U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s waiver proposal for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) creates a pressure cooker for the Obama Administration. While the Executive Branch has rather generous waiver authority, Congressional leaders are right to be concerned that the conditions associated with the proposed waivers could exceed the spirit of that authority. At this moment, state and school district officials need time and support to continue implementation of obligations under NCLB and Race to the Top (RTTT) grants; they have no appetite for additional reform challenges. Further, imposing conditions of RTTT to all states and districts absent express federal authorization and additional support for implementation may be more than cash strapped governors and local superintendents would deem prudent.

The only condition of a NCLB waiver that would be helpful to all educational institutions and to students, the intended beneficiaries of the law, would be one requiring states to accelerate design and development of data systems that manage student achievement data, coordinated with data systems that track the productivity of educator preparation providers. All other requirements of RTTT and the School Improvement Grants are as yet experimental, highly contested in research and should not be required as a “condition” that qualifies states and districts for a waiver. A robust data system would supply teachers and educator preparation providers with data that can identify targets for instructional intervention and support efforts to improve student learning.

If Secretary Duncan has a Plan B, it would be nice to know what it is. If he wants to push Congress into action, he'll be more successful, I think, if he has something real with which to push. But whether he is full of bluff, bluster, or something else that starts with "b", it’s hard to see where the win is here.

Too often of late the Secretary has asked “How can I create a headline?” when he would have done better to ask “How can I create an opportunity?”

A few months ago, he told us we had entered “The Era of the New Normal”, a period characterized by the necessity of doing more with less. But each time he grants a waiver, he sends the message that we should all be doing less with less. And if, as some suspect, the mysterious Plan B stands for “bitter pill to swallow”, schools aren’t likely to be doing more with less as bitterness rarely leads to betterness.

So where is the opportunity? Right where it has been all along: in the combination of responsible policy and transparent accounting for results. In this context, the Secretary has six golden opportunities before him:

1. The opportunity to improve classroom instruction. (Hint: It’s not merit pay or job security tied to test scores.)

2. The opportunity to improve school leadership. (Hint: It’s not removing accountability.)

3. The opportunity to improve curriculum. (Hint: It’s not CCSSI.)

4. The opportunity to improve assessment. (Hint: It’s not new tests.)

5. The opportunity to improve education culture, educator morale, and public confidence in our schools. (Hint: It’s not a bundle of “do this or else” requirements.)

6. The opportunity to participate constructively in the reauthorization of the ESEA. (Hint: It’s not a nebulous Plan B threat.)

The Classroom Instruction Opportunity

The best way to improve instruction is to increase the number of teachers implementing effective practices effectively. I wrote about a simple, scaleable, and cost-effective way to do this here.

It is not hard to know what effective practices are; most are thoroughly documented and easily observed in the classrooms of the thousands of truly outstanding teachers we have in our country.

Teaching quality is the most important piece of the reform puzzle. It is also the one we know the most about solving:

1. Identify effective practices. (We have many great teachers.)

2. Introduce them to teachers. (Great teachers can help other teachers with this.)

3. Ask teachers to use them or to develop practices that are more effective. (It’s amazing how often things don’t get done in schools simply because no one asks.)

4. Evaluate implementation. (We are developing evaluation systems all the time.)

5. Train as needed. (The teachers in #1 and #2 above can certainly help their colleagues.)

The Secretary could be taking the lead here by supporting research into innovative practice, by advocating fiercely for better models of teacher training, and by promoting teacher evaluation systems designed to increase teacher effectiveness through increased support as opposed to threatening job security.

If Plan B in this case stands for "But we have to fire bad teachers first!”, the Secretary will miss an important opportunity to change education forever, and our children will miss an important opportunity to receive a high-quality education.

The School Leadership Opportunity

When it comes to improving schools, the principal is indeed our pal. But reform policy has ignored this office almost completely. Intuitively, we know that positive change is only possible with good leadership. But we've become so enamored of vilifying teachers, we've paid scant attention to the people who lead them.

In addition to being effective leaders, good principals know how to recruit, train, and retain good teachers. They know how to support good teachers with adequate resources and how to use good teacher evaluation instruments as well.

The principal is also the obvious person in a school to coordinate the activities of teachers and other staff members toward successful outcomes for kids. Thus, a single effective principal could make an extraordinary contribution to long term gains in student achievement through strong instructional and operational leadership.

Compared to four million teachers, one hundred thousand principals represents a considerably more workable group. They also have greater autonomy than teachers and can therefore apply their increased agency to accelerate meaningful change at the building level, precisely where federal policy seeks to measure outcomes and impose consequential accountability.

While teachers are the most important in-school factor in student success, and the classroom is where the learning happens, the principal's office is where we could do the most good in the least amount of time with the fewest resources—a perfect strategy, it would seem, for “The Era of the New Normal”. If the Secretary's goal is to do more with less, he should be doing it in the principal’s office.

