We know we can legislate schools and districts to undertake certain actions; or in this case to adopt certain turnaround models. We have done it over and over again, under many different names. But, we cannot legislate the real commitment to change that school leaders, teachers, community members, parents, and students must demonstrate for any turnaround effort to succeed. We can foster this commitment by taking a comprehensive view of the challenges facing the school and involving the community, parents, and educators in the solution. At the same time, we need to evaluate the interventions to learn what works when and scale up the successful practices. Conversations where we agonize amongst ourselves over language – punitive, accountability, flexibility – are counterproductive.

We need to stop talking and move, now. We will continue to squander the potential of kids until our education system is standardized and flexible enough to pay attention to every single student. All of our teachers and leaders have to be effective – not 51 percent, not 79 percent, but every single one of them. All of our students – not half of them or even three quarters of them - need to be engaged with learning processes that meet their individual needs. Each and every child must be supported on the path to being successful in a college and career environment; and we cannot settle for less than a 100 percent graduation rate from all schools. Is this hard to do? Yes, of course. And, getting there will require a strategic combination of standardization of processes and flexibility of implementation.

The schools that are successful – traditional public, charter, private – put students at the center of school culture. The principal and teachers know every student’s name and care about the success of that student. Instructional practice is of the highest quality. This story in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune about the college signing day at Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy shows us what is possible when kids are made to believe that they can – and must – succeed.

Let’s resist the impulse to bicker over magnet vs. neighborhood, traditional public vs. charter or even over how many models should be allowed under the new turnaround mandate. We must keep our eyes on the prize and not settle for the myriad excuses for why we cannot educate all of our children to high academic standards. No one model will work in every school and I predict that at some point there will be more than four options. However, right now we should start to better define, implement, and EVALUATE any of the models that are offered. The system has to be willing to accommodate this, and allow for the flexibility to identify promise and remove failure under much quicker timeframes.

Sure, we can build new models, overhaul the existing approaches, and pour in the resources and support. But, whatever we do, we need to research the effectiveness of all approaches so that we can excise what doesn’t work quickly and scale up what does work in a way that has never been done before.

At Learning Point Associates, we focus less on the debate about the structure and put our energy behind implementation and evaluation. We stand by using research-based methods and tools that can be tested under a variety of circumstances to determine how effectively they help us reach every single child in a way that nurtures their individual academic growth.

Together, the best we can do is hold ourselves accountable for reaching the goal of a successful future for all of our students. We cannot do it in isolation or in competition. We cannot continue to look for why something won’t work or keep complaining that the options are too limited. We will never know the right answers unless we collect the evidence to prove the point. We must have a strong system of research and development working in alignment with planned implementation. Our students are waiting for our next move.

While the Blueprint has many strengths, one weakness is the omission of early learning. We know that most of a child's brain development occurs before he or she enters kindergarten (or even preschool), and the Blueprint doesn't do anything to address those critical years. The Administration was smart to support the Early Learning Challenge Grants -- a part of SAFRA based on one of President Obama's campaign pledges, but dropped from the reconciliation bill. Still, the fact that early learning deserves its own bill doesn't change the fact that it should also be a key part of ESEA.

Many of the policy areas that K-12 advocates focus on have resonance in early learning as well – great teachers, better assessment, better data, services for dual language learners, improving the lowest-performing schools, community involvement, and more. Our specific needs may be a little different because of the population we serve, but a lot of the basic ideas similar enough that they should be reflected in ESEA reauthorization. We appreciate ESEA's focus on college and career readiness, and the first step to college and career readiness is not kindergarten.

Title I has been an underutilized resource for early learning; it's set up to be used for birth to five programs, it just isn't. So that's a great place to start, but it's only a starting point. Early learning should be a dimension of almost every element in a reauthorized ESEA. Through ESEA we should be investing in high quality, comprehensive birth to five programs, and driving critical policy changes in birth to five education. We know the Secretary understands the importance of early learning. So as we move from blueprint to legislative language, we're cautiously optimistic that ESEA reauthorization will start to address the importance of early learning -- and we're hoping the Department will more than make up for this missed opportunity.

In response to the reader from South Carolina:

The number of college degrees that we produce directly strengthens the country’s social fabric. Not only do the college educated vote in higher numbers and volunteer in higher numbers. They also wear their seatbelts, stay away from crime, and give blood in higher numbers. The list of positives goes on and on.

In terms of salary, there are plenty of jobs that are not high paying but require post-secondary training. Most advocates promoting college access and affordability aim to make college affordable enough that a high wage is not necessary upon completion of the degree.

I think the reader in South Carolina has a good point. But why shouldn't the cashier at the grocery store be well educated, ditto the man who takes down the dead tree. In a democracy every body should, by 18, be sufficiently well-educated for me to feel comfortable about having the same number of votes as I do! And being a thoughtful neighbor, and being thoughtful at competent when taking down that tree--hardly an unskilled job. Rereadin' "Minds at Work" by Mike Rose is a reminder of how we falsely define skilled vs unskilled work.

Then we can encourage those who want to--if we made it cheap enough--to get a classy liberal education that expands their world view, acquaints them with more aspects of human achievement and possibility, and provides time and stimulus for being citizen-intellectuals. And which will, for some, be an entryway into academic careers. This oughtn't be restricted to 1 year olds, but maybe we can make it cheaper and cheaper the older you are, thus encouraging lifetime learning. For utiliarian job/career oriented schooling let's call it what it is--and let the chips fall where they may. But let's stop assuming cosmologists and cosmeticians need to be less well-educated as citizens and human members of society. But that should be the goal of a good K-12 education, with these other options available thereafter. Wouldn't it be exciting to rethink what we mean by a well-educated citizen, to whom we entrust the most important decisions of all.

In response to the reader from South Carolina:

Of course, since 60% of the population is educated at the grocery check-out level he describes now, I don’t think we will have to worry about getting 100% of our population to higher levels in our lifetimes.

As we evaluate the Blueprint, please don’t forget my teacher colleague Kelly McMahon who started teaching five-year old kindergarten in the Milwaukee Public Schools six-years ago. She knows nothing but life under NCLB. Writing in the spring issue of Rethinking Schools she describes how in those six years she has “seen a decrease in district initiatives that are developmentally appropriate, and an increase in the amount of testing and data collection for 5-year-olds.”

Sound familiar? Check out what her students had to do in her classroom last year:

• Milwaukee Public Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kindergarten Assessment (completed three times a year)

• On the Mark Reading Verification Assessment (completed three times a year)

• A monthly writing prompt focused on different strands of the Six Traits of Writing

• 28 assessments measuring key early reading and spelling skills

• Chapter pre- and post-tests for all nine math chapters completed

• Three additional assessments for each math chapter completed

• A monthly math prompt

• Four Classroom Assessments Based on Standards (CABS) per social studies chapter (20 total)

• Four CABS assessments per science chapter (20 total)

• Four CABS assessments per health chapter (20 total)

Her full article details even more destructive policies that have been forced upon us classroom teachers.

This is not teaching. This is not learning. This is data collection that destroys the craft of teaching and the joy of learning.

An education reform policy built on a Blueprint that continues these types of data-drenched obsessions will create more classrooms uninhabitable for young learners and compassionate teachers.

Don't forget Kelly and her young children.

Rhode Island has made progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), but we still have a long way to go before all of our students are ready for success in college, careers, and life. As Education Commissioner, I appreciate many aspects of Secretary Duncan’s blueprint for reform. His plan for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provides the right balance of sanctions and incentives to spur all states toward greatness.

First of all, I am pleased that Secretary Duncan’s blueprint provides states with greater flexibility in determining which schools are making progress and which need the most help. Under his plan, we will be able to use our accountability systems “to recognize progress and growth and reward success, rather than only identify failure.”

As many have pointed out, NCLB focuses on one measure of progress – percent proficient on state assessments – and it is very prescriptive regarding what steps schools and districts must take when schools fail to make “adequate yearly progress.” Under the new proposal, states will continue to use “absolute performance and proficiency” as one of the ways to hold schools accountable, but we will also be able to use measures such as “individual student growth and school progress over time.” This proposal makes a lot of sense. Under NCLB, too many schools were labeled as “failing” when they missed one of many performance targets – and too many others that were at relatively high proficiency levels escaped sanction even when their scores flattened or declined. Under the new ESEA, all schools must make real progress.

Some who have written about the blueprint for ESEA are concerned that it will focus all of our efforts on the persistently lowest-achieving schools (the lowest-performing 5 percent), allowing all other schools to languish in mediocrity. If that were so, it would be a tragedy. One of our top priorities in Rhode Island is to “accelerate all schools toward greatness.” We have set attainable but ambitious goals for all of our schools and districts, and we are providing the support they need to meet these goals.

I agree with Secretary Duncan, however, that it is urgent that we move aggressively to turn around our lowest-achieving schools. We cannot tolerate having schools that fail to meet the needs of the students and their communities, year after year. NCLB painted with too broad a brush. By sweepingly identifying far too many schools as failures, NCLB diluted reform efforts and made it difficult for states to bring help to or intervene effectively in the schools in greatest need. With its focus on the lowest-performing 5 percent, the new ESEA will ensure that we bring about dramatic changes that will affect outcomes and improve students’ lives.

What about the other 95 percent? Will we just forget about these schools? No, not at all. First of all, the new ESEA recognizes the highest-performing schools – and in a meaningful way. The blueprint calls for states, districts, and schools that succeed in reaching targets and closing achievement gaps to receive financial rewards and, more important, “to share their best practices and…to assist lower-performing schools and districts.”

The blueprint for ESEA, in fact, includes a whole section on “Fostering Innovation and Excellence,” primarily through incentive systems modeled on Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation programs. Both of these competitive-grant programs have inspired districts and states to tackle ambitious reform agendas in a way that has been unprecedented in recent memory. States that receive Race to the Top funds will have access to vital resources to move forward with their action agendas, and even the states that do not receive the funding will have a solid plan in place for school reform. These incentive programs, when incorporated into ESEA, will pay tremendous dividends as they improve education across the board, for all schools and districts, for many years.

