So we will move to a more European model, where business helps ensure that students learn at least minimal skills. Sure, executives smell technology profit in the lucrative education market. But they are also genuinely fed up with job applicants unable to read their own high-school diplomas. Japanese kids do five times as much homework as Americans. Why? The CEOs mince no words, and bring briskness and focus to the soupy, unfocused word of educational reform. Impatient with what IBM chief Louis Gerstner called the “sea of mediocrity,” they have narrowed their demand for action to three specific areas: standards, assessment and accountability. These Palisades principles are much better than the usual education fads. But they are inadequate without deeper structural change.
That’s because the governors and CEOs are up against what is known as the “BLOB,” the hundreds of sincere but unhelpful panels, boards, councils, union locals, departments, federations, alliances and consulting firms that make up the educational establishment. “It’s not really a wall–they always talk about change–but rather more like quicksand, or a tar pit where ideas sink slowly out of sight, leaving everything just as it had been,” notes Jeanne Allen of the Center for Educational Reform, a spunky, non-BLOBBY group. Of course the governors are themselves part of the beast. They insist on freedom from Washington yet often refuse to relinquish control to locals or cut state regulations that inhibit true school-by-school experimentation.
Even so, this summit is more historic than the last one, in Charlottesville, Va., in 1989, when President Bush, the then Gov. Clinton and other, mostly Democratic governors established national goals for education. Those unfulfilled, top-down goals are now all but dead, killed by anti-Washington political winds and silly debates over history standards. By contrast, this year’s summit acknowledged education as a state issue and gave the governors two years to establish state-by-state standards with the help of a new independent clearinghouse. Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, a summit cochair, says it’s not brain surgery: “If you don’t know the difference between Wisconsin and Nevada, you should not be able to get a diploma. Period.”
Take that, BLOB. Unfortunately, the educators who will actually write the standards barely know English. And that includes the English teachers. In releasing its version of standards last month, for instance, the National Council of Teachers of English felt obliged to define words like “spelling” and “punctuation” (an “orthographic system that separates linguistic units,” in case you were curious). By the time the latest process is over, we may have defined and facilitated and standardized ourselves into the same old hole, where the vast bulk of the money somehow never ends up in the classroom.
But let’s assume the standard-setting works. The second part of the Palisades plan is assessment (known in English as testing). This will theoretically bring back flunking, not just for students but for schools and districts, thereby helping parents make judgments among them. This sounds good, but as Ted Sizer, who runs the Coalition of Essential Schools, notes, stigmatizing schools with poor test scores hasn’t improved them so far. And he argues that it can’t work without true public-school choice.
Now we’re getting closer to some of the real answers the summit ducked. Public-school choice (not to be confused with the impractical private-school voucher system some conservatives favor) would allow parents to send their kid to any public school in the state, with the per-pupil tax dollars following them into that school. Then the comparative school test results would be meaningful, because parents could act on them. Weak schools would lose funds and be forced to improve–or close. Some states are moving that way with charter schools, but real progress depends on ridding schools of their dependence on local property taxes.
Only then does the final and most important Palisades principle–accountability–have any meaning. But if you hold schools and students responsible for results, you must do the same for teachers. To his credit, President Clinton made this point at the summit, decrying how expensive (as much as $200,000 in New York) and time-consuming it is to get rid of incompetent teachers. But his indebtedness to the reform-averse National Education Association makes it hard for Clinton to press this issue, and even Republican governors have been largely unwilling to expend political capital fighting the unions on teacher accountability. Not one state has taken the tough but necessary step of replacing tenure and holding teachers as responsible for performance as any other employee in any other line of work. In other words, the BLOB’s still winning. But at least it’s now got some powerful new enemies.