If Plan B stood for "Bold", the Secretary could argue for a temporary shift in funding to emphasize Title II over Title I and to prioritize support for principals over teachers. He could also advocate for better principal training and better principal evaluations which, at present, are not much better than the traditional teacher evaluations we're always citing as one of the great travesties of our time.

To put the school leadership opportunity in perspective, if we took the money spent on Reading First and Race to the Top, and spent it on improving school leadership instead, we would have had about $10,000 per year to spend on every principal in the country over the last decade.

The principalship is the point of greatest leverage in the system. It was virtually untouched by NCLB and is not targeted significantly in the Obama blueprint. If the Secretary is looking for a true power play, the principalship—and not the Congress or 50 state legislatures—is where he should apply some muscle.

The Curriculum Opportunity

In 16 years of working in education, I’ve seen many rounds of many curriculum standards in many states. But I’ve never seen any set of standards result in great curriculum. Yet, as a student, I experienced great curriculum. And when I teach, I think I offer great curriculum.

So I ask myself, “Where’s the disconnect?”

There’s an expression used in business called, “Throwing a document over the wall.” It refers to one part of an organization creating a plan and then handing it off to another part of an organization to implement.

The problems with this approach are so numerous and so obvious they aren’t worth detailing here. They are also so well known now that few businesses continue to operate this way—and those that do, operate poorly.

But efforts like CCSSI, or the work of the 50 states, with regard to the creation of curriculum standards is nothing more than creating a document and throwing it over the wall for others to implement.

Why we think this works in education when we know it doesn’t work in other situations is the part that confuses me.

Long ago, in the days before standards, some kids—most of us who are fortunate enough to write on this forum, for example—were probably exposed to some pretty good curriculum. So where did all this good curriculum come from?

Good curriculum comes from good teachers. What is a set of standards anyway but a description of a discipline and the most important things someone is supposed to learn about it. To be a teacher is to know this information. And if one doesn’t know it, that’s a personal learning problem, not a curriculum problem. But really knowing it requires really learning it—not having it hit you over the head as it falls over the wall.

So the key to improving curriculum is improving the disciplinary knowledge of our teachers. The HQT provision of NCLB attempted to do this. But we know now that credentials are not a very meaningful indicator of effectiveness in education. So we must find another mechanism and the Secretary should be leading the way.

We cannot standardize our way out of our current educational challenges. Our nation is too diverse, our character is too individualistic, and our world is too dynamic. It takes years to create a set of standards. Years to create tests to measure them. Years to create materials to teach them. And an eternity to train teachers to teach them well (because many of our teachers don’t have the requisite disciplinary knowledge to begin with).

Long before this process matures, the world has passed us by and new standards are needed once again. The creation of a well-trained teaching corps is the only viable long term solution. It also has the advantage of uniting curriculum with instruction, which is the natural state of affairs when most of us head up in front of the room to teach.

If Plan B stood for “Brace yourself!”, Secretary Duncan would relate to us the truth of his own fine education: that the best curriculum he experienced came from the best educators, perhaps educators like his mother, for example. Would standards have made her more effective? Would they have made Secretary Duncan a better educated man?

Seems like Harvard has great curriculum. I’m pretty sure they get it with great teachers and not with standards. When we say we need standards, do we say this because we think our teachers aren’t smart enough to know their disciplines? If we are, then throwing standards over the wall is likely only to make teachers feel less smart.

When someone says to me, “I don’t trust you to teach effectively so I’m going to take away your opportunity to determine what you teach,” I don’t feel very good about that. And I certainly don’t feel very good about becoming a better teacher.

When we treat curriculum as though it can be separated from instruction—and further disconnect it from instructors—we exhibit a lapse in judgment and we risk the intellectual liberty on which this nation was founded. Great teachers make great curriculum; semi-secret committees make documents and throw them over the wall. Groups of intelligent educators adopt great curriculum through thoughtful collaboration; states adopted CCSSI primarily because of federal arm-twisting.

Well-written and thoroughly supported standards may indeed make the poorest of poor teachers less poor. And in this sense, perhaps a standardized curriculum should exist as an option for teachers who think they would be more effective using it. But making less effective teachers slightly more effective isn’t the rhetoric I keep hearing about rigor, readiness, and high standards. We’re going to need to some pretty sharp teachers for that.

The thing is, you can’t go there if you don’t know there. If I don’t know my discipline, a big book of standards, and accompanying materials, won’t help me very much. It may, in fact, make me worse as it lowers my incentive to learn what I need to learn. Continuing to throw standards over the wall, and then blame teachers when they can’t do what we want, is simply a way to repeat the arguments of the past decade ad infinitum.

The Assessment Opportunity

I’m not opposed to tests. I’ve taken many of them, just like most people. I took the ITBS and MAT tests as a kid. And later, the PSAT, SAT, and something called the Washington Pre-College Test. More recently, I took the GRE.