A frequent criticism of NCLB has been that the remedies for failing schools are far too prescriptive at some stages – public-school choice, supplemental educational services – and too vague at other stages (corrective action, reconstitution). The proposed changes in ESEA rightly allow states a great deal of flexibility in the use of federal funds to improve school performance for the vast majority of schools. The blueprint notes that when schools are in danger of falling into the lowest 5 percent, “states and districts will implement research-based, locally determined strategies to help them improve.” All states will greatly benefit from this authority to determine what’s best for their schools and students and what works at the local level. The proposed ESEA does become more prescriptive, however, regarding the selection of school-reform models for the lowest-achieving schools. It’s hard to argue against that; these schools have failed for many years, and interventions in these schools must be dramatic and across the board. Secretary Duncan is right to provide specific guidance on these dramatic interventions. In these cases, time is running out and we have to get it right.

Finally, it’s heartening to me to see the strong emphasis the ESEA blueprint places on improving educator quality, including highly effective teachers and school leaders. I completely agree with the statement that opens the section on Great Teachers and Great Leaders: “Of all the work that occurs at every level of our education system, the interaction between teacher and student is the primary determinant of student success.” NCLB focused on “highly qualified teachers,” which for the most part was determined by degrees and other professional credentials. I welcome the new focus on highly effective teachers (and principals), which we must determine “based in significant part on student growth and…other measures, such as classroom observations of practice.”

Many of the ESEA principles regarding great teachers and leaders are already part of our strategic plan for transforming education in Rhode Island, including performance-based evaluation systems, individualized and targeted professional development, rigorous standards for educator-preparation programs, and expanded pathways into the teacher profession to attract more high-quality teachers and to increase the diversity of the profession. It is very encouraging the ESEA blueprint would include competitive grants for ambitious reforms “to better identify, recruit, prepare, develop, retain, reward, and advance effective teachers, principals, and school leadership teams in high-need schools.” Becoming a great teacher is a lifelong process, and I am glad that Secretary Duncan’s blueprint recognizes the entire spectrum of the profession.

The goal of the reauthorization of ESEA is that “every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a career.” Some have said that this goal is too vague or too difficult to measure or define. I disagree. I believe that everything we do as educators – standards, instruction, assessment, support, community engagement – ties directly to this goal. Are we preparing our students for college and careers? Are we adequately preparing our students for success in life? What better way is there to hold each of us accountable? What better way is there to measure our own success?

I will never forget the stomach ache I had -- to the point of nausea -- when I heard the late Gerald Bracey stand up in a crowd at an education meeting in the mid-90s and say something akin to the comments of your reader from South Carolina. Paraphrasing a question for the panel on setting and keeping high standards, Bracey said "Who will be the busboys at this hotel? How will the garbage reach the dump?"

I poked fun at Bracey back then, calling him and his compatriots the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" crowd (think Bobby McFerrin). It made me angry. It still does.

My Dad came to this country, off the boat. Like the millions here right now that came here looking to make their lives better, he took menial jobs, as did his entire family. Those menial jobs allowed him to pay for college, and then led to a better life. The same course is true for all of our immigrants today. The only thing stopping them from having a better life is a strong education, one that lasts through college into career life.

Those who are already citizens and perhaps were born here but are at various income levels and currently pack our groceries or cut our grass deserve the same opportunity to reach high. They should have the ability to be promoted -- with justification through achievement -- throughout the ranks of education and up through four years of college if they choose. But most of these folks can't choose college because we have killed their ambitions by killing their education. We stop them in their tracks because we fail them. When I go to the grocery store and see a sea of lower-income people taking care of groceries in my upper income neighborhood, I'm not gratified that someone can check me out. There are self check-out lines now that would make me perfectly happy if these noble workers were able to dig themselves out of the Giant.

There are also some people who mow grass and pack groceries that might be happy. That, too, is their choice. But it's only their choice if we've done everything we can do to create great learning opportunities for all of our citizens, and see to it they that are not failed by inadequate administration, teaching or lack of choices.

As for who will do these tasks in the future should we succeed in educating all of our kids? Maybe such jobs will be taken by our high school and college students, as was the case when I was growing up. I worked at Burger King, among other places, throughout my high school and college career. My friends were busboys, construction workers, garbage people. That didn't stop most of them from pursuing higher education. Maybe the blue collar and lower level white collar jobs will be constantly churning with new entrants into that job market, as they stop, gain valuable experience and move on. But career ready is a misnomer. If we truly want to make people career ready, give them access to 16 years of great education. Any other training they need in the future they can get on the job or as a condition of getting the job, on their own.

We must remember that there will always be people who want or have to work. If that should cease to be the case, innovations in technology may solve problems. But let's all understand that without a core education for all of our people, real success for all Americans will remain just a dream.

It’s great to have people writing in with their ideas and questions. I thank our editor for making this available to us, for e-mailing to let us know, and for encouraging us to comment on an important issue, one that I encounter frequently when speaking to people outside of education.

Many Americans fear that if we send too many kids to college, there will be no one to do the jobs currently performed by people who don’t have college degrees. The origin of this concern, while it seems economic on the surface, is actually personal or perhaps socio-cultural. In our deeply-rooted free-enterprise way of life, educational status, job status, social status, and self-image are all intensely intertwined. In America, you are what you do. We even have a not-so-subtle subtext we send to all kids from toddlers to teens when we ask them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Or, perhaps even worse, “What do you want to do for a living?” The enculturation begins early and is regular reinforced. That’s how you know it’s so important to us.

Personally, what I want kids to be when they grow up is healthy and happy. And this is possible regardless of one’s education level or job status. At the same time, I don’t see any reason why our kids shouldn’t be well-educated, too, so maybe I’ll just add that one to my list now as well. In any case, I see nothing to indicate that The American Way of Life will disintegrate or disappear if my UPS man has a B.A. from Yale.

What I hope does disintegrate and disappear is the tragic conflation of what we do with we who we are.

Since the problem begins early in life, we must intervene early in life to stop it. Instead of asking kids what they want to be when they grow up, ask them, “How do you want to live when you grow up?” This is the better question because it helps kids form a vision of a good life, and then work backward from that worthy goal grounded in fulfillment to the steps they’ll need to reach it. It also sends the message that a good job is not the end but perhaps merely one of many means to the life they are looking for.

Who knows? Some day we might even decouple college from career and ditch this disastrous notion of education as job training.

So take your pick: the best job or the best life? I’ll take both please, with a side of wealth and status to go!

But is that what I really want? Have I actually thought about it in terms other than the post-industrial pablum I’ve been spoon-fed all my life? When I pull up to the drive-thru window, do I even know what’s on the menu (or that there are far more healthier ways to eat)? Is there more to life than ordering up a “Happy Meal” and zooming off to my brilliant future, or have my parents and teachers brainwashed me with the now-common equation that College + Job = Happiness?

If I have been brainwashed, I’m in for a rude awakening. Perhaps not unlike the one I awakened to some years ago.

I was never an academic all-star by any means. But seven years after completing my B.A., I had my dream job as an executive, heading up product development at a publicly-traded software company. I had grown a company, sold a company, and been through an IPO—a month before my 30th birthday, the magical age by which all (immature) men measure their accomplishments. I had a new car, new clothes, a great title, a fat salary, and enough stock options to rightly think that one day I might be a millionaire.

Too bad I was miserable. Too bad that nothing—nothing at all—about my situation was fulfilling to me. This was the job I had been dreaming of and yet it was a nightmare because it didn’t afford me the life I wanted to live.

So I gave up my salary and my stock for the chance to scramble around on the floor for free chasing rugrats with the idea that I might one day learn how to teach kids to read. I was broke but I had never been happier. Working in education, though significantly harder and far less lucrative than tech, is for me the perfect match between soul and role.

Friends of mine who travel the world assure me that educating children does not a ruined nation make. And indeed when I have been fortunate to travel internationally myself, I have often been surprised by how well educated is the eel fisherman I meet on the Thames or the street musician I meet on a Paris sidewalk. I understand that in northern European countries, this situation is even better. Annual happiness indexes typically list places like Finland, Denmark, Sweden, or Norway way up high. I’d even bet that there’s a reasonable correlation between happiness and literacy. In these countries, there is far less stratification by wealth; far better pre-kindergarten support, especially for poor children; free or often heavily subsidized access to college—and plenty of baristas and bicycle messengers with solid educations who don’t seem the least bit miserable to me. Nor doese anyone seem miserable about them.

Making sure every kid in America has a good education simply assures us of a well-educated populace, something one of our Founding Fathers considered a cornerstone of a vital and enduring democracy. What we need to do is dump the vital and enduring culture of classism that tells every one of us—and I am by no means immune myself—that the path to fulfillment in life is the College + Job = Happiness equation.

The simple truth is that there are plenty of happy people without college degrees and plenty of miserable people with them. The best research we have on this issue (probably the stuff from Martin Seligman and the world of Positive Psychology) seems to suggest that happiness is a choice we can make independent of our life circumstances.

So if that’s true, what’s the harm in helping kids make the choice to be both happy and well-educated while keeping in mind that the two might not even be related? There’s certainly no research telling us that a college education is a detriment to one’s life. And there is ample evidence that the habits of mind and heart kids need to develop in order to attend and complete college will serve them well in all aspects of their lives and in anything they choose to do.

No social aspiration will ever capture every single person. But as individuals and as a society, we should aspire to the best for ourselves and our families, and in the 21st century, a post-high school education and degree is the single most important key to the kind of life we seek for ourselves and hope for our children.

In fact, of the four jobs cited by our emailer as examples of jobs that do not require education after high school, two—the grocery checker and the gas station attendant--are already on the path to extinction. Almost every gas station offers customers the option of charging their gas at the pump; business history tells us that it won’t be long before many gas stations become completely automated and don’t need anybody at all on-site. Grocery stores are also expanding the number of lines in which customers scan, bag and charge their own groceries. Basic economics suggests that this trend, too, will continue as groceries seek to offer lower prices and increase profit margins.

