The mid-term election wasn’t a referendum on a specific policy issue – it was a protest against hyper-partisan gridlock. A recent national survey found that 61 percent of Independents, 73 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of swing voters and 46 percent of Republicans would rather see Congress work toward finding compromises, instead of digging in their heels for the sake of ideology. And most voters surveyed thought both parties needed to become more centrist.

Here’s the good news: Education reform is just the sort of bipartisan issue that can unite a Congress seeking accomplishment but mired in paralysis. In fact, one of the chief architects of the No Child Left Behind Act is Speaker-Designate John Boehner. Others have stated that education is one of the few issues the 112th Congress could and should tackle in a bipartisan manner—including state leaders like Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, as well as Senator Tom Harkin and Representative John Kline, respective chairs of the Senate and House committees on education in the new Congress.

Making ESEA reauthorization a high priority isn’t just about fostering cooperation between the parties, it’s a necessity for safeguarding the future of America’s children. Internationally, the United States no longer ranks among the top 10 developed nations in math or science performance. Despite some improvements over the past decade, achievement is still too low across the board and low-income and minority students are consistently outperformed by their more affluent and white peers. Data from the National Assessment of Education Progress show that:

• Less than one-third of our nation’s fourth-graders read at the Proficient level. For Latino students (16 percent Proficient) and African-American students (15 percent Proficient), the results are even more disturbing.
• In eighth-grade math, fewer than two out of every five students are Proficient. Among low-income students, the rate is about one in five.
• On the long-term trends assessment, our African-American and Latino 17-year-olds score on math and reading at the same levels as white 13-year-olds.

NCLB has not done enough to close these nagging achievement gaps. Our children – all of them – deserve an education that will enable them to compete in the global economy. And those students that come to school with less – whether it’s less money or less preparation – deserve to have the teachers and the resources that can help them achieve at the same high rates as their peers.

We need federal policymakers to put our collective future first, overcome division, and set to work on fixing ESEA in this next Congress.

“Local control” is a key principle of states and local school districts. When combined, these two entities contribute to almost 90 percent of the cost of delivering educational services to our students. “Local control” does not mean sustaining the status quo. Rather, it recognizes that mandates from Washington do not achieve the same results in every community across the nation. States and school districts understand that strategies must be tailored to address the unique circumstances of students, and that is not something that can be done effectively without local control.

Of course we should have a national policy that supports access to high quality education for all students so they can compete successfully in a challenging 21st century climate. The federal government should establish an effective framework that includes technical support and incentives to support state and local school district initiatives to improve the academic performance of all students. This “top-down” approach that has existed since No Child Left Behind (NLCB) simply is not working, and even Secretary Arne Duncan has agreed that the current accountability system under NCLB is inaccurate and unfair.

In the upcoming 112th Congress, school boards expect both new and long-time lawmakers to agree on legislation that helps states and local school districts implement creative, yet evidence-based programs that address the urgent challenges facing our schools. Both Congress and the Obama administration can start with legislative or regulatory actions that would provide temporary relief to protect districts and schools from costly sanctions under the current NCLB law (such as mandates that require the closing or restructuring of schools and force the ineffective and inefficient expenditure of extremely limited state and local resources). If Congress acts quickly, school board members, educators, parents and residents can better focus their attention on solutions rather than federal requirements that have yet to demonstrate sustained success.

I don’t think the term “local control” has much practical meaning as a policy approach for improving our schools. I think it’s just a term of art, an idea we invoke to seem consequential, and a way of wrapping complaints about NCLB in the well-worn cloth of states’ rights.

Rather than speaking of local control, we should be speaking of local infrastructure, local capacity, local excellence, and ultimately local ownership (not in the financial sense but in the communal sense we often associate with pride of place).

If legislators argued for these ideas, and tuned their rhetoric to reality, we might get somewhere on a district-by-district basis. If local control came with local support for good teaching and good leadership practices, if it came with striking models of local accountability, if it came with new approaches to local funding, it would be worth exploring as it would likely lead to positive change.

But arguments over local control, ironically, almost never touch on local issues in education. The term as we use it today is almost entirely symbolic, its ideals mythical, it’s popularity fueled not by the substantive policies it inspires but by a maudlin sentimentality for a misremembered past.