But none of these things could be used as assessments.

I suppose we’d call them “summative” assessments nowadays. But that’s just a euphemism. Tests make better sorting devices than they do diagnostic tools. They tell us where one person falls in relation to another in a given area but not necessarily what we need to do to help that person improve. They’re reasonably good tools for making decisions about very large sample sizes. But they are far less useful when the sample size is a single child, in a single subject, on a single day.

Assessment is the gathering of information to guide instruction. Knowing that a kid is “proficient” in 5th grade math tells us very little about what that kid knows and what he needs to know next. Assessment works best when it happens in real time as kids work and teachers (or other students) give them feedback which they can apply immediately in order to improve.

If Plan B stood for “Balderdash!”, the Secretary could advocate for less testing while simultaneously maintaining significant accountability through a significantly smaller number of tests. Think about the NAEP. It’s the only test we trust, right? It isn’t given every year. Yet it remains the gold standard by which all other tests are measured. Why do we need CCSSI and two multi-million dollar testing consortia when we have the NAEP? All we’re going to do when the new tests come out is benchmark them against the NAEP anyway, right?

And don’t forget that we’ve become very comfortable with both the SAT and the ACT as exit exams from high school. Not much teaching to the test to be done in these cases; not much narrowing of curriculum or gaming of the system has occurred in the history of these instruments. We already have tests we trust, and none has been shown to distort teaching and learning the way our current state tests have, so why don’t we use them?

Keep in mind, as well, that college admissions officers do not make decisions solely based on the scores of college entrance tests. They use a mixed portfolio of indicators, many of which are qualitative and highly subjective.

The college admissions process has its problems, but testing is not one of them. So why is it such a problem in all the grades leading up to college? Because we confuse testing with assessment.

Employers are similarly thoughtful in their evaluations of potential employees. Perhaps if school were more like the places we wanted kids to end up, more kids would end up in those places.

As our nation’s Educator in Chief, the Secretary could straighten us out on this issue.

The PR Opportunity

Recently, I found a quote attributed to Rahm Emmanuel: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is that] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

I think the Secretary has done quite a bit to ratchet up the feeling of crisis in our schools. The political advantage in doing this is obvious; the advantage to our nation is not.

If we’re in a crisis now, we were certainly in one ten years ago, and most definitely ten years before that. In fact, applying the “The Theory of Comparative Crises”, education in America has been in a constant state of crisis for as long as anyone can remember.

And that’s the problem: we only remember the crisis.

This makes it hard to see that anything good ever happens. It turns a nation of can-do optimists into doubters and cynics. Nothing could be good, we think, because we’re in a crisis.

The crisis mentality also pushes us toward bad short-term decision-making—toward crisis decision-making, the most desperate kind of decision-making.

Secretary Duncan could change this. But he has chosen not to. The main reason we are dealing with a war on teachers, low morale, and a lack of public confidence is because our nation’s educational leader has chosen to focus his energy on crisis rather than on courage.

Change grounded in crisis can sometimes be dramatic. But when the crisis is over, the change is usually over, too. Our challenges in education are generational. Our thinking, therefore, must be generational as well. Short-term “wag the dog” tactics may get a program or two created, a law or two passed, but they won’t bring us closer to our real goal of providing a quality education for every child.

If Plan B stood for “Be a leader”, the Secretary would be leading us toward solutions, not attempting to intimidate Congress.

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

How many Secretaries of Education have had their terms coincide with the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act? Not many. This legislation has perhaps the most wide-ranging effects of any action any Secretary could be involved with, yet what is the Secretary’s involvement at this time? Playing chicken with Congress, granting waivers, making crisis-oriented statements that inflate the percentage of potentially “failing” schools, etc.

Secretary Duncan is bright and ambitious. Why would he spend political capital trying to push Congress around? Doesn’t he marginalize himself when he does this? Doesn’t he take himself out of the game of ESEA reauthorization?

The blueprint was not a great start. But now he’s making things worse. Secretary Duncan has the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to be “in the room” when the big decisions get made. But he’s choosing to alienate Congress instead.

If Plan B stands for “Backroom deals”, the Secretary may have find himself out in the lobby waiting with all the rest of us to see what Congress will do.

Education is Opportunity

Education is opportunity, and the Secretary surely understands this as well as anyone in the country. Which is why his tactics of late have seemed so strange.

He took the opportunity to tell us how bad things were going to be in the “Era of the New Normal”. Then he took the opportunity to tell us that more than four fifths of our schools would be failing. Now he is taking the opportunity to… grab the spotlight? Pick a fight he can’t win? Further enrage states' rights-oriented governors?

Perhaps Plan B stands for “Barely breathing”. Perhaps this is the Secretary’s last gasp effort to leave his mark.

Would that he had chosen to create a different opportunity.

