELA standards, in addition to the barrage of “crosswalks” sent to the Board within a week of the vote. The one Board member who called me before the July 21 meeting to talk about them (the night before the vote, as a matter of fact) said he had read them all but had not looked at Common Core’s mathematics or ELA standards themselves! Although he commented that Achieve, Inc.’s material read like propaganda, he unhesitatingly voted to adopt Common Core’s standards the next morning.
Achieve’s materials, however, were not the only problematic materials the Board received. The effort to elevate the quality of Common Core’s ELA standards and demote the quality of the Bay State’s current standards is apparent in Fordham’s report. Anyone reading the pages of critical comments on Common Core’s ELA standards would wonder how such a deficient document ever merited the B+ it was given, which meant that Fordham could say that the differences between Common Core’s ELA standards and those of Massachusetts (whose document was graded A-) were “too close to call.”
On the other hand, the only critical comments on Massachusetts’ ELA standards are as follows:
“Unfortunately, some of these excellent standards are difficult to track, due to a somewhat confusing organizational structure. As discussed above, the 2001 document provides standards by grade band only. The 2004 supplement provides additional standards, but only for grades 3, 5, and 7. While the intent of this supplement is to help teachers piece together grade-specific expectations for grades 3-8, the state doesn’t provide explicit guidance about how these standards fit together, leaving some room for interpretation.
Furthermore, no grade-specific guidance is provided for grades Pre-K-3 or 9-12. While the standards are clear and specific, the failure to provide specific expectations for every grade, coupled with a complicated and difficult-to-navigate organizational structure, earn them two points out of three for Clarity and Specificity.”
In fact, however, Massachusetts does provide explicit guidance in the supplement itself because these additional grade-level standards were developed for testing purposes for NCLB and have been used every year since 2004. There is no wiggle-room for interpretation and there has been nothing confusing to the Bay State’s elementary teachers about what standards were for MCAS and for them to teach.
Moreover, because of the supplement, there are specific grade-level standards for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in the Massachusetts document. Fordham demoted the Bay State’s ELA standards not only by setting forth an outright error in its critique but also by using a double standard. Massachusetts has standards for PreK-K, 1-2, and 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, as well as for high school, which are organized in two-year grade spans exactly as Common Core’s are: 9-10 and 11-12. But, Common Core’s standards were not criticized for not providing Pre-K standards or grade-level standards in high school—in either ELA or mathematics.
It is worth noting that, for full credit for “organization” in earlier Fordham reviews, standards had to be presented for every grade or two-year grade span. This definition for organization no longer appears in the criteria used by Fordham in 2010.
It should also be noted that the abandonment of this definition for “organization” as well as a puzzling approach to “rigor” clearly contributed to the rating of A- for Common Core’s mathematics standards. By themselves, its high school standards do not warrant that grade. They are not organized by grade level, by grade span, or by course. Instead, they are listed in five unordered categories of mathematical constructs, leaving it totally unclear which standards belong to each of the three basic courses of: Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. Moreover, its high school geometry standards reflect a new approach with no record of effectiveness to support it. Thus one cannot say that they are rigorous because we don’t even know that they can be taught in grade 8 and high school. In fact, there is some evidence to the contrary.
In sum, one cannot discern the rigor of Common Core’s mathematics standards “for the targeted grade level(s)” in grades 9-12 since there are no grade level standards for grades 9 to 12. Nor, more important, can one readily discern the academic level, or rigor, of the high school standards addressing Common Core’s goal of “college readiness.” Nevertheless, Common Core’s mathematics standards as a whole received full credit on the “Content and Rigor Conclusion”
“The Common Core standards cover nearly all the essential content with appropriate rigor. In the elementary grades, arithmetic is well prioritized and generally well developed. In high school, there are a few issues with both content and organization, but most of the essential content is covered including the STEM-ready material. The standards receive a Content and Rigor score of seven points out of seven.”
There needs to be more public attention to the quality of Common Core’s ELA (and mathematics) standards. There also needs to be public attention to the methodology of the reports of several national organizations all claiming to show that Common Core’s ELA standards are among the best in this country, all being used to sway the vote of our state boards of education.
[Updated to correct typos]
13 Comments | politics, school accountability | Tagged: Achieve, Fordham, national standards, Sandra Stotsky | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
If you don’t believe me check out this political ad from Alabama. Robert Byrne was in a Republican primary contest for governor of Alabama, but the teachers unions didn’t want him to win. So they “gave $1.5 million to 10 PACs, which in turn gave nearly $1 million to True Republican PAC. Joe Cottle, a lobbyist for the teachers’ group, is the treasurer of five of the PACs, and Rudy Davidson, a former education lobbyist and a contributor to A VOTE, was treasurer of four others.”