Schools are already governed locally and always have been. Even though, technically, education is a state function, in reality it’s a district issue. Districts set the policies that affect kids’ lives on a daily basis. But true control is even more local than this.

Districts lack the infrastructure, and often the will, to enforce their own policies. At the building level only a small percentage of strong principals can effectively create and execute their own initiatives. So local control in schools often comes down to the most local unit of all: the individual classroom. And here, the only control, if it exists at all, comes from individual teachers—who are not easily controlled by anyone.

Because we have such a clear hierarchy in education, we assume that we have a clear control structure. We don’t. At the building and classroom levels, there is extraordinary variation. Even under NCLB, which has tightened requirements dramatically, local control has remained alive and well.

I’ve worked in several thousand classroom since the law was enacted and the variation I’ve seen, even in the same departments and grade levels of single schools, is astounding, so much so that I’ve come to view the term “local control” as both a hyper-reality and an oxymoron. We have over 15,000 districts in the US, over 100,000 schools, and between three and four million teachers. That’s a lot of local. But no one is really in control of anything.

Here in my town, we have a lovely mid-sized school district packed with upper middle class kids from six-figure dual-Ph.D. households. But we have no local control of education. Our current superintendent is a 20-year figurehead. Our district office staff rarely even attempts to move good ideas down into the schools. We have a few strong principals who stand out for their ability to keep their buildings working well. But the existence of a small number of talented building leaders is, for us, just the luck of the draw. We don’t even attempt to control who we hire.

And this is not at all unusual in my experience.

Out of the hundreds of schools where I’ve worked, I would characterize just a few of the very smallest as reasonably well controlled. They appear to function effectively because of the degree of consistency they exhibit. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds, and sometimes simple minds are at work maintaining simple structures for simple—and meaningless—forms of control.

These well-controlled schools are often a pleasure for me to work in but just as often they are no more successful than their less-controlled counterparts. What’s more, high levels of control rarely last because they are often maintained by a single strong leader.

My favorite control trick is when schools or districts require teachers to submit lesson plans tied to state standards. This is almost always a farce. Teachers don’t write them. Teachers don’t turn them in. Teachers write them, turn them in, and then teach something different.

For management’s part, the plans are never reviewed, teachers are never observed to see how well their plans are being executed, nor do they receive helpful feedback of any kind on their planning efforts. As a result, no information is gathered about planning, teachers are never shown how to improve their planning, or even what good planning is. The requiring of lesson plans is merely an exercise in establishing the appearance of control—and a colossal waste of time for everyone.

Discussions of local control in education politics are also a colossal waste of time because local control isn’t really what people are talking about. When politicians say they want local control, it’s not because they have bold and innovative plans for restructuring education in their states and districts. They simply mean they don’t want the burden of complying with federal requirements like those associated with NCLB.

NCLB is viewed as particularly onerous because it involves testing. States don’t want to test for three reasons:

1. Testing is expensive and fraught with problems. States view testing as an unfunded mandate. True, states get Title I money, but Title I money can’t be spent on creating a testing infrastructure or on scoring tests—and states were used to getting the money anyway, without giving tests. States aren’t very good at creating and executing testing systems and often make expensive and embarrassing mistakes. They also aren’t very good at handling test data and often get into trouble with the public when it comes to communicating what the numbers mean or why they change—or don't change—over time.

2. Nobody really likes testing. Kids don’t like it. Teachers don’t like it. Districts practically have to shut down to execute it. Parents are confused about it. The general citizenry doesn’t understand it either. And politicians really don’t like it because it forces them to confront the consequences of their own “local control” decision making. A few people, mostly policy folks and academics, like the data. And, of course, testing companies love it because it makes them rich. But the process of testing is uncomfortable and messy, something akin to the familiar and unpleasant sausage making politicians know all too well.