The primary target of Secretary Duncan’s vow to exempt states from problematic provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act is the law’s call for school accountability. The law requires states to set student achievement standards, test students against the standards, report the results by categories of students, and move to improve schools where any group of students repeatedly fails to meet standards.

The feds had never attempted to hold local educators’ feet to the fire in such an aggressive way prior to the passage of the 2001 law, which was the latest incarnation of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And the law’s accountability demands have pushed educators to pay greater attention to the needs of English-language-learners and other often-neglected students.

But the way NCLB requires states to measure school performance—by taking a snap-shot of how many students per group meet state standards in a given year—has advantaged schools with more affluent students and encouraged states to take a range of counterproductive steps in an effort to reduce the number of their schools that flunk the NCLB test, including lowering the student achievement bar. Duncan recently reported that upwards of 80 percent of the nation’s public schools could be labeled “failing” under NCLB once the results of 2010-11 testing are tallied this summer.

To address the problem, the Obama administration has proposed that states take the reform cudgel to only their lowest-performing schools (particularly the bottom 5 percent), rather than to any school that falls short with any group of students at any grade level, as the law currently requires. The administration wants to preserve the law’s insistence that states test nearly every student in math and reading at several grade levels every year and report every school’s results publicly, it just doesn’t want to put in reform jail every school that commits the minor crimes of missing the mark with a single group of students or at a single grade level. Transparency is a sufficient deterrent to the many schools with minor performance weaknesses, the administration argues. More serious interventions are best imposed on the worst performers.

This is what Duncan wants to achieve with his waivers (relatedly, he would let states out from under NCLB’s pipe-dream requirement that schools have all their students meeting state expectations by 2014). But he’s got a problem: Democrat leaders on education in the House and Senate don’t think the administration’s transparency strategy is tough enough to leverage real reforms. Nor do many of its allies in the civil rights community such as the Education Trust and reform advocacy groups like Democrats for Education Reform.

The rift between the administration and its fellow democrats was on display at a recent NCLB symposium at the Center for American Progress. Rep. George Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House education committee and an NCLB author, was asked how the administration and Congressional democrats were going to reconcile their differences on the accountability question. His answer: “I don’t know.”

One thing’s for sure: If Duncan goes the waiver route over the objection of Hill leaders in his own party, republicans will have a field day.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has focused national attention on the need for every school to be held accountable for raising student achievement to high academic standards. But most educators, researchers, and members of Congress now see the problems that make this law impossible to sustain. Recently, Secretary Arne Duncan indicated that as many as 82 percent of public schools could be labeled as failing because of its fatally flawed premises, including the overemphasis on once-a-year state assessments to judge whether a school is successful or failing.

The law has been due for a reauthorization for more than four years, but with other pressing national issues and many new members of Congress who simply do not understand the complexities or intentions of the law, the political will is lacking.

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) applauds Secretary Duncan for addressing the reality that school districts will be required to expend scarce time and money to meet flawed mandates until Congress is willing and able to make critical changes. One example is the provision for Supplemental Educational Services (SES): Many schools will be required to set aside 20 percent of their Title I funds to offer school choice or tutoring services by private providers, which is not a research-based strategy. At a time when school districts can no longer avoid budget cuts that directly impact students, this money needs to be spent on classroom programs. The Center for Public Education’s report, “Cutting to the Bone: How the economic crisis effects schools,” (link: http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Public-education/Cutting-to-the-bone-At-a-glance) analyzed the long-term impact of this unprecedented budget crunch and noted, “Today’s primary school children may graduate from high school before their districts can afford to reinvest in quality teachers, small classes, and proven educational programs.”

As Dan Domenech mentioned, NSBA is working with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) on a local school district resolution and petition drive (link: http:// www.nsba.advocacy) to show that school districts need regulatory relief immediately, before the start of the new school year.

NSBA has several concerns and questions about Duncan’s proposal, particularly his ability to put this process in place in just a few weeks. We are also concerned that he plans to require states to apply for waivers in exchange for specific reforms, an issue that only replaces one set of regulations with another. This also could cause further delays and complicate matters if Congress goes in a different direction in reauthorizing ESEA.

Our view is that the best approach would be for Duncan to simply issue rules that would relieve school districts from NCLB’s ineffective and wasteful requirements, such as the 20 percent SES set-aside, until a new ESEA is implemented. We’ve asked all school boards to join the NSBA/AASA petition and resolution drive to ensure that our federal lawmakers get the message that the onerous burdens of NCLB must be removed immediately.

You have to give Team Duncan credit for keeping at it with this whole reauthorization thing, whether you agree with them or not on the substance (NCLB is having a dire negative effect on public education) or the tactics (they're calling it a "flexibility package" but I call it a "recess reauthorization").

