Morning Shots

In the 1990s, Republicans on Capitol Hill argued that improving education in America would require moving dollars and decision-making authority back to those closest to students. For too long, Washington’s inefficient and ineffective education policies had sidetracked the momentum of reform.

In 2007, many of those efforts seem like a distant memory. But the spirit of state, local, and parental empowerment was alive and well earlier this month at a public forum at The Heritage Foundation.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R–MI) and Bob Schaffer, a former congressman and current Vice Chair of the Colorado State Board of Education, delivered remarks geared toward restoring conservative principles in the federal education debate.

Conservatives in the 1990s, Rep. Hoekstra said, "were winning. We were moving toward state control, local control, empowering parents, empowering local communities to design their education system." In 1998, for example, the House Education Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which Rep. Hoekstra chaired, published "Education at Crossroads: What Works and What’s Wasted in Education Today," which reported the findings of extensive investigations and field hearings across the nation.

The Crossroads report documented the scope of the federal role in education. It identified 760 federal education programs scattered across 39 different government agencies costing taxpayers more than $100 billion annually. It reported that the Department of Education required over 48.6 billion hours of paperwork each year – enough to keep 25,000 full-time employees busy all year. It also found that as little as 65 to 70 cents of each federal dollar for education actually reaches the classroom.

Based on these findings, the subcommittee recommended reforms that would empower parents, return policymaking control to the state and local level, and streamline the federal bureaucracy and eliminate wasteful programs. One outcome of this effort was legislation called the Academic Achievement for All Act, or "Straight A’s." This

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If one could make a case against the perpetrators of reform math—complete with arrests and jail time—showing that such programs are a form of child abuse, the math wars would cease in a matter of days.  As it is, however, reasoned arguments from those who oppose the reform programs haven’t seemed to carry much weight, as the programs seem to proliferate in school after school across the U.S.  And in a recent Education Week column, Mr. T.C. O’Brien seems quite content to skewer those who criticize the reform programs, resorting at times to borderline name-calling, and laying blame in large part on mathematicians.  It seems that mathematicians’ call for math to be in math textbooks and that such math be correct is an artifact of purism and backwards thinking.

Ordinarily I would ignore such a diatribe.  But I believe there have been too few rebuttals to this type of op-ed which Education Week seems only too happy to publish.  Take for example this statement: “The National Mathematics Advisory Panel, established by the Bush administration in April of last year, has been meeting to discuss the improvement of achievement in mathematics in the schools.  A good portion of its members have no experience in mathematics, no experience teaching children, or both.”

Putting aside the fact that panels typically draw from a number of disciplines, of the 17-member panel two are well-respected mathematicians (Wilfried Schmid from Harvard, and Hung-Hsi Wu from U.C. Berkeley); one is a middle-school math teacher who teaches in the traditional style reviled by Mr. O’Brien and many of whose gifted students end up at universities like MIT (Vern Williams); one is a former principal of a school in California who turned it around to become a top performing school (Nancy Ichinaga); and one is a former math

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