3. Nobody really wants to know the results (because they’re usually pretty bad). Politicians hate to divulge test results. That’s why so many states work so hard to pump them up or obscure them. Kids certainly don’t care about the results. Parents are often furious about concepts like “proficiency” when they know their kids can’t read, write, or do much math. The general public is simply confused: at times the numbers look bad, then they look better, then we find out that the only reason they look better is because some group of psychometric experts made the tests easier. People naturally think words like “proficient” carry the same positive meaning in testing that they do in life. Then they encounter “proficient” kids who really don’t know very much and some savvy journalist finds out that “proficiency” is a much lower bar than most people think—often something akin to a “D” grade in the old-fashioned system folks are used to. (It isn’t exactly like that, of course, but people have no way of knowing this because states don’t want to explain it.)

For all the huffing and puffing about NCLB, no state has to participate. Just opt out and give back the money. Since there appears to be little direct evidence that Title I funding improves student achievement, one would think that opting out of NCLB, especially for less populous states, would be a no-brainer.

But here the political brain kicks into high gear. Rather than actually exerting their right to local control, states prefer to take the money and complain that their control has been unjustly usurped by a meddling federal government. I don’t know if this qualifies as biting the hand that feeds you, but it’s pretty close. This leads some politicians to an identity crisis of sorts: What’s more important? The money or the control? Apparently, it’s the money.

Calls for local control in the context of NCLB seem insincere. And, as Mr. Kress pointed out, it’s not as if local control has worked very well historically for our nation. You could go back to Brown and start there but the fiasco of local school control is as old as American schooling itself.

Our school system was more locally controlled in the 19th century and the most important thing people tried to control was who could be educated and who could not. Only a small percentage of our population finished high school and many of our citizens were educated in squalor or denied the opportunity to attend school at all.

The history of federal involvement in schools has been one of improving funding, assuring access, and now, with NCLB, addressing quality—three things that states, historically, have been loathe to address.

Whether we try to control schools at the federal or the state level, they are very hard to control, so hard that perhaps the metaphor of control is where the real problem lies. Control is costly, and in hyper-distributed systems like American education, the pursuit of control creates friction.

As wonky-populist as it sounds, we might do better to turn edupolicy on its head and build a new system from the bottom up, focusing on high standards for teachers and principals, great training and support, and unprecedented school and classroom freedom in exchange for powerful forms of self-organization and topnotch local accountability. But that sounds a lot like NCLB plus good human capital management, two things we seem not to want, so it’s unlikely we will ever do anything like this.

However, something similar to this has evolved in other sectors and it may truly be the only way for education to live as locally as we would like it to while also improving quality. The idea would be to give control to the people who have it already—classroom teachers—while putting our true controlling energies into improving teacher quality and assessing progress.

“Local control” sounds good because it sounds very American. But high degrees of fragmentation make it difficult to improve a system in a systematic way. The term “local control” seems to me an oxymoron: the more local education gets, the less control we as a nation seem to have over it—at least that’s what history tells us.

But clearly, we have cultural resistance to a centralized model of change, so perhaps a distributed model—if the local controllers would come up with one—might be a better bet. If we see a New Hampshire state flag emblazoned with the motto, “Learn free or die!”, we’ll know the revolution has begun.

Most of the countries whose education systems we drool over have high degrees of national control. They’re smaller and less diverse, and their people tend to tolerate more government meddling in all aspects of their lives. But one can’t help wondering if just a little bit of mighty Finland’s stunning success is due at least in some small part to a high degree of national control.

While essentially meaningless as a lever of reform or as an expression of thoughtful education policy, the concept of local control is an important touchstone in the national dialog. Like the jasper, slate, or basalt rocks 19th century prospectors used to tell iron pyrite from the gold they so desired, we can scratch ourselves against the notion of local control and discover who we really are.

A vote for local control is a vote for the past. Unshackling states from the historic influence of NCLB is a vote for the good old days of the 1980s, the 1950s, and the 19th century when our system was so localized we had tens of thousands of school districts, many consisting of only a single school. Wanna go back? Scratch the rock and see if you make a mark.

It’s easy to understand how going back to a more localized education system would be attractive to politicians. But hard to see how it would improve the quality of our schools.

Local control would certainly give states more freedom. But as the saying goes, “The price of freedom is vigilance.” And when it comes to education, vigilance has not historically been a term used to desecribe the way states have run their education systems.