Just as important, the kinds of jobs the emailer cites are minimum wage jobs. They don’t pay enough to buy homes or support families or communities. Is that the future we want for the next generation? Is that the future we want for our communities?

I have heard this question before. When one drives to work, or around town doing daily chores, many, if not most of the workers that are encountered are in relatively occupations whic require little in the way of education and skill preparation. At the same time, national and state-level labor market information products point to fast growing jobs that require postsecondary education and training as a key trend that must be addressed as a part of the country’s workforce strategy. But fast growing jobs aren't the only ones out there. There are lots of jobs that will continue to exist, some require lots of education and training and many which are of the ilk discussed in the writer’s e-mail. Now and in the future, there will be a significant need for workers to fill these jobs throughout the labor market. The question is whether or not relatively low skill jobs (which are also low wage and vulnerable to economic events) should represent long term careers where individuals are relegated to working in these jobs for their entire adult life because they have no other viable options. These are the jobs that should be (and are) continuously filled by younger workers, both in and out-of-school – as they take their initial approaches to learning about the world of work. There are certainly opportunities in this arena where older workers looking for supplemental income or experiences, immigrants, and others who might just be pursuing their druthers provide worker resources as well. Again, though, these jobs should never be seen as something an individual is relegated to on a permanent basis because they lack educational, training, or assistance opportunities. Our national (and state) policies whould be geared to the necessary education, training, and related services aimed at remunerative and stable careers.

The reader asks a very good question. Let's begin the answer.

First, let's recall that only some 39% in the US attain an associate's degree or higher. If we achieve the goal of Lumina and others of getting this number up to 60%, which would be an amazing achievement, there would still be 40% for whom we'd need to have jobs of the sort the reader describes.

The sort-of-good news, according to the BLS, is that there will be such jobs in the economy. The bad news is that these jobs will be declining both in number and value. Of the 30 occupations with the largest employment declines projected over the next 10 years, the vast majority, 27, are ones that require only moderate or short term on-the-job training.

On the other hand, the fast growing jobs require an associate's degree. And 11 of the 15 fastest growing jobs in the high or very high annual wage quartiles require a credential, which might include a certificate.

So, shooting for college or career readiness is the right goal.

Having said that, I would also like to point out how steep the climb is from where we are today to much higher rates of credential attainment. I continue to scratch my head at the utter naiivete or political partisanship that causes some to say that we can create college/career readiness goals for 2020 and yet decry how "unrealistic" and ridiculous it is to expect mere grade level readiness by 2014.

Fooling ourselves or playing political games do not help put us further down the path we need to travel.

Eliza,

As I understand it, the reader in South Carolina is concerned about the following: Currently, most workers do not have a college degree. Those who do enjoy significant rewards in the labor market while those who don't are forced to accept low wages. Over the last four decades, this education wage gap has widened. Your reader is concerned that a successful effort to increase college preparation--and thus, attainment--could reverse this trend and result in convenience store clerks gaining more power in the labor market. It's not clear to me that this will actually happen, but for the sake of argument, let's grant the premise.

My response is: So what? Or to be more precise: That'd be great! Growing inequality and the struggle of workers in the bottom half of the income distribution to maintain a decent quality of life is one of the most vexing problems facing American society today. If increasing college and career readiness will help solve that problem then, full speed ahead! It doesn't surprise me that some people in relatively privileged economic positions want to hoard valuable education credentials and keep working people down. It does surprise me--although perhaps it shouldn't--when they admit it in public.

In response to an article I wrote this week on college- and career- ready standards, a reader from South Carolina wrote me to expresson concern over preparing everyone to graduate from public schools college and career ready. What follows is part of his email: Are his concerns legitimate? why or why not?

"Just as a question, if everyone is highly technically trained
or college educated who is going to check out my groceries, cut down the
dead tree in my back yard, tow my car when it breaks down, or take my
money when I buy gas at the convenience store? If you think the illegal
alien problem is bad now, just wait until all of us middle class
soon-to-be-elderly are told we have to pay highly skilled wages to the guy
who cuts our grass.

Not to mention what do you plan on doing with all those kids, like my
nephew, who would rather work on a road crew than go to college. Force
that kid into the local U or Techincal College, and all you will get is a
constantly hung-over student with an "F" average."

This week, I've heard murmured frustration in some quarters that the push for Common Core standards, conceived and sold by NGA and CCSSO as a state-driven exercise, has been increasingly federalized. Several state officials, and a few associated with organizations that spearheaded the effort, have mentioned to me disappointment that the administration has pushed so aggressively to require states to embrace the standards. Their ire is drawn by the proposal to potentially require adoption as a condition of aid in the ESEA blueprint (the particulars on this point are a little ambiguous, as there's some disagreement among the experts as to just what the current blueprint language would require).

Virginia Secretary of Education Gerard Robinson, for instance, has made it very clear that the state has no intention of adopting new standards. If this were to put the state's federal ed dollars at risk, the Obama administration would enter the reauthorization push with two seriously disgruntled Democratic senators. While there's mostly positive buzz around the standards and the enthusiastic early reception, these murmurs might be cause for the administration to reflect on how well its current approach complies with the oft-repeated declaration that these are "common" standards rather than "national" ones.

Yes—if Congress takes its cues from those the Administration’s blueprint suggests, accountability could be seriously undermined to the detriment of far too many children.

There is much that is good in the blueprint, including longstanding Commission priorities such as teacher and principal effectiveness measures primarily focused on student achievement, more aggressive interventions in chronically low-performing schools, and higher expectations for students. But these and other worthy reforms will be empty aspirations if the next ESEA fails to maintain the urgency to take immediate action to improve the academic performance of all kids—not just those who attend the lowest five or ten percent of schools. It’s worth remembering just how grim the statistics are—a school in the bottom twenty-five or even fifty percent will still have a significant percentage of students who can’t read or do math or even graduate from high school.

If the pressure to continuously improve performance fades, if most schools can avoid taking real action to remedy their shortcomings, and if options for students in struggling schools disappear, then we will return to a time when disadvantaged students were essentially invisible and low performance was excused or swept under the rug. While we hope that is not what the Administration intended, we must all work together to guard against this potential outcome. Simply put, strengthening efforts to help the lowest-performing schools must not result in lowered accountability for all other students.

Instead, the next ESEA must update current accountability provisions, take into account student growth, and give states and districts the flexibility to better target assistance and interventions to each school’s most compelling needs while driving improved performance for all students in all schools.

In its approach to failing schools, Obama’s Blueprint has all the sophistication of Drill, Baby Drill. I associate Obama with courage, vision, and nuance. I don’t even see an educational plan here, much less the other three.

If schools fail, it is because the social structures and systems that surround them are failing. These schools are also failing because the teachers themselves have been disenfranchised when it comes to the reform of their own schools. They take orders regarding curriculum, programming, school discipline, grading policies, pedagogy, professional development, parent engagement – and those orders change from year to year. Teachers are told to “reflect on their practice,” and then keep reflecting (always with the threat of punishment) if their reflections do not yet match the reflections of their administrators. In middle school they cannot teach novels. In high school, they are told content does not matter anymore, and the main purpose of the art classes is to teach kids literacy. In elementary schools, if teachers want to focus on strengthening the background knowledge of their students (the foundation of sophisticated – even simple – reading) they are told that students don’t need to know things anymore because in this world of information, they can always look it up. On all levels, they are forced to teach to rudimentary state tests, and they have seen their own evaluation of student progress and achievement eliminated in favor of the scores upon those tests. What is more, there is no professional context that allows teachers to engage in the school-wide work that desperately needs their expertise: no time, no resources, no professional respect. That context doesn’t exist because teachers work in systems that believe that all the work of improving schools and student achievement must be done right in the classroom, even if the school-wide climate is set by an uninspiring mishmash of fads and policies, essentially a neglected afterthought. Finally, these same teachers often work against the odds to remediate the deeply flawed policies of central systems, failed budgets, cronyism, or worse – the end result of which is often to concentrate the students with the highest needs in some schools, and then fail to support them, all the while also failing to create schools that are truly academically diverse.

And then, when schools fail, who is to blame? The teachers.

I am responding this week not only for myself but for the Education Equality Project (EEP), of which I am one of three co-chairpersons, the other two being Joel I. Klein, Chancellor, New York City schools and Janet Murguía, President and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. EEP was formed to lead the effort to eliminate the racial and ethnic achievement gap in public education and ensure that all students have access to a high-quality education.

President Obama's blueprint for ESEA reauthorization is the first step in our nation's commitment to regaining world leadership in the percentage of citizens with a college education. To create college and career ready students, our nation's education system must focus from the first day of pre-school to high school graduation on ensuring that every child has equal educational opportunities regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender or zip code.

Soon after the Obama administration released its blueprint, EEP responded with a statement which lauds the current efforts and sounds a call for making equality the priority for ESEA reauthorization. We praised the sense of urgency the President conveyed in calling for swift action by Congress. Almost 56 years after Brown v. Board of Education, our nation’s education system still fails to provide a strong, academic education to low-income, African American, Latino, and Native American students with an education that is not equal to that of their higher-income or white peers. They have waited long enough.

And we called on Congress to ensure that a reauthorized ESEA focuses on both rigorous and fair accountability and equity, including the continued examination of and mandatory public reporting of subgroup achievement levels, as well as focusing on measuring student growth. Without these provisions we cannot track the state of the achievement gap or of our efforts to close it. The full statement may be found at the EEP web site.

Beyond the views articulated in the statement, three ideas are important to keep in mind.

The first is that the combination of the landmark Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act (SAFRA), which we hope will soon become law as part of the health care reconciliation package, and the Obama administration's blueprint for reforming ESEA, the admministration has taken a major step toward initiating major reform of our education policy framework--not piece by piece, in isolation, but treating education as it should be treated: as a continuum or pipeline that children must enter when they begin school and not exit until they complete their post-secondary education and are fully prepared to begin their careers. Like education, our national education policy should be a fabric, not a collection of threads.