It's long been clear that Duncan could waive some of the NCLB provisions -- after all, he's been granting waivers to states all along. Blanket waivers would be something slightly new, but if they were limited to the most obvious elements -- the 2014 deadline for 100 percent proficiency, for example -- that'd be nothing to bat an eye at. Overdue reauthorizations aren't necessarily a big deal, either. It's not like the appropriators won't fund programs with expired authorizations. New strings? That's another matter.

Indeed, more than a week in and there's still pretty much no one (besides weasely state and district administrators) who will admit to liking Duncan's Plan B "recess reauthorization" -- though Patrick Eduflack Riccards comes close. Even more important, it's not at all clear that the idea has done anything to jumpstart reauthorization talks on the Hill, either (the underlying goal of the Duncan proposal).

Right from the start, the responses have been pretty negative from the Hill -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- as well as from the chattering class, as you can see from this roundup: Will States Accept Duncan-Style Reforms for NCLB Relief? EdWeek: "He offered so few details about what that relief would look like that the reporters spent much of the call flummoxed over what the news actually was"... Duncan's Disregard for the Constitution Rick Hess: "Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday"... Duncan Wants to Use NCLB Sanctions to Force More Education Reform Measures FireDogLake: "This just sounds like another version of Race to the Top, only a bit worse"... What's Plan C Anyway? Eduwonk: "Congress doesn't like being preempted - and there is, of course, a natural tension between two co-equal branches of government. But there are also a host of policy issues at play in this specific instance"... "Give me the money or I shoot my foot!" and other political theories of education reform Sherman Dorn: "If I had a crystal ball, I would guess this trial balloon will sink ignominiously by the end of the summer"... Arnius Duncanus? Mike Petrilli: "Duncan's plans to tie regulatory relief to new requirements indicates an incredible amount of tone-deafness, not to mention Constitutional ignorance"...Give Us What We Want Or You're Dead Jim Horn: "There is a time bomb in your basement, and it is set to explode in 2014, maybe sooner. Only two people have the ability to disarm it"...

The followup reaction in recent days hasn't been much more encouraging. NEA president Dennis Van Roekel came out strongly against the idea, calling it "more of the same bad patchwork quilt of disparities in our education system." House Democrat George Miller criticized the plan at yesterday's CAP event, according to EdWeek (Rep. Miller Not a Fan of Duncan's NCLB Waiver Plan) as did AFT president Randi Weingarten, who said a waiver approach "creates a disincentive to get the law reauthorized (at about 44:20). Chairman Kline noted on NPR that Race To The Top was already one giant waiver and NCLB didn't need to be turned into another.

Things haven't gotten better over the last couple of days, either, with a variety of folks weighing in against the idea (including even CAP!): Can We Get 'Plain Writing' on Duncan's NCLB Waiver Plan? Politics K12: 'How about Duncan explains what he means by "regulatory relief" in exchange for a "basket of reforms"?'... Reauthorize, Reauthorize, Reauthorize CAP: 'The secretary should grant waivers, not regulatory relief'... Reauthorization, Waivers, and the Third Variable Problem DFER: 'The decibel level from the usual suspects inside the Beltway is enough to rattle anyone's nerves, especially those new to the game.'

Indeed, Duncan's rattled saber-rattling seems to have done little more than piss off the Hill. Indeed, members of both parties indicated in their remarks that -- publicly at least -- they're not pleased with Duncan's taunts. Maybe Duncan's team thinks there's nothing to lose, given how annoyed they already are. Perhaps the White House is angling to blame Congress for its inaction on education reform, a strategy that hits Senate Dems as well as House Republicans.

It's a double whammy -- folks either don't like the idea of waivers, or they don't like the idea of attaching Race To The Top-like strings, or both. Not even NCLB's harshest critics -- the Diane Ravitches of the world -- have come out in favor of the waiver plan. They don't like NCLB, but they don't like -- or trust -- the Duncan team to come up with something that they'd like much better.

This impatience to do something is all the more fascinating given how few real-world results we've seen from Race To The Top so far and how lackluster the Department's implementation of SIG has been. And that's the main problem here. If it was simple regulatory relief that Duncan was offering, that might be one thing. But Duncan et al are selling their Race to the Top agenda as part of the deal and no one knows yet whether Race is going to work. The tough work of making sure that Race generates some real changes has barely begun with state implementation visits (Department Officials Visit Massachusetts to Learn About Race Implementation), and House Republicans are moving ahead with their piecemeal approach.

Adapted From the Huffington Post. All rights reserved.

I keep wondering what Mr. Duncan’s like at the family dinner table.

“Dad, please pass the catsup.”

“I’ll consider it son, but your sister also wants the catsup. And I think I’ll only give it to one of you. How about each of you stand on your head? Whoever can maintain it longer gets the catsup.”

If the waivers are good policy and it’s within Duncan’s authority, he should be giving them out like Halloween candy. It’s harmful to withhold a useful opportunity or resource from a state just because the state refuses to completely tow the EdSec’s party line. This fixation he has with “competition” (coercion, extortion, shakedown … you say potato, I say potahto…) is very troubling.