Ultimately, then, local control is neither: we can’t get much more local than we already are, and states are unlikely to be able to exert more control over their schools even if they want to. If anything, local control is simply a permission slip for states to backburner one of their most sacred responsibilities.

Instead of local control, we should be speaking of local ownership by way of community investment in schools. This investment need not be financial. It should, in fact, be moral. Communities should want good schools because good schools are a moral thing to want. Politicians appealing for local control of schools should appeal to voters on the basis of the morality of education and not on the basis of a respite from the unjust burden of federal requirements.

If Tip O’Neill were alive he would remind us that all education is local. He would probably also point out that the most successful politicians are those who interact the most successfully with their constituents.

Politicians arguing for local control of education would do well to get into their local schools and get some chalk on their hands. Teach a lesson. Grade a paper. Train a teacher or two. Help a principal analyze data and make a school improvement plan. Then check back a few months later and see how things have turned out. This kind of lesson has value for both school house and state house.

It’s hard to understand what local control of education could truly mean unless one did a little bit of local educating. With that experience might come the wisdom to see that while education is very local, it isn’t very easily controlled. Ownership, not control, should be the governing metaphor for educational governance. Investment, not taxation, should be the reframing of school funding. Excellence, not proficiency, should be the standard to which we aspire.

Anyone who wants to use local control to achieve those things can have my vote regardless of what party they belong to.

National employee groups bargain with locally elected officials--a well financed and highly sophisticated and coordinated effort across the table from a PTA parent. In big cities, the employee groups elect the board. Goliath is winning.

It's ironic that the republicans are ready to give up on accountability and hand schools back to the employees.

It would be logistically possible to offer every student in American at the beginning of the second semester the opportunity to take any foreign language and any AP or advanced STEM course online. States could save hundreds of millions and quality would be consistently high. Local control stands in the way.

Local control of education is an American anachronism corrupted beyond repair in urban areas and antiquated by innovation.

Unsurprisingly, the deal seen as viable by various contributors to this blog reflects their goals. For many, that means essentially preserving the structure of NCLB, even though it has been educationally damaging and shows no likelihood of success. For the most part, RTTT makes things worse, not better.

Using nostrums such as “tight on ends, loose on means” is more misleading than helpful. For example, high-stakes testing mandated under NCLB is both ends and means, and cannot feasibly be otherwise. And even if it were only ends, why should the feds mandate massive testing when such testing does not improve education? If most nations that do better than the US by various measures (international tests, high school graduation rates, and often college entrance and completion rates) rely far less heavily on testing, what is the rationale for the feds to mandate so much testing and then functionally ensure teaching to the test becomes the default practice of schooling? In short, the feds have mangled the definition of ends by reducing it to test scores, and done so in a way that it also controls the means.

If Congress rejects the NCLB framework, as it should, can a deal be struck to help improve teaching and learning for low-income students, as the original ESEA called for? Its purpose was “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.” Can Congress advance that better than did the original ESEA?

There are nations that provide equitable funding while not dictating their educational ends in more than quite general terms, and that have better outcomes than does the US. Civil rights can be advanced without the federal government pressuring states to reduce schooling to test prep.

The Forum on Educational Accountability (which I chair) has produced proposals that re-calibrate federal, state and local relations. They would reduce testing while helping states and districts gather and use a wide array of useful information on inputs, processes and outcomes; replace sanctions with assistance; emphasize school-based improvement with district, state and federal support; and promote the provision of real opportunity to learn for all students. These proposals deserve support from both Republicans and Democrats who now understand that NCLB has failed as an improvement strategy, but who are serious about putting the federal government behind meaningful support for education.

The clearest message coming out of the election was that voters want the Senate, the House and the Obama administration to call a truce in the political trench warfare and find common ground on issues that matter to Americans. For many issues like tax policy and immigration, that’s going to be a tall order. Opposing advocates on these issues are separated by deep philosophical disagreements. So why not focus on issues on which the parties are not so deeply divided, issues on which opposing sides have already moved a considerable distance towards each other, on both ends and means?