Second, we should remember that in an at least one very important aspect, the Obama-Duncan blueprint is continuing a commitment first laid out by No Child Left Behind. For all of its many flaws in design and implementation, when we discuss NCLB, I think it is important to acknowledge that it was perhaps the first national articulation of the notion that all American children are due, as their right, not just some education, not disparate and unequal educations, but that they are due the opportunity to learn rigorous, challenging academic content and the mental skills that will prepare them for further education and careers. This blueprint continues that commitment, and it needs to be kept at the very center of the debate.

Third, the release of the blueprint is not a conclusion but a beginning. This week’s previous posters have pointed to some important issues and questions relating to the administration’s blueprint, as have Mayor Bloomberg (also a signatory to the Education Equality Project) and Chancellor Klein in their opinion piece in last week’s TIME magazine. These and many other issues need to be debated and resolved. Which of course is exactly what will happen as ESEA reauthorization makes its way through the legislative process of sub-committee and full committee hearings and markups and floor action in both the House and Senate. That is when vaguenesses will be made specific, and when first principles will be strengthened or weakened. Through this week’s contributions to this blog we have all been present at the creation. I’m confident we’ll be here for the duration.

Two things in education have affected me deeply this year: Chester Finn’s article “The End of the Education Debate”, and the Obama blueprint.

In his article, Mr. Finn makes a convincing case that reform has been unsuccessful, and that it is time to move on:

“The education reform debate as we have known it for a generation is creaking to a halt. No new way of thinking has emerged to displace those that have preoccupied reformers for a quarter­-century—but the defining ideas of our current wave of reform (standards, testing, and choice), and the conceptual framework built around them, are clearly outliving their usefulness.”

In this regard, the Obama blueprint breaks no new ground, though it does plow the shovel into the same dirt with different techniques and different degrees of force.

This leaves me with two questions: How could we have worked so hard and done so much, yet achieved so little? And why does the Obama blueprint seem, to most of us here, at best a slight improvement and at worst a significant loss?

Perhaps the reason that the article and the blueprint strike a similar chord with me is that the two questions they raise have the same answer. Past policies have failed, and new policies will likely fare no better, because we have no coherent theory of education policy. It’s as if we pick programs out of a hat—a hat for accountability, a hat for curriculum, a hat for choice, a hat for whatever our current Secretary of Education did in his last job, a hat for whatever seems politically fashionable at the moment. And from each hat, we blindly make our selections.

Most hats seem to be chock full of structural policies because this is the type of policy we choose most often. Charter schools, curriculum standards, testing—each of these changes the structure of schooling. But neither works particularly well at affecting learning because, at best, structural policies can only create conditions that might encourage good things to happen. But “might” is not mighty, so structural reforms by themselves seem only to create empty structures.

Structural policies in education are extremely vulnerable to being undone by the very people whose behaviors they seek to structure.

Charter schools are no better than traditional public schools unless they have better people in them.

Standards don’t get met unless teachers understand their meaning and intent. Then teachers have to plan with those standards in mind, execute their plans effectively, use appropriate assessments appropriately, differentiate, and re-teach as needed. While standards relieve teachers of having to think much about “what” to teach, they don’t help teachers figure out “how” to teach.

Testing doesn’t seem to help much either, even as a component of accountability, because teachers teach to the test, schools narrow the curriculum, and states game the system. Accountability is still a vital concept, but in order for it to work it must be implemented by means more nuanced than structural reform alone can provide.

The truth is, culture trumps structure every time. Human beings are just so darned clever and persistent that if they’re not down for deal, various forms of sabotage are likely to occur, Campbell’s Law effects may emerge, morale may plunge, and productivity will follow.

In contrast to structural policies, cultural reform policies in education are few, but they are potentially far more powerful. Had NCLB’s “High Quality Teacher” provision been based on high quality teaching, as opposed to credentialing unrelated to quality, a legitimate transformation of human capital may have occurred. What if, for example, this provision had given districts until 2014 to make sure all teachers with at least four years of experience achieved National Board certification? This could have created a powerful and permanent shift in the culture of teaching and a dramatic improvement in teacher quality nationwide.

Cultural policies pack such a wallop because they’re aimed directly at the people who create and maintain the culture of education. Structural policies create conditions where culture might be more likely to change. But cultural reforms skip the wrapping paper altogether and simply deliver the gift.

Because cultural change is stronger and more enduring than structural change, cultural policy reforms hold more promise for significant, sustainable gains. Unfortunately, they are less viable politically because policies that seek to change people tend to organize those people in opposition. As such, great political courage is required, courage like we seem to have for saving healthcare and for saving large insurance companies and investment banks, but apparently not for saving children.

Then we have entitlement policies. Entitlement policies are intended as instruments of equity. But the formulaic funding they parcel out is, like structural reform, unable to do much on its own. Money is merely a proxy for resources. Schools and districts that haven’t secured helpful resources with Title I money in the past are unlikely to do so in the future, even with more money, unless other changes occur. The problem with entitlement policies isn’t just that we get what we pay for, but that when we spend foolishly, we also pay for what we get.

So Mr. Finn is right and Mr. Obama is wrong for the following reasons:

1. No reform policy inhabiting a single policy category can affect significant change. This is why most education policies have little or no positive effect.

2. We’ve spent the last quarter-century implementing single-category policies. This is why education maintains its traditional factory form, and why Mr. Finn is right when he contends that Ed Reform 1.0 is over but for the shouting.

3. Mr. Obama’s blueprint is packed with single-category policies that, while different in some cases from current single-category policies, repeat the essential conceptual "category errors" of the past and are therefore unlikely to produce better results in the future.

Structural policies are intuitively appealing but culture wiggles its way out of every environment they build. Cultural policies won’t work without new structures. And entitlement policies, with no new structural reforms or cultural reforms to invest in, simply maintain the status quo.

As Mr. Finn suggests, we need an entirely new kind of thinking in education reform. And I believe that thinking should be based on the creation of tripartite policies featuring complementary structural, cultural, and entitlement components. Such coordinated reforms could have extraordinary impact.

To see how powerful this policy approach could be, let’s use KIPP as a hypothetical example. Everyone seems to agree that KIPP represents a successful approach to reform. KIPP benefits from charter school legislation, an important structural policy. But KIPP schools have a special culture, too—a powerful culture of achievement that takes full advantage of the additional freedom charter school structure provides. But structure and culture aren’t the whole story.

KIPP also has an extraordinary base of additional funding anchored by the immense generosity of the Fisher family. While not an entitlement per se, this significant store of cash gives KIPP the opportunity, to engage in thoughtful long-range planning, to act strategically as opposed to tactically, and to sustain a unique corporate infrastructure that includes things like a fantastic recruiting program, top notch financial and operational controls, and excellent strategic communications. Best of all, KIPP can afford to experiment—and also afford to fail—with bold new ideas that might improve it’s already stellar performance. Extra money doesn’t make the difference at KIPP but it is a difference, and one that surely accrues to the benefit of its students.

There’s no reason the Obama blueprint couldn’t include a complementary tripartite policy modeled on KIPP’s success. In fact, I’ll bet that “the KIPP policy” would not only be successful, but enormously popular as well. Perhaps best of all, it could be offered to both existing charter and traditional public schools willing to switch to the charter model. Clearly, there would be work to do at the state level, but with a powerful, proven reform dangling in front of them, hungry states might take the bait even faster than they bit into RTTT.

And “the KIPP policy” would be just the beginning. Why not base virtually all reforms on “The Theory of Tripartite Policy Complementarity in Education”? (Yes, I know that’s a mouthful. I’ll send it back to the folks in marketing next week for a re-write.)

Here’s another neat thing about this concept: it works at every level of the system.

I use it all the time at the school level. For example, almost all of my middle and high school clients have the same problem: large numbers of students whose literacy skills who are so far below grade level they can’t function in their content area subjects because they can’t read the textbooks, do the research, or write the papers.

The solution is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. STRUCTURAL REFORM: Change the school’s schedule to create two Language Arts periods—one for a skills-based approach to writing, the other for a skills-based approach to reading.

2. CULTURAL REFORM: Train Language Arts teachers in Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop. Train content area teachers to reinforce new reading and writing skills through literacy across the curriculum activities.

3. ENTITLEMENT REFORM: Allot per-teacher funding for training based on a formula that accounts for the fact that Language Arts teachers will need more hours of training (though they will represent a small group to train), and the fact that there are many more content area teachers (who will, thankfully, need far less training).

Virtually all problems in all schools can be solved in this way. Problems at the district and state levels respond effectively to tripartite policy complementarity as well. And what about turnarounds? The tripartite approach could be used extensively not only to improve single schools but also to strengthen school networks like MassInsight’s Partnership Zones.

Perhaps best of all, when designing new policies at any level of the system, the theory can be applied in a predictive manner to determine how effective a given approach will be. Over time, statistical models could be created, and software simulations designed, that would allow policy makers to preview expected results of reforms before implementing them. What a wonderful savings of time, money, back-biting, bickering, and ideological rock-throwing it would be if one could simply adjust policies on a laptop before unleashing them on an unsuspecting system.

In regard to the current Obama blueprint, application of the theory—augmented by data from recent history—predicts the following:

• Most of the policies will have no measurable effect. (Too many traditional single-category efforts here.)

• Two or three policies may have partial or slight positive effects. (I’m thinking of RTTT and i3 here where perhaps two or three truly useful ideas may emerge out of the dozens of projects attempted and the many that will fail outright or never even get off the ground.)

• The cornerstone “5-90-5” approach to revising NCLB accountability will have little effect on top schools, a small positive effect on bottom schools, and a significant negative effect on the vast majority of schools in the middle.

• “College- and Career Readiness” standards will be more thoughtfully designed and more carefully crafted, but they will be unable to guarantee that students who meet them are prepared for college and the world of work.