Arne Duncan has a -- potentially -- good idea about a waiver approach to next-generation education policy.

Most of the negative reaction seems driven by an assumption that a state would get its waiver in return for doing just what the Secretary wants. Nobody can really tell yet what he wants. So be safe: Be negative.

What if, instead, Duncan asked each state -- individually -- to design the education policy it would like to see? That would combine (a) the actions the state itself would take with (b) the waivers it'd like to get from national law. A negotiation would ensue. Duncan could approve only what agreed would meet national goals. He could hold the waiver until he saw the new state legislation: No more money for promises.

But we might get a much more diverse, perhaps more appropriate, national policy. That was in fact James B. Conant's concept of 'national policy' in 1964: the states acting, nation-wide.

It'd be worth a try. Certainly the traditional federal strategy -- of imposing on systems that exist in state law a standard solution designed in Washington -- hasn't been a crashing success. Consider:

In the 1960s everyone decided 'urban growth' was a national problem. The key elements of the urban system, including land-use law and the property tax, were clearly in state law. But something happening everywhere must be a national problem, so requiring action by the national government. And in 1966 Washington moved to take control.

Unable to reach state law directly, the Johnson administration hit on the idea of requiring that as a condition of receiving federal aid for housing, roads, transit, parks, airports, sewer and water systems and local planning, each metropolitan area would develop a regional plan. To ensure that development conformed to the plan each request for aid would have to be approved by a regional planning body. Washington specified that this be a 'council of governments' (CoG) composed of sitting officials of cities and counties in the region. From this, we were solemnly assured, orderly metropolitan development would proceed.

It was a disaster. Local officials were no way going to put their projects at risk. So they faked it. The regional bodies became 'paper mills', finding every application consistent with the plan or never creating a plan to which any project would not conform. The whole apparatus was shut down by the new administration arriving in 1981.

One state had a better idea. Congressman Don Fraser, Democrat from Minneapolis, amended the COG requirement to add: "except as otherwise provided by state legislation". Yea, a waiver process. The next year Minnesota's Legislature created a representative and politically responsive regional council not composed of sitting local officials. Which worked.

So perhaps now with K-12 education -- another system that can be changed only by changing state law -- Washington should avoid trying to impose the standard-enlightened prescription for what-will-work.

Perhaps Secretary Duncan should simply ask: "What do you think will work?" He might be astonished at the constructive ideas he'd get in return.

We at the American Association of School Administrators, along with the National School Boards Association, have been urging the Secretary of Education to provide school districts with regulatory relief from the provisions of No Child Left Behind. Our resolution has now been adopted and signed on to by over 1000 school districts throughout the nation from all fifty states (https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGttMXRGZXVLT2FFQThKUkk4cHo2WkE6MQ). We are pleased that Secretary Duncan has indicated a willingness to move in the direction of regulatory relief. We too would prefer to see ESEA reauthorized prior to the beginning of the next school year, but it is highly unlikely that it will happen. Meanwhile, school systems throughout America are being ravaged by the economic recession and the end of the federal stimulus dollars. Our surveys of superintendents indicate that 227,000 education jobs are being eliminated for this coming school year. Acceptance of the stimulus dollars now require school systems to provide an unprecedented amount of data that is forcing schools systems to hire people to collect and process the data at the same time that they are laying off classroom teachers. This is all on top of the existing NCLB requirements. Secretary Duncan recently testified before Congress that he expects over eighty percent of the schools in America to fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress this coming school year because of the faulty accountability provisions currently embedded in the law. Failing to make AYP kicks in penalties that have financial repercussions, further adding to a district’s economic distress.

So, with no imminent apparent action by Congress to reauthorize ESEA, we applaud Secretary Duncan for his bold step to bring some relief to America’s schools. We do, however, respectfully disagree with the Secretary in one key component of what he is suggesting. He is proposing a quid pro quo, I give you this if you give me that. We would prefer to see the immediate suspension of the sanctions that impact districts that fail to make AYP. We would also like to see the immediate elimination of the provision that requires schools to set aside twenty percent of their title I funding for choice and supplementary educational services when they fail to make AYP. Neither choice nor SES services have proven to be effective vehicles under the set aside provisions. Yet the twenty percent of funding might well save very necessary teaching jobs.

We have not seen the details of what the Secretary is proposing, but we support his efforts and we are willing to work with him to bring our schools much needed relief from red tape and sanctions that are having an adverse effect on the education of our students.

I usually like this term. It means we might as well bend some rules, if the need justifies it, and normally, this term is associated with good deeds. But, Secretary Arne Duncan’s attempt to start creatively non-complying with NCLB may not be about good deeds, as much as he suggests it is. Throughout the weekend, news reports screamed that Duncan will be granting waivers to a law carefully and painfully put in place to guard against the kind of data abuses and lack of transparency that plagued the nation prior to NCLB’s enactment.