Of course, I’m talking about education. On ends, there’s a broad national consensus, stretching not only across party loyalties but across economic divisions. Low-income Americans want an education, especially a college education, for their children and themselves because they know that the fastest-growing and highest-paying jobs and careers almost all require college degrees. And employers both large and small know that 21st century business runs on a college-educated workforce.

On means, as the question suggests, the consensus isn’t quite as broad, but it’s growing. Other issues may pit the supporters of active government against those who believe that government is best when it governs least. But on education, we have a Democratic president whose signature education initiative, Race to the Top, is built on principles like choice and competition traditionally associated with conservatives. We have Republican governors from red states like Mississippi, South Carolina, Arizona and Nebraska ready to sign up for education reform grants under a Democratic program, Race to the Top.

And we have a tradition of bipartisanship to draw on when it comes to education policy. There is a good deal of legitimate criticism of how No Child Left Behind was carried out. But the principle on which NCLB was built, accountability in education, has been the centerpiece on which the Obama administration built its Race to the Top initiative. In fact, there’s a picture from the Bush administration I’d like to see replicated in the Obama White House. At the signing desk, of course, sits the president. Next to him, representing the new law’s beneficiaries, is a young black student. Behind them are two liberal friends of education, Rep. George Miller and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. And standing beside the president is another congressional leader whose was crucial in getting NCLB through Congress. At the time the picture was taken, he was chairman of the House Education Committee. Today he’s the presumptive Speaker of the House, John Boehner.

Education brought contending parties together then. Why not again?

Congressman Kline’s reputation as a well-regarded and thoughtful lawmaker notwithstanding, from our experience at Knowledgeworks we’ve learned that a hybrid of local control supported by state and federal governments makes for the most successful long-term education programs.

We know that local community context must drive the implementation of education programs in their communities based on their social and economic needs. For example, the methods used to turnaround a high school in Detroit may differ dramatically from those used to turnaround a high school in Lima, Ohio.

However, the encouragement, guidance, tools and flexibility federal and state governments can provide are invaluable forms of support for local communities to reach their education goals. It is not enough to offer local communities a set of goals and tell them to figure it out, because there often are not enough local resources, flexibility or talent to get there.

And it’s our experience that many local educators and communities may not even know the best route to get to the goals they set. So, research in best practices, training, networking and resource allocation from federal and state governments are necessary supports to the change process.

Indeed, both the federal and state governments should take on a role that is tight on results but looser on means. That does not mean locals should be left on their own to figure things out. They do need guidance, encouragement and tools to get it done, but this should provide options that allow them to have ownership and buy-in on the means as well the goals.

The notion in the question that “local” is both “state” and “local community” is a misnomer. States have a very different role in education than local communities, and in that way, they are just like the federal government. Locals are providing the service; federal and state governments are setting out the framework by which they will deliver those services.

At the end of the day, education reform is less about local, state or federal control. Primarily, it’s about making sure our children get the highest-quality education possible and be prepared for college and careers of tomorrow.

Few GOP Members of the U.S. House who voted for No Child Left Behind are rejoicing about it today, if they ever did. Many who supported it, returned home to local school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers and parents whose most common question was on the order of, “what could you have possibly been thinking?”

I know firsthand, because these Congressmen told me – many dozens of them within months of NCLB becoming law – how they wished they could have taken that vote back. That was nine years ago. Some of those remorseful Congressmen are gone, but a great many are still there.

It’s not hard to imagine most of them, having once believed NCLB was good policy, have been pining for a chance at atonement ever since. Mr.Kline’s “local-control” revival may prove a convenient confessional into which House Republicans will duck for redemption.

Add to their numbers the horde of Democrats who, entranced by the high priests of the National Education Association, find the idea of a federal Adequate Yearly Progress standard utterly heretical, and you’ve got an interesting possibility for a great, bi-partisan, “local-control” awakening.

For a variety of peculiar reasons, there is a high degree of Congressional and Executive interest in reauthorizing ESEA/NCLB before 2012. If Mr. Kline harnesses these sundry motivations just right, the House could reauthorize NCLB with the redeeming features the law might have included in the first place.

