Morning Shots

For those intrigued by the new report Tough Choices or Tough Times, Colorado is ground zero for reform. This is the place to be for anyone eager to jump into the nuts-and-bolts debate on whether and how the K-12 education system can be transformed.

“No state has expressed more excitement,” former Secretary of Labor William Brock told the Denver Post about the report’s reception here.

Brock and National Center on Education and the Economy President Marc Tucker, both members of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce that generated the report, recently shared their thoughts with a teeming crowd of 600 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. The January 17 event was co-sponsored by the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Piton Foundation.

In attendance was Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff, who immediately upon the report’s release in December expressed interest in moving the plan forward in Colorado. New Lieutenant Governor Barbara O’Brien offered one of the enthusiastic introductions from the platform.

Notably, both Romanoff and O’Brien are Democrats. To their credit, they are willing to think—and act—outside the education establishment box.

The amazing level of interest witnessed here in Colorado suggests that free market reformers risk ignoring the report at our peril. With this consideration in mind, I had perused through the report before attending the forum.

Regardless of your opinion of its merits, Tough Choices or Tough Times cannot be labeled a tepid call to trim a little fat from the K-12 education system. Tucker and Brock said we can no longer afford to tinker around the edges. Instead, they expressed a remarkable sense of urgency surrounding the need to bring wholesale reform to the way the nation runs its public schools.

Brock, who served in President Reagan’s Cabinet, painted a bleak portrait of our

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Q: How do you know when you’ve been fighting your school district too long?

A: When you create a comic strip based on your experiences and you’ve got plenty of material to use.

Alpine School District, Utah.  I wasn’t born or raised here, but this is where I got my real world education.  I suppose one could say that I “discovered” myself through the experiences I’ve had here.

A few years ago my oldest daughter was finishing up her third grade year and at a parent/teacher conference I asked her teacher when they were going to start learning the times tables since they hadn’t yet and I’d done it nearly thirty years earlier in third grade.  

The teacher replied, “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.”

“You don’t do that anymore?”

“That’s right, it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“Well then how do you expect the children to learn their times tables?”

“Well,” she thoughtfully paused, “the smart kids will just pick it up as they go.”  This time my jaw cracked hard when it hit the ground and I was off to the principal’s office.

The principal explained that although this method was different from how we had grown up, there were problems with traditional math and all the research showed kids were really excelling under these discovery learning methods.  I left with a serious intestinal problem and promptly purchased Singapore math workbooks and flashcards for my children to make sure they knew their basic facts.

A year and a half later, I was at a school community meeting where I had sworn to myself not to bring up math.  Thankfully another parent did and asked why we weren’t following California’s example, which after trying these programs made

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Once a self-proclaimed "true believer" in NCLB, Mike Petrilli has come to the conclusion that it’s "fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair."  He recommends that the law be reauthorized to limit the federal government’s role to only two areas: redistributing funds more fairly, and developing a uniform system for evaluating the nation’s schools (through national standards and a national test). This, he says, would restore the federal government to its appropriate place in K-12 education (very limited) and return to states and districts the heavy lifting of improving schools.

But this heavy lifting was in the hands of states and districts from time immemorial. The federal government barged into elementary and secondary education precisely because states and districts had proved themselves wholly incapable of solving the nation’s most serious social justice and Civil Rights issue: the achievement gap. Unfortunately, nothing has taken place over the last five years to give us confidence that they’re better equipped today to solve this problem then they were before NCLB.

While I support both of Petrilli’s recommendations, neither–nor the two in combination-would materially help districts improve student learning. And that has to be our guiding star when considering NCLB’s reauthorization.

First, directing more funds to needy students is a just policy, but it’s also a well-worn path. Title I, state legislatures, and state courts have been increasing aid to low-income kids for the last 40 years, and yet the achievement gap remains. Absent some other fundamental changes in state and district policies, it’s hard to imagine how this new stream of money is going to solve the problem.

Second, while I agree that national standards and a national test would give us a reliable means of comparing schools across state lines and shine light on our educational problems, it’s extremely difficult to make the case

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