Fueled with laundered teacher union money, “True Republican PAC” ran the following ad accusing Robert Byrne of believing in evolution and doubting that every word of the Bible was true:
The Alabama Education Association, the local affiliate of the NEA, admitted to funneling this money to True Republican PAC despite the fact that the NEA has repeatedly declared its support for the teaching of evolution.
Truth, consistency, educational excellence, honesty, the well-being of children — none of this matters to the teacher unions. The only thing that matters is winning so that they can extract as much money from the public as possible.
The teacher union-funded ad has attracted some funny parodies. Bill Maher fails to correctly describe the origin of the ad, but has this howler:
And as long as we are making fun of incredibly ignorant and embarrassing political ads from Alabama, which makes me feel less bad about the incredibly ignorant and embarrassing ads in Arkansas, check out this one by another gubernatorial candidates, Tim James:
And now check out this parody:
Oh. And in case you were worried, the teacher union-backed candidate for the Republican nomination was the one who won. Gives you confidence in democracy.
(Update: I can’t find the original Tim James ad without the editorial comments inserted, but this gives a a good idea of what the original ad looked like.]
5 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: Alabama Education Association, Bill Maher, National Education Association, Robert Byrne, teacher union, Tim James | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Thinking back over these two posts on schools, citizenship and culture, I think there’s a further distinction I need to add. When I composed those posts, I didn’t explicitly distinguish two different ways in which schools can be said to contribute to the formation of national identity or moral character.
I was concerned to identify what I thought was a continuous historical dynamic, running from the foundation of the government school monopoly to the present day, in which the government monopoly is seen as a solution to America’s perennial anxieities over the formation of national identity and moral character. Because America has embraced religious freedom more fully than any other nation in history (far more fully than, say, the governments in continental Europe that preen themselves on their commitment to religious freedom while passing law after law after law governing the permissible boundaries of religious expression), and for other reasons as well, it is endemic to the American experiment that we are constantly worried about whether we will continue, over time, to share a common commitment to the shared moral values that define our civic order (don’t kill, don’t steal, etc.) and to the shared national identity that is the prerequisite of basic social cohesion. Many people are driven to embrace an aggressive use of government power, in the form of the school monopoly, in the name of various educational schemes designed to alleviate these anxieties. While many people on both sides of the ideological divide succumb to this temptation, I believe the temptation itself (as distinct from those who succumb to it) has its roots in the collectivist thinking that has historically been an ideological product of the left. And it can never work, for all the reasons that collectivism in every form can never work. And I still think all of that is right.
But I didn’t sufficiently distinguish between this dynamic and what one might call the “natural” role of schools in nurturing the formation of national identity and moral character in children. It was never my intention to deny that schools can, and should, nurture the formation of these attributes. What I deny is that the exercise of government power, in the form of a school monopoly or in any other way, contributes to such formation. Quite the opposite is the case, as the evidence shows – the more government gets out of the way, the better a job schools do at nurturing the formation of national identity and moral character.
To reiterate the wisdom of Silent Cal:
Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.
It is not the role of schools, but the role of government, that is the problem. What this ultimately boils down to is an insistence that schooling is a natural, and therefore prepolitical, phenomenon, not a creature of the state – and that the formation of national identity and moral character are included in the prepolitical nature of schooling. It may sound paradoxical to say that the formation of national identity is prepolitical, but it shouldn’t; indeed, the assertion that national identity precedes politics rather than following from it is basic to all liberty.
1 Comment | civic values | Tagged: Greg Forster | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
As Neal McCluskey revealed (and Greg highlighted), Checker made an excellent case against national standards… in 1997. The Weekly Standard has now allowed non-subscribers to link to the piece, so everyone can read it for him or herself.
Many of Checker’s arguments against national standards and assessments back in 1997 are remarkably similar to those of current critics.
… anything so sensitive as these tests must be run at arm’s length from the government and education-establishment tar babies. It also seemed that Congress should have something to say about the arrangements for so momentous a shift in American educational federalism….
As often in education-reform efforts, the procedure has been hijacked by the tar babies. The hijacking takes the form of contracts that are already being signed with neither congressional approval nor independent oversight.
The main contract so far is with the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop test specifications. “The chiefs,” as they’re known in educator- land, are the Washington-based association of state superintendents, and they form one of the establishment’s most change-averse crews. The chief of the chiefs, Gordon Ambach, is a former New York state commissioner of education, staunch advocate of a larger federal role in education — a key backer of Goals 2000, for example — and a veteran federal grant-getter. He and his group have an ancient and cozy relationship with the Education Department and can be counted on to do its bidding, down to such particulars as Spanish- language math tests and other worrisome wrinkles in the Clinton plan.
The current national standards and assessment craze has similarly not been authorized by Congress and is being spear-headed by the very same Council of Chief State School Officers that Checker denounced as “one of the establishment’s most change-averse crews.”