What Democrats want is a suspension of AYP. The Administration would love to codify Race To The Top. Leveraging these and other motivations, Mr. Klein could insist upon real reforms that the Bush Whitehouse too quickly jettisoned in 2001 – meaningful school choice and generous flexibility to the states. In other words, he could secure real, consequential, substantive local control applied in a way that could actually offer America’s schoolchildren real promise.

It’s not at all a Hail Mary scenario. Local control is a powerful theme. And for the salvation of America’s public schools, it has the added advantage of actually being the right way forward.

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I can't imagine the Congress wasting its time with the "patch" Rick Hess suggests. Members will want something for the time and effort they spend on legislation these days. And members of both parties have long pent up desires for action on the education agenda. Since most of the immediate problems in NCLB can be dealt with administratively, it's hard to see Congressional energy being spent on just a "patch."

Plus, making NCLB "toothless" would be a policy disaster in that all who vote for it will have responsibility for the inevitable reduction in pressure on schools to pay attention to the poor academic achievement generally of disadvantaged students. Let's remember that THAT is what causes schools not to make AYP and why, I guess, NCLB is so...reviled(?)

God willing, some of us will be around to remind the world of the consequences of such "patch" legislation, should it be passed.

I'm betting that there won't be an ESEA/NCLB reauthorization in the next two years. As I've said before, while there is surface agreement between the administration and Republicans on charter schooling and teacher quality, that doesn't reflect broad consensus. More to the point, House Republicans aren't going to spend 2011 or 2012 looking to pen a big federal education bill-- even if the cognoscenti assure them that it's really reducing Uncle Sam's footprint. Getting House Republicans (and Pelosi's NEA-friendly, post-election caucus) to sign on will likely require a bill that clearly and pretty unmistably just eviscerates and downsizes NCLB-- with no "worst 5%" provision, no teacher effectiveness stuff, no Race to the Top, and so on-- and I don't see the administration or key Senators signing on for that.

I do expect, though, that before the 2012 elections the new Congress will pass some kind of "NCLB patch," which suspends the ludicrous consequences of a law that will soon label most of the nation's schools as failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). No need to rehash here the self-defeating problems with this well-intentioned effort to legislate aspirations (for more on that, check out the Education Next article "Crash Course" which I penned with Checker Finn a few years back).

I'm not expecting a "stripped-down" bill but something like the annual "doc fix" we see Congress pass to halt mandated cuts in Medicare payment rates to doctors. Congress is bad at addressing big problems through complex legislation, but it excels at stopgaps that ease the pain. Take the annual "Alternative Minimum Tax patch," which spares millions of taxpayers from getting caught up in the AMT without actually resolving the concerns with this 41-year-old statute. Just last week, we saw bipartisan support to push the patch through the lame duck session. Like the "doc fix," the AMT patch is never offset and will result in tens of billions in additional federal borrowing this year. Congress hardly blinks an eye at these costly patches, as it routinely passes them; pushing through a cost-free bill that halts the clumsy consequences of the now widely reviled NCLB should be easy pickings by comparison. I'm betting that a bipartisan measure which renders NCLB toothless--either by making its remedy provisions voluntary or otherwise declawing AYP--will pass sometime in 2012.

Let me be painfully be clear. I'm not talking about a "slimmed down" bill; I'm talking about Congress finding agreement on the one thing that comes most easily, voting for popular patches that alleviate the pain for attentive constituents.

Not long after the 2008 election, Mike Petrilli and I penned an "open letter" to the new powers that be in Washington, suggesting an approach to ESEA/NCLB reauthorization that we termed "reform realism". (See http://www.edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_an-open-letter-to-president-obama-secretary-duncan-and-the-111th-congress ) Fourteen months later, the White House released an Obama/Duncan "blueprint" for ESEA reauthorization that begin with something of a "reform realist" perspective. (See http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/publicationtoc.html ) It's firm about education goals and standards but more relaxed about Washington's capacity to micromanage the nation's schools and it would cure many of the ills of NCLB, including that law's tendency to declare far too many schools "in need of improvement."

But, of course, the generally-dysfunctional 111th Congress has accomplished absolutely nothing on the ESEA front (and presumably won't during the lame duck session that's about to commence.) Which means that if anything is to happen on this overdue reauthorization front it will fall to members of the very different 112th Congress to do.