Sure, NCLB is not perfect, and Congress and the past president made lots of mistakes. But the fact is that without NCLB, we simply don’t have a clue how schools or students are performing. We can argue some bars are lower and some higher, that some schools that get labeled do so unfairly. For the most part, however, it works. It shines sun on the dirty little secret of even the best schools that neglect their neediest students. And it captured our attention and put the establishment on the defensive. Most important, it gave parents a tool to use as a lever for change.

I’m not sure 82 percent of schools are really failing or that Duncan believes that. I think he wants his own lever, and Congress isn’t playing. Duncan wants to give well-meaning states and districts flexibility away from NCLB mandates. It’s too punitive, not flexible enough, he says. This from the man that wants national standards, which are hardly flexible!

Perhaps this is just a way to fulfill pre-election promises. The president did tell the unions that he’d fix NCLB. We have never quite understood how, but money was mentioned, as was more flexibility.

Republicans in Congress agree that NCLB is rigid. Congressman John Kline (R-Minn.) has been clear that he wants to fight the right balance of carrot and stick. They have bought some of the school board arguments about fairness and funding, but they also understand that throwing out the baby with the bath water gives the establishment a pass. So they are taking their time — months so far, not years — to figure out what is the best formula for both ensuring accountability for funding one receives while at the same time, giving them more leeway to respond to the pressure.

The public needs to know what we’re getting for the money we spend. Waivers don’t make parents’ jobs easier - they make school administrators’ loads lighter. I’m not for that as long as more than half of all school kids still can’t do most subjects proficiently. Let’s stop worrying about lightening loads and focus on getting kids into successful schools, punitive-feeling or not.

If Duncan has his way, states will have to “choose” between the frying pan of NCLB and the fire of RTTT. Or so it seems from his vague language.

The frying pan: Under NCLB, ever more schools will face “in need of improvement” (INOI) status and then ever-escalating sanctions as they fail to make “adequate yearly progress.” Once in that status, schools must spend money on “supplemental services” that haven’t proven to help and student transfers that are rarely available. Should they fail to make the ever-increasing AYP requirements, they’ll move on to additional mostly ineffective options - ones Duncan included in Race to the Top.

When Duncan issued RTTT, he was challenged to provide evidence the options had a reasonable chance of working. He could not. Meanwhile, steadily accumulating evidence shows that NCLB has not improved schools but has demoralized teachers, narrowed curriculum, and promoted massive over-testing and teaching to the test.

The fire: These unhelpful RTTT options are what schools and districts will have to choose from under the “fire” option: sacking educators (mandated by the Secretary who loves to praise teachers while attacking them), privatizing control, or closing schools. These all tend to disrupt communities. If they worked with any consistency, then the price might be worth it, but they don’t. In any case, better options exist.

States also will probably have to judge teachers and principals by student test scores “in significant part.” Never mind that Duncan praised Montgomery County’s teacher evaluation system which does not use test scores and whose superintendent turned down RTTT money so they would not have to (though the Maryland may yet destroy the good to impose the bad). Or that rating teachers on student scores is dangerously flawed. Once again, watch what Duncan does, not what he says.

If I were a state, I’d stay with the “frying pan.” There isn’t much of anything a state can do to or for most of the “failing” schools, anyway, since there is no money to help them make real improvements and few staff to enforce expanded sanctions. Even if it means waiting a few more years till Congress can get its act together to craft a new law, the wait will be worth it, especially if Congress does remove NCLB’s many damaging requirements.

What Duncan should do is use the waiver authority the law grants him to tell states they don’t have to put any more schools in “INOI” status. The schools doing least well on test scores have already been identified and the mandated changes by and large aren’t beneficial. No one will be helped by expanding NCLB’s sanctioned schools, least of all low-income and minority-group children.

States should reject Duncan’s deal. Congress should craft a new law that includes positive changes such as those recommended by the Forum on Educational Accountability.

Secretary Duncan has acknowledged the need to intervene if Congress doesn’t act, but he’s clearly signaled that any relief would be coupled with more unmanageable hurdles for schools and students. There is widespread and bipartisan agreement that NCLB is a flawed law that harms every school and every student. Relief that is not provided to every school and every student isn't relief; it's just more of the same bad patchwork quilt of disparities in our education system.

The logic just doesn’t add up. The U.S. Department of Education acknowledges that the law is broken, but at the same time, the department keeps suggesting more layers of bureaucracy when we should be peeling them away. Our students and schools need regulatory relief, not more hoops to jump through on a never-ending obstacle course. Our cash-strapped schools don’t have the resources to meet the many existing mandates, much less the time and resources to meet another layer of rules or for a lengthy application process to get the government to lift those burdens.