Thankfully, this round of ed reform construction has yet to begin. Therefore, the blueprint can be changed. Changes made through application of the theory will likely have greater positive impact.

Improving the blueprint will require courage more than anything else. But theoretically, coming up with new and better ideas for education is as easy as 1-2-3.

Since its passage in 1965, The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) remains the premiere federal legislation for closing the achievement gap between affluent and low-income children of color. Each subsequent modification promises changes that embrace the fierce urgency of now to end disparities and fulfill the hopes of educational excellence for all.

The release of the Administration's Blueprint for Reform of ESEA keeps hope alive. As expected, the President’s proposal includes the best of his predecessor's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, offers alternatives to areas needing improvement, excludes strategies that received limited implementation, and introduces substantial changes in the areas aligned with Race to the Top. I look forward to greater clarity about how each state will achieve a focused, effective and achievable accountability system, and I hope that unfunded mandates will be funded or removed.

The proposal to rely less on formula grants and more on competitive grants is one of the most controversial and interesting changes. One critic asked if this proposal is a retreat from the notion of quality education as a civil right and another proclaimed that a child's civil rights should not be part of a competition. Creating equality has not been achieved through formula grants, and continuing the same old funding formula is not likely to achieve the President's goal of all students graduating high school ready for college or career by 2020. We must achieve this goal by any means necessary. Only the insane believe they can solve new problems with old strategies. Incentives and rewards must go to states that are willing to making sweeping reforms.

Separately, I am not happy with the symbolism of pulling back from choice, even though the NCLB mandate here has been pretty useless, with only about 1 percent of students in failing schools able to transfer to a higher performing school. In dropping the choice requirement, I wish the Administration had offered something else in its place to demonstrate that they actually want more, not less, choice for low-income families. For example, they could require state accountability plans to include a robust program for new school creation and greater parental choice, at least in low-performing districts. The poor deserve the right to exit schools that fail to educate their children.

Now that health care reform has passed, and education is front and center, I hope ESEA will be reauthorized with bipartisan support, but if this dream is impossible, I hope the President will once again use as much of his political capital as necessary to do the right thing.

For the most part, the Obama administration's ESEA reauthorization blueprint takes three steps in the right direction. I am not surprised that Sandy Kress is still wedded to the NCLB framework, but other former Bush administration appointees have joined those of us who have long recognized problems with NCLB's Rube Goldberg mechanism, and we should all admit that NCLB is broken. The central flaws of NCLB were its assumptions that all problems in education were the same, could be measured using the same yardstick, and needed the same response. In reality, we have three different challenges that we can hold schools responsible for meeting: the crisis facing individual schools through mismanagement or other unique circumstances, unequal educational opportunities, and the need to make sure our children and grandchildren are at least a little smarter and wiser than we are. To its credit, the Obama administration has separated those challenges in the blueprint. To address schools in crisis, it asks states to identify and intervene in a limited number of schools. To address inequality, it is promising to ramp up enforcement of civil-rights laws outside the context of ESEA. To address the generational challenge, it is encouraging the development of common standards.

The blueprint is general about how it accomplishes these ends, with one exception: the specificity of four (and only four) options for states to intervene in schools in crisis. As Diane Ravitch pointed out Tuesday, there is scant research to support the prescriptive approach in the blueprint and plenty of failures (including Secretary Duncan's attempts when running the Chicago school system), failures that should make the federal government more humble about its capacity to prescribe specific interventions. I have no miracle cure to offer schools in deep crisis, but neither does the federal government. A wiser approach would be to require intervention for such schools, fund a range of approaches, and then collect information for analysis. A new ESEA should create such a structure so that five years from today, we're not saying the same things we are today about "we must do something" without having a clue as to what that something might be. Most people would agree that such research is a legitimate activity for the federal government.

Finally, along with Race to the Top, the reauthorization blueprint risks giving a green light for a broad attack on teachers at the state and local level. In the abstract, a shift from discussing "qualified teachers" to "effective teachers" is interesting, and it's hard to argue with the general outline in the blueprint requiring Statewide definitions of "effective teacher," "effective principal," "highly effective teacher," and "highly effective principal," developed in collaboration with teachers, principals, and other stakeholders, that are based in significant part on student growth and also include other measures, such as classroom observations of practice. Unfortunately, what I've seen in Florida has been a failure of state policyholders to pay attention to the word "collaboration." In preparing its Race to the Top application in the fall, the state tried to pressure local systems and teachers unions to accept a top-down, rigid approach to teacher evaluation, and now the state legislature is fast-tracking a bill that would eliminate continuing contracts for experienced and effective teachers (along with their due-process protections), make teacher license renewals dependent on test scores, and mandate all of this for all teachers, regardless of what they teach and whether there is even a remote possibility of technically adequate measures of student achievement. A bit of disclosure is in order here: I am the head of my university's faculty union chapter, and as such I am a member of both the NEA and the AFT. Yet we also have merit pay as part of our union contract for faculty, and I've written a little about the relationship between using student outcome data and other sources for teacher evaluation. I am not opposed in the abstract either to performance pay or to incorporating student outcome data into teacher evaluation. But depending on how the blueprint is translated into statutory language and regulations, what I fear will happen in many states is what's starting to happen in Florida: a goat rodeo of teacher evaluation policy, a replacement of allegedly stodgy evaluation systems with fly-by-prayer systems. The Obama administration has responded well to the central problem of NCLB but needs to acknowledge that we don't know how to "turn around" schools in crisis, and an ESEA reauthorization should not encourage overreaching teacher evaluation policies that will become a poison pill for serious discussions.

Little to add to Sandy's excellent kickoff. As I wrote last week, "The best part of NCLB is the part that people hate the most–a baseline school accountability system that refused to accept chronic failure. Sure there are problems that should have been fixed, but it was a bipartisan attempt to promise every American family that they would have access to at least one good public school. The ESEA Blueprint released by the Department today gives up on that promise. It’s largely a return to federalism where many states will ignore the failure to educate low income students. There will be money for districts to try homegrown fixes to the worst 5% but the rest largely get a free pass."

In Time this week, Bloomberg and Klein point to the NYC example of strong accountability, "We've phased out more than 90 schools during the past seven years; these decisions haven't been politically popular, but the schools that replaced them have dramatically higher graduation rates than their predecessors."

I also agree with a statement from Rep Kline's office, “It’s disappointing to see [tutoring] and school choice removed from the parental toolbox, particularly because it appears the focus is shifting to the needs of schools rather than the needs of students.”

There's a lot good to be said about the Blueprint, but it would be a shame to give up on the good school promise.

The Obama Administration's "Blueprint for Reform" continues to rely far too heavily on standardized tests to control schools and define learning. As a result, it provides far too little reform of the discredited No Child Left Behind law (NCLB). Too much of this plan merely rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Congress must largely reject this Blueprint and craft a law that thoroughly overhauls NCLB and puts the federal government on track to provide substantial assistance to schools while supporting genuine accountability that helps schools improve. The Forum on Educational Accountability has developed such a blueprint in the areas of assessment, accountability, school improvement and opportunity to learn.

The Administration proposes to improve tests, but provides no meaningful detail on how it will do so. They are perhaps waiting in part to release their guidelines for use of the Secretary Duncan’s $350 million Race to the Top (RTTT) assessment pot, due in 2-3 weeks. Still, the Blueprint provides no evidence that it will support multiple measures (multiple sources of different types of evidence of student learning) instead of slightly revised standardized tests. It assumes "growth" can be reduced to scores on tests and pretends that two ways of looking at one test - growth and status - are actually two different things.

It continues to insist that states test all students in grades 3-8, even though such extensive testing is not necessary for accountability or school improvement. Nations doing well on international comparisons only test about once each in elementary, middle and high school. The requirement to have so many tests only ensures each one is cheap and low quality. It will make the situation worse by encouraging states to add standardized tests in more subjects. While the document uses the word "assessment," it provides no evidence that the Department means anything more than standardized tests.

The Administration also would intensify some of NCLB's worst characteristics by requiring states and districts to judge teachers in significant part on student test scores, as required in RTTT. Combined with these other misuses and overuses of tests, the Administration's proposals will continue the push to reduce the nation's schools to test prep programs.

The RTTT requirements for overhauling low scoring schools have failed in Chicago, but the Administration now wants to make them part of ESEA. This should remind us how the Bush Administration used Texas to sell NCLB. Only later did we find how much of the “data” was fraudulent. This time, Congress has the information. The Administration’s specific proposals for low-scoring schools would greatly damage urban public schools systems, not improve them, and similarly hurt low-income rural and suburban schools. Its proposals will continue to promote the reduction of teaching and learning to test preparation in our nation’s schools that serve our most vulnerable children.

ESEA must establish a different approach to helping schools in dire trouble, starting with ensuring they have adequate resources, and then helping them implement improvement efforts tailored to their specific needs, with actual evidence they have a chance of working. Further, such schools must be identified by more than test scores leavened only slightly by other factors.

There are some positive steps in the Blueprint, such as proposing support for school quality reviews and requiring states to develop plans to improve equity across their schools. But even in these cases, the steps are too limited. For example, it is unclear how the Administration sees the use of school quality reviews. They should be part of a comprehensive replacement for test-based accountability that the federal government should help the states develop. The Blueprint says it supports professional collaboration, but its specific language fails to make central that approach to strengthening the education workforce.

Perhaps most promising is that the Blueprint appears to eliminate adequate yearly progress and sanctions for all but the lowest-performing schools. This is good news, but undermined by insisting on failed approaches for low-scoring schools and by the overuse and misuse of tests. The Administration’s proposal to require all students to be on track to be “career and college ready” by 2020 is as unattainable as NCLB’s requirement that all students attain “proficiency” by 2014. If this reasonable goal is attached to an impossible timeline, it will simply become the new basis for continuing to castigate schools and teachers for not accomplishing what society has failed to provide the resources to accomplish.

Finally, in many places it is difficult to know what the Administration intends or how it would spell out the often too-vague language of the Blueprint. This leaves it up to Congress to fill in the details. But Congress must not merely insert positive details, it must reject this Blueprint and construct its own.