Some people I respect are already predicting that this won't happen, that Republicans on the Hill have no incentive to cooperate with a weakened Obama administration on anything at all and that the President, despite talk of bipartisanship on the education front, has other, larger, fish to fry--and is not himself much good at reaching across the aisle.

It is, of course, way too soon to be sure. But last week Mike and I suggested a way forward

(http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/index.cfm?issue=611&edition=N#a6578) that, if the political stars could align, just might carry us a long way toward rectifying the failures and overreaches of NCLB while still pushing American education firmly in a reformist direction.

What makes this so hard, politics aside, is that, with rare exceptions, none of the three main levels of government in our federalist structure is very good at reforming schools. Uncle Sam can make rules but can't make anyone do anything. Most state education agencies exist to distribute funds and ensure compliance with rules (including Uncle Sam's) but don't have the capacity to compel the changes that might lead to kids actually learning more. And "local control", for all of its rhetorical appeal, means leaving things to teacher unions, unimaginative administrators, school boards that are typically preoccupied with budgets (when not themselves as dysfunctional as the Congress!) and a general public that is all too often smug about its schools, not to mention taxed to death and weary of people promising "reforms" that never happen.

Rebalancing all this is going to take great skills. It may well be impossible. But if that turns out to be the case, it truly augurs badly for the country's future.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm a fan - to a substantial degree - of local control. As the presumptive Speaker, John Boehner, would say with pride, virtually all decisions in education, even in the wake of NCLB, are made by states and districts.

Standards. Tests. Cut scores. Curricula. Education materials. Staffing. Technology. Courses. Promotion and graduation decisions. Virtually all spending. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And, especially to conservatives, I would mention other items that are also left to local control. These would include decisions to prevent parental choice, budget-busting pension practices, heavy bureaucratic and administrative spending, and, the grand daddy of them all, unaccountable teachers' union contracts.

So, conservatives have some tough decisions to make. Are we for local control so much that we support encrusted, top-heavy, expensive local bureaucracy? Are we for local control so much that we support union and bureaucracy-based decisions that prevent meaningful parental choice? Are we for local control so much that we support decisions in many districts that foster waste and ineffective spending?

Really the only "intrusion" from NCLB is to say that for all the federal dollars schools and districts receive they must be held accountable (by the locals!) for closing the achievement gap for poor kids and kids of color. The sad part of this "intrusion" is that it permits this accountability to be so much on local terms it can be to low standards.
So, is taking away even that pressure what is meant by "relief" and allowing the locals "to make their own decisions?"

I hope not.

It would be a step backwards in the long civil rights march begun by Brown and ESEA to assure effective education for our nation's disadvantaged students. After all, it wasn't the "good local control" that prompted the concern in the first place. It was the "not-so-good local control" that was insensitive to the education of disadvantaged kids that started all this.

A deal to go back there? I certainly hope not.

Do we need fixes? Yes. Do we need flexibility in certain areas? Yes. But we need continued pressure and new direction and improved practice as well.

If we can get some of the best of the Obama agenda, some of the fixes that Congressman Kline may have in mind, along with even stronger accountability and parental options, then maybe we can and should get a deal.

But a hodgepodge of softening and retreat with some of the same old spending and programs, perhaps cut back? No, thank you!

Back in the mid-1990s when I first started studying education policy, I learned that the federal role in education focused on three things: (1) equity, (2) research and data collection, and (3) national security. The latter was focused on the Cold War need for scientists, so we got the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and similar federal boosts since then. The second item is seen through things like IES and NCES. Equity involvement took the form of civil rights acts, IDEA, and (of course) the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 – the law now called NCLB and up for reauthorization. Does it strike anyone else as odd that the grand bargain we’re discussing here has moved so far from ESEA’s original purpose?

If the policies being pushed by Secretary Duncan had a proven record of helping vulnerable communities, one could argue that the focus is still equity. But in large part they don’t, so it just looks like Washington arbitrarily telling local communities how to run their schools. It’s hard not to side with the small-government folks on this one. And it’s hard not to want to see the federal focus return to its original scope and goals.