First, the people most hurt by a failed urban education system are the least powerful politically. Imagine a world in which the shameful achievement gap were reversed—with African American and Latino children systematically surpassing their white counterparts. Does anyone seriously doubt that political forces would have been arrayed to generate a Manhattan-Project-level effort to correct the imbalance?I wil readily admit to sometimes "overheated flights of rhetoric" about the unions, but I plead that my heart and concern are in the right place and bound to a moral goal. But I do want to suggest something practical for Cerf and the political leaders of today and tomorrow, essentially a riff on Cerf's first point.
Second, you don't need to be a disciple of Adam Smith to know in your bones that competition and accountability for results drive innovation and quality. For the most part, however, both are anathema to public education. When they are embraced at all, it is usually after fierce resistance and in watered down form. Witness the fight-to-the-death opposition to charter schools, the hostility to merit-based compensation, the opposition to using evidence of student learning to evaluate teacher performance and even (incredibly) the concern that NCLB is problematic precisely because it focuses too much attention on which schools are succeeding and which are failing. It is simply too facile an explanation to suggest, as many do, that this resistance is the inevitable reaction of any monopolist that wants to keep the good times rolling. I am convinced that the antipathy to competition and accountability has deep cultural roots that go well beyond narrow self interest.
Third, the politics of school reform pretty much guarantee inaction, or at best incrementalism. I am especially distressed by the failure of courage in my party, the Democratic party, even to engage in a serious debate about the kind of structural reforms that might really make a difference. As Robert Gordon recounted, John Kerry’s hasty retreat from a strong opening salvo in the 2004 election is sadly typical. The party that prides itself on social justice consistently avoids pushing the envelope on serious reform, resorting instead to comfortable sloganeering like "more money," "fewer tests," and "lower class size." The worst part? In private, the better candidates totally "get it," but tell you that now is not the time to rock the boat. While Republicans are more likely to "call it like it is," they have succeeded in marginalizing their voice in the debate through excessive reliance on market-based solutions, overheated union bashing, and an often suspect track record on other civil rights issues. The result of this left/right dynamic is political inaction. And as bad as this is at the national level, the more local you get, the worse it becomes.
Fourth, real reform takes time to sink roots, at least five years and often more. Continuity of leadership is absolutely critical to organizational change, yet urban school systems often turn over their leadership with almost comic frequency. As a result, school districts are like archeological digs: scrape down a layer and find the favorite initiative of a long departed superintendent, go a layer deeper, and find the preferred fad of yet another, and on and on. Before Mayor Bloomberg had the political courage to ask for control of—and accountability for— the school system, NYC had 10 Chancellors in 20 years. Since his arrival in 2002, there has been one.
Fifth, the overheated flights of rhetoric that regularly emanate from teachers unions and management alike too often obscure the one truth that should guide both parties: The single most important determinant of positive student outcomes is the quality of the teachers in every classroom. Our collective failure to forge a positive collaboration around this shared ideal represents a missed opportunity of significant proportions and a real barrier to progress. In NYC, for example, the centrality of teacher quality represents a fundamental tenet of the Bloomberg/Klein administration. But it is no less so for the United Federation of Teachers. This is fertile terrain for important work—finding, training, developing, and retaining the best in the business, and ensuring that only those who are succeeding with students remain in our classrooms. Shame on us if we can't find a way to tackle it together.(formatting in original, links omitted)
The people most wounded by the current state of public education are not only the least politically potent constituencies, they are often represented by people most wedded to interest groups that favor the status quo. Because representatives need to get money to get elected and their constituencies generally don't have money to pay all their bills, let alone make contributions to candidates, these candidates are heavily reliant upon interest groups (read PACs) for funding and assistance. These interest groups tend to color the thinking of the representatives (note, I do not mean by corruption but rather through a form of group think via close association). As a result these elected representatives don't necessarily favor or vocally support the kind of radical restructuring that an urban school system needs.
But to overcome this political handicap, there needs to be a coalition building with the groups least affected by urban school decay--suburban and exurban inhabitants. Generally speaking, schools in these areas are doing well, whether by virtue of more money or more educated parents who value the education. If urban activists were to build a grassroots momentum from this direction, there would likely be more political action as opposed to the current inaction.
What, you may ask, would be the hook to get this constituency involved--money. As always we are talking about money. If you take a state with one large urban area, say Illinois and Chicago or New York and New York City, etc. You will find that for each person paying taxes in a state, a certain percentage of their tax bill funds education. Let's say, for the sake of demonstration, that percentage is 40%, or 40 cents on the tax dollar. Given that urban district spend a higher amount per pupil that suburban or exurban districts, and that the urban district tax base (whether income or property tax) tends to be proportionally lower than suburban areas, the suburbs actually pay for a large percentage of urban school spending, with perhaps as much as 1/3 of that 40 cents on the dollar leaving the suburban districts and being spent in the urban district.
While it may be a practical impossiblity to noticeably lower the education spending by the states, which has been on a steady increase for decades, it may be possible to at least get a better bargain for the spending. This is where the political clout of suburban families comes in. If these suburban groups were capable forcing real educational change in both their own districts and urban districts, political and structural change is far more likely. The political stature of the groups interested in school reform, either for their own kids or for the sake of value driven governmental spending, is increased by the coalition.
Until urban education becomes a suburban issue, popular among the soccer moms, NASCAR dads and swing voters, do not look for any real change to the debate. More and more people will have to become "education voters" for there to be any real change and the only way to create an "education voting" bloc is to forge one through multiple interests.
No comments:
Post a Comment