I’m glad Mr. Kress went first because his comments go to the very foundation of reform (or what used to be reform). His argument is simple and correct. President Obama’s blueprint weakens accountability. As a structural pillar of reform, accountability on its own cannot change the form of schooling, but it is a necessary component for sustained progress. NCLB established the concept of accountability for all. You can tighten it where it’s loose, loosen it where it’s tight, or just buy it a whole new set of clothes. But the core concept of accountability for all must be preserved—even if we change completely how it works.

Perhaps somewhat at odds with Mr. Kress’s position, and my endorsement of it, is Mr. Rothstein. However, I can’t help but be impressed with, and sincerely moved by, his command of the issues, his unrelenting focus on the welfare of children, and his incredibly insightful analysis. The depth and precision of his thinking on the blueprint is impressive. His post is truly worth a read whether one entirely agrees with him or not. If we could somehow fashion education reform out of the leadership of Mr. Kress and Mr. Rothstein—though I suspect they might often disagree with each other—we wouldn’t be talking about mere blueprints of reform, we’d be talking about skyscrapers.

However, I think there is an entirely different set of issues around the President’s blueprint that I hope we will address this week. Everyone here can easily weigh in “for” or “against” the blueprint and “for” or “against” any of its parts. But this analysis is unlikely to provide us with solutions to the problems we face.

President Obama’s blueprint seems to me the most ambitious federal education plan in history. It has many aspects: some new, others old; some significant, others trivial. But after reading the document, what seems most significant to me is that it lacks coherence because it is not based on a well-defined vision of education reform.

In order to reform education, we must have a description of the system in its current form and a description of the new form we want to it take. We probably have the first but we surely don’t have the second.

To be successful, education reforms must focus on RE-forming education. That means creating a form in the future that differs dramatically from the form we have today. For example, I’m composing this post at my dining room table. If the government helps me add four feet to one end, so I can sit more folks for Easter Sunday dinner, my table will be reformed. But if my government says, “Buy a bunch of cheap, skinny chairs and just watch where you put the lefties,” I may be able to squeeze in more people, but my table will not have been altered in the least. And we all know what’s going to happen next. As soon as my relatives leave, and I go back to the chairs I feel most comfortable with, my table will no longer support additional diners.

The Obama blueprint is more about adding chairs than changing tables.

Evaluating schools on “college- and career-readiness” instead of Adequate Yearly Progress might make for measurements people can relate to more intuitively. Getting every kid ready for college or a job is a wonderful goal—one that we have no reliable way to define, no idea how to achieve, and little experience implementing, except in the small number of communities that offer Early College High School programs. So, will changing our metric from AYP to C&CR change the form of education? Not likely. It doesn’t touch the table, it just tries to buy more chairs.

Will national curriculum standards change education’s form? Probably not. Even if, at some distant point in the future, we nationalize both curriculum and testing, will the form of school be any different than it is now? No. Standards don’t change the table, they just put different food on it. And testing just tells you who’s eating it and how much they weigh. It can’t make kids eat their vegetables any better than their parents can. Standards and testing may be good things for certain kinds of educational change. But the change they may create will never change the form of education.

How about charter schools? This does change the form of education—sort of. If a charter school uses its freedom to create a new form of schooling, then schooling—at least at one school—has been reformed. But few charters do this. KIPP is the obvious outlier here. I suspect that one of the reasons they are successful is because they have a clear vision of the form of education they offer.

Charter school legislation could enable the creation of many new and better tables. However, the majority of charter schools are no different than their traditional public school counterparts. In theory, the charter concept has great transformational potential. In practice, that potential remains, and is likely to remain, almost totally untapped.

How about school turnarounds? This is a huge part of the administration’s agenda. Will turnarounds change the form of schooling? It depends on who does the turning and how fast they go around. A turnaround is like taking my table apart and putting the pieces back together again—and maybe throwing in a few new pieces and providing a skilled craftsman to do the work. I won’t know what I’ve got until the work is done, which could take years, and even then it isn’t clear that my dinner’s gonna taste any different. School turnarounds are exciting and, frankly, there’s probably no way to avoid them in many tragic situations. Ultimately, turnarounds may be the only way to truly change the form of schooling in our country. But Secretary Duncan’s proposed turnaround policy, because it lacks a vision of the form a turnaround school would take, is more of a regulatory action than a reform action.

In most areas of our government, we have strong visions of how we want things to be. We don’t always realize them, but we know where we are relative to a clearly-defined form which represents the desired end point, and serves as the unifying principle for the creation and execution of all reform actions. This end result is what guides us in our research, in our policy making, and ultimately in our legislating.

Our government knows very well how to reform things. The military has reformed itself many times. Homeland Security was created out of a massive reformation of government agencies. And we can argue all day over healthcare, but the vision of getting more people insured and lowering costs is crystal clear. If the President’s plan passes, the form of our healthcare system will change dramatically in the years to come.

But we have no vision of a new form for public education in America. Therefore, no reform plan can be evaluated with any sense of how it may or may not help us get to where we want to go.

President Obama’s blueprint contains a few things I support, a few I don’t, and a few that baffle me completely. But I see no reliable way of evaluating the blueprint as an education reform plan because the plan does not describe a new form of education.

New forms of education are sprinkled sparsely throughout our country but they do exist. KIPP would probably count as a new form. Nancie Atwell’s Center for Teaching and Learning is certainly a new form. Core Knowledge schools, based on E. D. Hirsch's Theory of Cultural Literacy, might qualify as a new form of school. And if, as I suggested last week, we took our very successful Early College High School programs and simply made them part of high school, that would certainly be a new and very exciting form schooling.

If we took any of these forms, or better yet, devised a more universally-applicable form of schooling that synthesized their best qualities, we could tell whether or not the Obama bluepring was moving us in the right direction. As things stand now, we can’t.

Before we can reform education, we need a vision of education’s new form. President Obama’s blueprint shows little evidence that such a vision exists at the federal level. Therefore, no meaningful evaluation of his plan is possible.

In case you missed it, the Education Sector recently posted a video of senior policy analyst Rob Manwaring disscussing the blueprint. Manwaring airs his concerns about developing a transition policy among other things. See here for the video.

When the Obama administration released its proposal for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind on Saturday, I had two immediate, conflicting reactions. The first was that the administration deserves kudos for sketching a vastly more modest conception of Uncle Sam's role and for dramatically scaling back NCLB's attempts to fix K-12 schooling from Washington.

The second reaction was puzzlement at what seems a schizophrenic vision of the federal role. Despite Duncan's declarations that he wants to be "tight" about ends but "loose" about means, Race to the Top has struck me as pretty prescriptive about means. And I'm not sure how a reauthorization less aggressive about singling out troubled-but-not-awful schools and dictating school improvement strategies squares with the Office of Civil Rights' (OCR) interest in investigating schools based on the racial representativeness of Advanced Placement enrollments and issuing detailed guidance on feeder patterns, early enrollments, and who knows what else. That seems real prescriptive to me.

So, what to do? Because I've sometimes been hard on the administration, I'm inclined to focus on the good. So, let's go there.

The proposal does away with much of the panoply that skeptics of bureaucratic overreach have long flagged. The administration proposal would do away with the "cascade of sanctions," including federal mandates governing supplemental educational services and public school choice; eliminate "Adequate Yearly Progress;" end the requirement that 100 percent of students be "proficient" by 2014; and halt the ability of lousy performance by a particular subgroup to trap a reasonably performing school in the gears of the "needs improvement" machinery. I understand why my friend Sandy Kress sees this as a retreat, but it strikes me as a more sensible and realistic vision of the federal role.

The Administration’s education policy feints in several positive directions. It hopes to inspire more young people to go to college, but recognizes that college is becoming prohibitively expensive for low- and middle-income families. So the budget reconciliation bill to be taken up shortly (yes, the same bill that will complete health care reform) will take back the college loan program from inefficient private lenders. The $67 billion in additional college loans that will result - from eliminating bankers’ fees for issuing government-insured loans - will enable about 8 million students to attend college who might otherwise not be able to do so. It would be foolish to try to re-organize elementary and secondary education to make students “college-ready” if college itself becomes less affordable.

The stimulus bill of February 2009 filled holes in state education budgets, avoiding the need for states to layoff perhaps a third of a million teachers and other school employees.

Yet the college loan and stimulus measures, while steps in the right direction, are inadequate. College costs are far outpacing the added financial help provided by a more efficient college loan program. California and Georgia, for example, recently announced tuition increases of over 30%. And one-time stimulus money cannot prevent growing layoffs of teachers and other school employees, resulting in increased class sizes and less ability for states to provide other programs that the Administration desires – such as more access to advanced placement classes for disadvantaged students and a broader curriculum that goes beyond math and reading. The economic crisis of public education will only get worse – many states fund public education in part by property taxes, and with real estate values low, layoffs of educators will intensify as reduced tax collections work their way through state and local budgets. Many school districts anticipate that budgets may not recover until Fiscal Year 2013, or perhaps later.

The Administration’s Blueprint for re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) also reflects some positive goals. Recognizing that the existing ESEA (No Child Left Behind, or NCLB) has narrowed the curriculum, the Administration proposes funding some states to broaden their curricula to include elements of “a well-rounded education [to give students the capacity] to contribute as citizens in our democracy and to thrive in a global economy – from literacy to mathematics, science, and technology to history, civics, foreign languages, the arts, financial literacy, and other subjects.”

The Blueprint also recognizes that student success cannot depend on the regular school day alone, and so proposes to fund some states that improve “early learning outcomes,” that provide before-, after-school and summer programs, that provide “comprehensive supports to students and families through full-service community school models,” and that develop “Promise Neighborhoods” projects that implement “a continuum of effective community services, strong family supports, and comprehensive education reforms to improve the educational and life outcomes for children and youths in high-need communities, from birth through college and into careers.”