It’s hard to see what about the current national standards push is fundamentally different to justify Checker’s change of mind. I suppose people are entitled to change their views, but when they do so without being able to articulate the reasons for the change we might have to worry about how much we would trust their policy opinion.
Why was Congressional support essential then but not now? Why was the Council of Chief State School Officers unreliable back then but wonderful now?
8 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: Checker Finn, national standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Earlier this year, Checker Finn went through a brief period where he was tying himself in knots, sounding a whole lot like he was both for national standards and against them. Mike Petrilli chose that moment to take potshots at Arne Duncan for being “Fickle on Federalism.” I had a little fun asking “Who’s Fickle?”
Since then, Checker has finally decided where he stands (at least for now). He’s accused those of us who ask embarrassing questions about whether national standards will be hijacked by the blog blob of “paranoia.”
[Update: Hijacked by the “blob,” of course. This was totally not a Freudian slip. The blog doesn’t hijack anything – as far as you know. Nothing to see here, folks…]
Well, the game just changed. Neal McCluskey has dug up a 1997 Weekly Standard article in which Checker makes the same arguments against national standards we are now making. None of the relevant facts on the ground has changed. So today I get to ask, “Who’s Paranoid?”
2 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, national standards, Neal McCluskey, Weekly Standard | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
There is a new contender in the race to enact the next McKay Scholarship-like voucher program for children with special needs: DCPS, led by the reigning Queen of the Cool Kids Michelle Rhee.
The Washington Times has the story.
This makes sooooo much sense. Special needs parents have been successfully suing their way to Cadillac Ferrari judgements and six-figure per year private school placements for years. Before you start to feel sorry for DCPS, it is worth noting their historical abysmal performance in fundamental tasks such as teaching children reading and math. We have almost zero reason to think that DCPS did anything better than catastrophically bad on average in dealing with the needs of special needs children.
Also note, as Jay does on an as-needed-basis, that the horror stories of such placements routinely fail to note that the amounts involved typically constitute a rounding error of the total public school budget. DCPS does suffer from an unusual combination of its own historically high level of incompetence (they seem to lose early and often in court) and a group of sophisticated special needs attorneys who have become quite skilled at shooting fish in the DCPS barrell.
At times in the past, I have seen rather intellectually sloppy attempts to use the DCPS as a cautionary tale to warn people off of the idea of enacting a voucher program for special needs children. Well, let’s wipe this bug off the bottom of our boot again: a McKay program allows parents to leave for another public or private school only with (at maximum) the allegedly inadequate funding provided for the child’s education.
For decades, the claim made by the public school establishment in lobbying for higher special education funding has been that they have had no choice but to transfer endless billions of dollars out of general education budgets to fund special education.
Back in 2004, my friends at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and I caught Texas districts red-handed quantifying the amounts transfered from general to special education. Usually such claims are made by lobbyists in private conversations, or as unsupported legislative testimony, but TPPF found someone who had written it down:
…Figures presented to the Texas Legislature by officials from Regional Education Service Center 20. Public school officials in Texas relate that the state and federal government inadequately fund special education in Texas. Representatives of Education Regional Service Center 20 recently presented information before the House Select Committee on Public School Finance regarding the disparity between special education funding and special education spending in the San Antonio, Northside, Northeast, Alamo Heights and Floresville Independent School Districts.
In each district, representatives provided figures showing that districts spent hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars more on special education services than the funding they received from state and federal sources. While school district expenditures exceeded government funding for special education, the decision to spend monies above and beyond government funds was a decision made by the districts. The exact nature of excess expenditure is unknown. Whether additional monies were necessary or simply elective spending was not identified. Nor is it known if these expenditures were required to underwrite the cost of delivering government-mandated services.
In San Antonio ISD, Education Regional Service Center 20 figures show a disparity of $8,163 more spent than received per full time equivalent special education student. The disparity figures for the Northside, North East, Alamo Heights and Floresville districts were $3,536, $4,521, $7,992 and $2,949 respectively.
Any disparity between special education funding and special education spending must come at the expense of general education spending. Because education dollars are limited, money is diverted away from regular classroom instruction when districts decide to spend additional funds above and beyond government funding for special education.
The Education Regional Service Center 20 figures, for example, show that the San Antonio ISD spent over $17 million more on special education services than received from the state. Under HB 2465, every special needs student departing from San Antonio ISD with a Freedom Scholarship, despite having special education funding included, would lift a substantial funding burden from the district, freeing resources to either focus more on the remaining special education students, or for general education programs, or for some combination thereof.
So in other words, a voucher program allowing kids to leave with their normal allotment of general education funding and their special education funding would save the district money with each transfer.