Yet these positive steps seem somewhat inconsistent with other aspects of the Blueprint and associated budget recommendations. Perhaps most troubling are the Blueprint’s extensive proposals to use ESEA funds for competitive grants to fund some states’ implementation of the policies described above. These might not be problematic if the competitive grants were being funded in normal economic times, with dollars supplementary to regular formula funding (where states get compensatory education - “Title I” - funds on a per child basis). But in the present period, with extensive layoffs of teachers and other school employees looming, it makes no sense to cut (in real, inflation adjusted terms) formula-driven funds in order to reward states that innovate in ways that suit the Administration’s policy preferences. A full employment program for grant-writers is no substitute for stable employment for educators. And what are states that don’t win the competitive grants, and thus have no way to avoid the layoffs, to do?

The practical reality is that in any economic climate, but especially the present one, no Congressman is going to allow schools in his or her district to layoff teachers so that other districts can get competitive funding. The result will be money spread around a little more evenly, but in a more haphazard way than Title I formula funds. A lot of money will be wasted on grant-writing and evaluation when it could have been spent on real educational services. And with political pressure as well as (if not more than) proposal quality determining the awards, little policy innovation will be accomplished.

In some disturbing ways, the Blueprint continues core NCLB policies that the competitive grants purport to correct. The most important is the accountability system. NCLB did the most harm by placing such high stakes on annual tests of math and reading that it created incentives for schools to narrow the curriculum and to substitute gaming for education. The narrowing was both inter-subject and intra-subject. Inter-subject narrowing consisted of reducing time and attention paid to the arts, science, history, physical education and other non-tested subjects. Intra-subject narrowing consisted of overemphasizing the basic skills most likely to be tested, and ignoring more difficult-to-test aspects of the math and reading curriculum, such as mathematical reasoning, critical thinking, and appreciation of good literature. Both types of narrowing disproportionately occurred in schools serving disadvantaged children, for these were the schools most in danger of suffering sanctions for low test scores.

NCLB also created incentives for other gaming. The most notorious was the targeting of students whose basic skills performance fell just short of “proficient.” Schools could increase their ratings, and escape sanctions, by improving the scores of a small number of students just below this criterion, and ignoring both students who were far behind (and had no chance of passing the proficiency point) and those who were already proficient.

The Blueprint continues this system, although with a twist. Only the bottom 5 percent of schools (called “Challenge” schools) will suffer severe sanctions (such as firing or replacing the staff) as a result of low test scores. Although all schools will be required to continue to administer annual math and reading tests alone, the Administration suggests that the absence of sanctions for the top 95 percent of schools will give states the flexibility to design new accountability systems that may even include requiring schools to broaden their curricula.

The next-lowest 5 percent of schools will be placed on “Warning” status; these schools, too, will have all the perverse incentives of the Challenge schools. Still, though, this presumably leaves 90 percent of schools with the flexibility to broaden their curricula and avoid excessive test-prep activities and gaming.

But not really. What Blueprint enthusiasts have neglected to recognize is that the tests of math and reading have always been highly unreliable. If we consider, say, the bottom 20 percent of schools, it is only a matter of chance whether a school will test low enough in any year to be categorized as Challenged. Schools that are Challenged in one year have a high probability of being in a safer category the next, and vice-versa.

The result of all this is that schools serving a large proportion of minority students will behave under the Blueprint very similarly to how they behaved under NCLB. If the Administration succeeds in raising the proficiency cut points (now called “college and career ready” standards), even more students will be ignored because they are too far below the passing point to matter.

Schools with largely middle class populations will effectively be exempt. The political consequences of this could be dangerous: federal officials will no longer be besieged by middle class parents upset that their schools have turned into test-prep factories; only poor and minority communities will suffer the punitive hammer of federal policy.

The Blueprint’s accountability provisions are also curiously contradictory. The Administration proposes competitive grants to establish Promise Neighborhoods that coordinate a wide range of social, health, and community services with schools, and will reward states with funds to establish programs that nurture children from birth and serve disadvantaged children’s before, after-school, and summer needs. A reasonable inference is that the Administration believes (correctly) that such programs contribute to student achievement. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has stated: “It takes more than a school to educate a student. It takes a city that can provide support from the parks department, health services, law enforcement, social services, after-school programs, nonprofits, businesses, and churches.”

If this is the case, however, whether a school is “Challenged” or on “Warning” status depends not only on the quality of its instruction, but on whether its students come to school ready to learn, with the benefits of Promise-Neighborhoods-type services. Imagine two schools of equal quality. Test scores in the first may be higher because its students come to school after enrollment in high quality early childhood programs and from the cooperative support of the parks department, health services, law enforcement, social services, after-school programs, nonprofits, businesses, and churches. Test scores in the second may be lower solely because of the absence of these supports. The Blueprint proposes to transform the second school by replacing the principal and teachers, turning the school over to private management or other draconian measures. It would be more logical to leave the instructional staff intact (after all, an instructional staff of identical quality is able to get satisfactory results in the first school) and instead remedy the situation by providing the early childhood, after school, health and other services that produce higher achievement.

If the Blueprint is politically tone-deaf with regards to the feasibility of shifting formula funds to competitive grants in a deep economic recession, it is sociologically tone-deaf with regards to the goal of raising achievement goals in this period. Presently, a quarter of black young and middle-aged adults, of an age to have children in school, are either unemployed, or so discouraged about looking for work that they have dropped out of the labor force. During the course of the year, approximately 40 percent of black adults will be unemployed at one time or another. Schoolchildren from families in such circumstances will change schools more often because of housing instability, will more frequently come to school hungry, in poor health, and with behavioral problems arising from family stress. It would be a remarkable accomplishment for the achievement of disadvantaged children to remain stable for the duration of the economic crisis. Expectations of near-term improvement are breathtakingly removed from reality.

The Blueprint refers repeatedly to the desirability of (and presumably, in Challenge schools, the requirement for) measurement of “growth” in math and reading scores. Not only are principals and teachers to be evaluated, and teacher compensation systems to be redesigned to account for the “growth” of students, but even teacher training institutions are to be judged by their contribution to such “growth.” Sanctions for the lowest-performing schools, and also the award of competitive grants, depend on such measurement. We can assume that, to measure growth, the Blueprint does not envision requiring schools now to test math and reading twice yearly, once in September and again in June. But if not, it is hard to imagine how states are going to respond to this demand for growth measurement. NCLB insisted that annual tests must be given early enough in the year so that they could be scored in time to design interventions for the next school year. The Blueprint will need a similar requirement if Challenge schools are going to be “turned around” the following year. Yet if tests are given, say, in March, which teachers are to get credit for students’ gains, or lack of them – the teacher who had the students from September to March, or the teacher who had the students from the previous March to the previous June? And how can such “growth” models account for learning, or lack of it, that takes place during the summer? One recent analysis calculated that over half of the schools in the lowest quintile of performance are mistakenly assigned to this low-performance category solely because of differences in children’s summer learning - or lack of it. Perhaps in the future we will develop a way around these problems, but we have not found one to date, and it seems precipitous for the Administration – especially one that claims to be committed to research and evidence-based policy - to load so many incentives onto a statistical technology for which there is no present prospect.

Other Blueprint proposals also seem to have been poorly (or too hurriedly) thought-through. One that has received relatively little attention is a requirement for intra-district funding equalization: “Over time, districts will be required to ensure that their high-poverty schools receive state and local funding levels (for personnel and relevant nonpersonnel expenditures) comparable to those received by their low-poverty schools.” Surely the Administration must be aware that there is now a 40-year tangle of litigation in a majority of states that attempts to define precisely what finance equalization means. Does “comparable” mean that high-poverty schools (however they are defined) should receive the same per-pupil resources as low-poverty schools, or does comparability require an adjustment for the greater needs of students in high-poverty schools? If the latter, how much of an adjustment?

Further, the most important cause of intra-district funding inequality is the tendency in some places for teachers serving low-income children to have less seniority, on average, than teachers serving middle-class children. As a result, total salaries paid to teachers in high-poverty schools may be less than the total paid to the same number of teachers in low-poverty schools. A requirement for equalization is, in effect, a requirement that more senior, higher-salaried teachers be re-assigned from low-poverty to high-poverty schools. The Blueprint calls for re-assigning the most effective teachers to high-poverty schools where “they are needed the most.” A fiscal requirement that more senior teachers be re-assigned to high-poverty schools seriously limits the ability of districts to make assignments based on other criteria of effectiveness. Many influential policy advocates have argued that seniority has little to do with effectiveness, and have promoted programs that recruit young college graduates for brief stints as teachers – Teach for America being the best known of these. The Blueprint endorses such programs, saying that priority for winning competitive grants “may be given to programs that work to recruit and prepare high-performing college graduates or non-traditional candidates, such as military veterans or midcareer professionals” for high-needs schools and students. Such teacher recruits will necessarily start at the bottom of the salary schedule. It is hard to imagine how such a priority can be fulfilled at the same time that districts must transfer senior teachers to ensure that funding levels in high-poverty and low-poverty schools are comparable.

The Blueprint’s overall theme is that by 2020 all students should graduate from high school “College and Career Ready.” Administration officials have explained that this entails the ability to gain admission to an academic college program without having to take remedial courses. (The addition of “Career” to “College Ready” is meaningless, because what the Administration intends to convey is that some students may choose to pursue a non-college career, but would still have gained the qualifications to enter an academic college program if they wished.) This is, perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of the Blueprint. It indicates that the Administration may have learned little from the NCLB experience.

The most widely ridiculed of NCLB’s pretensions was that all students would be “proficient” at a challenging standard by 2014. Arne Duncan has called this goal “utopian” and nobody seriously thinks that the goal ever was achievable, or close to achievable. The normal variability of human ability ensures that no standard of proficiency can simultaneously be “challenging” for students at the top and the bottom of the normal ability distribution.

But aside from ridicule, NCLB’s adoption of this goal did great harm to public education. It created incentives for educators to lie to the public and claim that they could achieve something that they knew was unachievable. It created well-known incentives to “define down” proficiency, to make it possible for more students to pass themselves off as proficient. It engendered a culture of cynicism in public education, and it discredited public education in the broader community, as it became apparent that school leaders could not deliver what they were promising.

Any institution that sets an impossible goal runs the risk of such cynicism and loss of legitimacy.

The goal of all students college-ready by 2020 is just as fanciful as the goal of all students proficient by 2014. Today, perhaps 20 percent of all youth graduate high school fully prepared for academic college. It should certainly be higher. Aspiring to make it higher is a worthy ambition. But basing policy on a promise, or even an expectation, that we will quintuple this rate in a mere decade is laughable.

Administration officials defend this goal by saying it is “aspirational,” unlike NCLB’s goal which was a mandate. As we have seen above, this is not accurate. Virtually all schools serving concentrations of disadvantaged children will be in danger of sanctions for failing to make progress towards this goal. For these schools, the same cynicism, the same false promises, the same gaming, will be stimulated as occurred with NCLB.

Even middle class schools will be harmed by this goal. Although they will not be closed or otherwise sanctioned for failing to have all students college-ready by 2020, they will still regularly have to report to the public that their performance is inadequate, regardless of its actual quality. In these cases, we can foresee the consequences. Just as it was easy to make most students proficient by making the definition of proficiency sufficiently minimal, so we can expect states (that control both higher and K-12 education systems) to start defining college readiness down. Promising to make all students college-ready by 2020 is, in effect, an attack on the quality of America’s institutions of higher education.

Defenders of this absurd goal aver that it is inspiring to have an aspirational goal, even if it cannot be met. This is true only if the goal is within reach, albeit with great effort. If the goal is entirely out of reach, then holding it up as an aspiration is corrupting.

Of course, every teacher should attempt to inspire every entering kindergartner, as that child proceeds through school, with encouragement that greater effort could lead to college and a professional career. But no sane teacher believes that this encouragement will be effective with every single child. When an institution promises such universal success, it undermines its own legitimacy.

We can hope that the Administration thinks further about its proposals, and revises them as they proceed through Congress. It is, in any event, virtually certain that the Blueprint will not be adopted in its present design by this Congress, and perhaps not even by the next.

This suggests an unintended benefit of the Blueprint. For the foreseeable future, Arne Duncan will continue to be responsible for administering NCLB. Having now gone on record that its provisions are seriously flawed and that compliance with them is doing American education great harm, the Secretary will have no coherent choice but to begin issuing wholesale waivers to states from compliance with the old law. If it accomplishes this much, the Blueprint will have done a great service.

I was one of the lawmakers who gave Secretary Duncan a warm welcome last week, largely because I think his approach to the process has been such a refreshing change of pace. I may not agree with all of his specific policy ideas – more on that in a moment – but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have to respect the Secretary’s commitment to an open dialogue.

The blueprint was never intended to have the specificity of legislative language, which is why I do not believe it’s valid to criticize the lack of details about college- and career-ready standards. In fact, those who have been watching this issue unfold know I am wary of too much federal involvement in this area, so as far as I’m concerned, the fewer specifics he gives, the better. That being said, I continue to believe the federal government is on a slippery slope when it comes to the nationalization of academic standards and assessments.

I have no objection to Minnesota deciding to collaborate with Wisconsin or California or any other state in the nation to set rigorous academic standards. My concern comes when the federal government starts incentivizing the process – or worse, when it starts punishing those who do not play along. Looking at the blueprint, states would no longer be eligible for certain formula funds if they fail to adopt assessments aligned to these common standards. I challenge anyone to argue this is not federal pressure – the school boards call it “coercion” – to adopt a particular set of standards and assessments.

Following last week’s hearing, I outlined a few areas where I think the blueprint got it right, a few where the blueprint got it wrong, and a few where the right idea needs the right execution. I won’t repeat myself here, but those who are interested can find the news release online here: http://republicans.edlabor.house.gov/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1478.

The Obama Administration released a thoughtful and innovative blueprint to guide the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The New Teacher Center (NTC) looks forward to seeing more specific details about the proposed policy changes, and is pleased by the new direction taken by the Administration, including a strong focus on quality teaching and principal leadership, a more reasonable approach to school accountability and unprecedented funding to support states.

The NTC is delighted to see that the Administration will require states and districts to collect teacher survey data on available professional support and working conditions in schools and report the results biennially. Our nationally recognized and extensive work on Teaching and Learning Conditions Surveys has shown the importance of using this type of information to ensure that all students are getting the effective teaching they deserve.

For the first time in recent history, there is now an appropriate focus on the professional needs of teachers, especially collaborative opportunities to increase teacher effectiveness through effective, job-embedded professional development. This will continue to be vitally important to the developmental needs of our newest educators who disproportionately serve America’s most disadvantaged students in some of our most challenged and under-resourced schools. High-quality, comprehensive educator induction programs — which provide formative instructional assistance from highly-skilled, carefully selected, trained mentors — expedite beginning teacher effectiveness and bolster student success.

The Teacher and Principal Improvement Act, soon to be proposed by U.S. Senator Jack Reed, will provide an important opportunity to underscore the federal government’s commitment to supporting beginning teachers in strengthening their practice and expediting their effectiveness in the classroom. It would provide $1 billion in targeted assistance to high-need schools and districts for comprehensive, multi-year induction and mentoring for new teachers, principals, and school leaders as well as for other research-based strategies.

NCLB launched an era of dumbing down state standards while undermining public confidence in public education. Sure education needs dramatic improvement, but NCLB did not produce it. American schools are not the best in the world, but the means adopted by NCLB did nothing to move in that direction.

Unfortunately Duncan's Blueprint--while removing some of the worst features of NCLB, like AYP and the ludricrous goal of 100% proficiency by 2014--is still deeply rooted in the "measure and punish" mentality of NCLB.

In particular, the draconian punishments to be meted out to the 5,000 schools with the lowest scores is even worse than anything in NCLB. Thousands of schools that are doing their best under difficult circumstances will be closed; staffs that are struggling to educate the most challenging students will be fired. To what end? Who says that a brand-new staff or a school with a new name will be better? Where's the evidence?

If it's broken, fix it, don't kill it.

Diane Ravitch

As our readers know, I have been generally supportive of the Obama education agenda. But, in my view, one set of decisions in the Blueprint threatens to blot out all the good that may come from the many other worthy initiatives. Further, I fear these decisions could stall or stop altogether the progress we've made in narrowing the achievement gap since the late 90s.

Before I define and defend my position, I want to make a few brief observations.

First, I believe that NCLB requires some fixes and enhancements. In 2001, when 80% of the Democrats and 80% of the Republicans in both Houses voted for the law, we did the best we could at the time. We've learned a lot in the last decade about such things as measuring student growth, the assessment challenges for disabled students and ells, and the nuances of measuring teacher and school effectiveness. We've also set our sights on higher goals, including our new aspiration that students graduate high school ready for college or career.

So, I am one who favors refinements and enhancements in the law.

But I also believe that standards based reforms have worked to improve student achievement. I don't claim the gains are due just or principally to NCLB. But I do believe the changes in state policy beginning in 1993-1994, extending through the IASA and NCLB, caused the dramatic spurt in most NAEP scores, beginning in the late 90s. And I further believe that the fundamental principle of these reforms - a sense of accountability, always subject to improvements in fairness and effectiveness - is the driving force behind the gains we've made and must continue to make.

Now to my complaint about the Blueprint.

NCLB requires that each and every school in all Title I districts across America be measured and face consequences based on whether disadvantaged students are making progress to standard.

Yes, the states set the standards and make the tests and determine proficiency. And, yes, the districts get to determine from a broad list what the consequences are. Perhaps the details on these matters could be better specified. It was the best balance in a federalist system that our poor, but bipartisan minds could fashion back then.

But what we did, and what should never be changed, was to insist that all schools that receive federal money should be held accountable for educating low income children and children of color.

Not 5% of such schools. Not 10% of such schools. Not some undefined small additional number of such schools that might have a gap. But rather ALL schools. That's what we all meant by No Child Left Behind.

Again that law is not perfect and should be made better. But the Administration is making a terrible mistake in saying that there will be no further federal interest in accountability for the achievement of disadvantaged students in as many as 90% of the schools.

Now, if the advocates of "local control" want to argue there ought to be greater flexibility in consequences in the schools in the middle, they may have a point. But to toss out the pressure that something must be done to improve schools where disadvantaged students are doing poorly - that sets federal policy back not only to pre-NCLB days, but also to pre-IASA.

The Administration's tossing the requirement for public school choice and supplemental services is also a terrible decision. This requirement was part of a delicate deal between Democrats and Republicans in order to find a balance on the issue of parental choice. These choices have not been as available as they should have been for reasons I won't discuss here. But, while we hope the Administration will be more successful in fixing broken schools than we all have been in the past, removing, rather than fixing, the requirement of choice options further erodes accountability in the law.

I would finally urge the Secretary to re-think his tight/loose notions. Let's assume all the states set the best content standards in the world. Without high performance standards on quality assessments, tough accountability, and indeed strong, aligned curricula taught by strong teachers, there's NOTHING "tight." It's all "loose."

You see - it's not the content standards that were "dummied down" after NCLB. That's a fiction. As the Secretary certainly knows from his experience in Illinois, it was, at least in certain states, the performance standards that were "dummied down." There is nothing in the Blueprint on performance standards. And there is a serious weakening of accountability.

I worry indeed that those who have called assurances from the past a "fraud" may be stepping into deeper trouble themselves going forward. Nothing on performance standards. Weaker accountability. No 2014 for grade level proficiency. Yet, all students college/career ready by 2020? Hmmm.

There will be at least as much federal control, if not more, under Blueprint policies, but there will no longer be any pressure in most federally funded schools to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students. So, with all the money and all the programs, however promising they may be, but without the lever of real accountability, I fear that measures such as NAEP will in 2019 look more like they did in 1999 than they did in 2009.

That would be a terrible shame.