So a McKay Program in DCPS would democratize access to private schools for all children with special needs from those who can access specialized attorneys to everyone. No one gets a Ferrari plan from McKay, just to opportunity to walk away with the money allotted for your child. The District spares itself a Ferrari payment and reduces the need to transfer general education funds.
Oh, and by the way, such a program would vastly increase the satisfaction of parents across a whole array of school measures.
4 Comments | special ed | Tagged: DCPS, Michelle Rhee, private placements for special education children, special education vouchers | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli seem to think so. As part of their Gates-fueled pro-standards juggernaut, they have a piece on National Review Online arguing that conservatives should support the current national standards effort. They write:
Conservatives generally favor setting a “single standard” for everybody. Setting different standards for different people — think affirmative action, for instance — is an idea most associated with the Left.
If by “conservative” we mean people who think that decisions should be decentralized, Finn and Petrilli have it exactly backwards. National standards are a centrally-imposed, one-size-fits-none approach that would make most conservatives shudder.
Let’s be clear — national standards are being centrally imposed because states are financially punished if they don’t adopt them because they would receive lower scores on their Race to the Top proposals and almost certainly lose out on getting their share of those tax dollars. National standards are “voluntary” in the same way that federal highway funds are voluntary. You can disobey the federal dictate as long as you don’t mind having the tax dollars your residents pay go to other states.
Let’s also be clear that conservatives do not generally favor a “single standard” for everyone. Conservatives do not think everyone should meet a single standard of fashion by being required to wear the same clothes. Nor should everyone be compelled to meet a single standard of nutrition by being required to eat the same foods. On what basis would we think conservatives would want every school child to be required to learn the same thing at the same time? To the contrary, conservatives generally favor allowing consumers (of food, clothing, education, or anything else) to decide how best to serve their own needs by having choice among competing providers with differing products.
It’s true that there are some people who are called conservatives who tend to favor centralization over choice and competition, but those people tend to have more of an authoritarian streak than a liberty-loving streak. It is one of the weaknesses of our language that the same word — conservative — is used to describe both Benito Mussolini and Milton Friedman. But no one should be fooled into thinking that policies favored by a “conservative” like Mussolini would also be favored by a “conservative” like Friedman.
The real divide here is between people who think that policies are best when decisions are decentralized and choice and competition are enhanced versus people who think that there is a “right way” that should be imposed centrally and should constrain choice and competition.
Nor are Finn and Petrilli accurate when they assert that national standards are being supported broadly by conservatives except for “a half-dozen libertarians who don’t much care for government to start with.” Is the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which came out against national standards, just a handful of libertarian crazies? Is the Heritage Foundation, which also opposes national standards, just a handful of libertarian nut-jobs? Or how about the Pioneer Institute? And look who’s supporting national standards — fine conservatives like the American Federation of Teachers.
Just because the education bureaucracies in a bunch of red states have signed up for national standards doesn’t mean that the idea has conservative support. It just means that their budgets are really tight and they want to be in the running for federal Race to the Top dollars as well as gobs of Gates “planning” grant dollars. The fact that there has not been more active conservative opposition can mostly be explained by the speed with which this is being crammed through in the midst of a severe state budgetary crisis.
But conservatives who favor decentralization, choice, and competition should take heart. Many of those states will change their minds if they don’t get federal dollars to stay on board. And the grand national coalition for these standards will probably fall apart as the airy-fairy standards are converted into actual practice in the form of national assessments. We’ll see how well the Linda Darling-Hammond led national assessment, which I can only imagine involves the testing of drum-circle collaboration, suits conservatives like Finn and Petrilli who so far have supported this enterprise. And with more time and greater imposition on actual practice, rank and file conservatives will become more mobilized in opposition.
There is a risk that the Obama Administration will link larger amounts of federal dollars, like Title I funds, to full adoption of these standards and a national assessment, in which case conservative opposition may be too little too late. But if the Obama Administration and the AFT do triumph no one will think it will be a conservative victory.
10 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: Checker Finn, gates foundation, Mike Petrilli, national standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Education studies based on the professional judgment of experts is phony science and is usually nothing more than an exercise in political manipulation. Unfortunately, the recent “study” released by Fordham assigning grades to state standards and the national standards proposed to replace them is an example of this kind of research.
Why would we trust expert panels any more when it comes to educational standards than education spending. The same basic problems exist. The experts do not necessarily represent all or the best views on the matter and may simply be selected by the researchers for their predisposition to support the researcher’s favored conclusion. In other words, we don’t learn anything from these analyses. It is simply a way of disguising and making more impressive the opinion of the researchers for the purpose of political manipulation.
Anyone interested in serious education research should shun professional judgment studies, whether for spending adequacy or for education standards.
6 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: Fordham, national standards, professional judgment | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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