NEA members – 3.2 million teachers and other educators – want accountability systems with multiple measures of school performance and student learning. They want Congress to revise testing rules to allow students to show what they really know and can do. They want a system that considers students with disabilities and English Language Learners. And they want Congress to align the Highly Qualified Teacher requirement with the needs of rural and small schools and teachers who teach multiple subjects. In other words, they want Congress to get it right this time for them and their students.

Frankly, it's sad to see what's happened to Arne Duncan during the term. What a decline it has been from the strong, innovative, early days of reform and Race to the Top to the sad and rather desperate games of 2011.

The Administration has been so anxious to get an education bill passed that it started the year by playing a silly game of Chicken Little with the Congress. A full 82% of schools in America were going to be punished for not making AYP unless the ESEA was amended, they threatened. Nobody believed the ploy, and the Administration's credibility was badly damaged.

Now, the Administration is threatening the Congress that it will administer "Plan B" if the ESEA is not reauthorized by August. What "Plan B" will be, no one knows for sure. And that uncertainty immediately further eroded the credibility of the threat and the overall authority of the Administration.

If "Plan B" were to consist of administrative fixes to NCLB that are appropriate but NOT weakening, that might be a reasonable course. Indeed there are certain administrative steps this Administration could and should have taken all along the way.

For example, Duncan has complained from day one that NCLB has "dummied down" standards in the states. I wrote an article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation showing that this has actually and generally not occurred.

But, as I mention in that article, Duncan could take steps to make it easier for states to raise standards without making it more difficult to attain annual measurable objectives.

Whether the Congress is able to reauthorize this year or not, there are other reasonable steps the Administration could consider as we approach 2014 that would create transitions without undermining the critically important accountability provisions of NCLB.

Yet, while the complaining continues, there seems to be little interest in exploring ideas of this sort. Instead every major administrative step the Administration has taken has had a weakening effect. And it appears that - for a favored few - more is in store.

Rather than doing the quiet, hard, and collaborative work that would be helpful, the Administration, apparently for political reasons, would rather scare the public and the Congress into thinking that the sky is falling and that desperate measures are needed.

To what end? To water down accountability for everyone? Apparently, the idea is not that simple. This crowd has an even more nefarious plan in mind: only those states and districts who agree to take federally favored steps will be let off the hook for accountability. So, outputs will matter less for those who implement federally favored inputs!

How did we get to this craziness?

For whatever flaws it has, NCLB correctly pushed states and districts to implement systems of accountability for closing achievement gaps while letting them make their own decisions on how to do so.

The Administration needs to right the ship. An immediate reauthorization is unlikely. Yet, a lot of good can be done to move the reform agenda and re-build the reform consensus that existed when NCLB was passed.

Duncan should cut the drama, quit the desperation moves, and reach out broadly for problem solving rather than scoring political points. If he would do so, he might get back on course.

I hope he does.

More of a delayed response than a bombshell: The Administration has finally responded to calls for the Department of Education to take action on behalf of students, teachers, and schools being unnecessarily harmed by NCLB requirements while Congress delays the full reauthorization of ESEA. Parents and educators’ have pleaded for months for the DOE to use its authority over the Law’s faulty implementation, including a letter from the 16-member Learning First Alliance just over a month ago.

The Ed Department had balked at resorting to regulatory relief, hoping that the public outcry would push Congress toward a speedier reauthorization, and one that included more of the Administration’s goals as outlined in its Blueprint. Now, faced with continued political inertia, Duncan has gone to what he calls “Plan B,” the issuance of waivers for some of the NCLB penalties. The plan (details of which are still very fuzzy) may help some students and schools get a respite from the NCLB axe; but it is far from being a solution.

What appears to be a just another partisan stalemate over reauthorization may actually be the latest rumblings of long-simmering political and social disagreements over our commitment to public education. When taken in context with the increasing denigration of teachers, demonizing of teacher unions, and the desecration of the ideal of quality public education for every child, the current reauthorization quandary points back to how and why the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was necessary.

Some critics have pointed to the glacial legislative progress as another reason why the Federal government should not be involved in public education policy, along with renewed calls for eliminating the Department of Education itself. In the face of such overreaction, it’s important to remember that Federal education policies, such as NCLB, do not affect all schools---but primarily those whose children depend on Federal funding and oversight to compensate for continued inequitable, incompetent, or indictable allocation of educational resources at the state and local levels. The Federal government’s role in education policy increased as citizens turned to it for protection and redress that could not be obtained at the local level. Cuts in state budgets, such as those in North Carolina--long considered an educational leader among Southern states--highlight both the continued need for Federal role and the larger need to break the link between local property taxes and public education. Public education should be as much of a legislative and budget priority as national defense.

As I’ve noted before:

President Obama has asserted more than once that a child's zip code should not determine the quality of his or her education. While I understand his point of reference, and cheer the concept, the reality is as long as school funding in our nation is still heavily dependent on local property taxes, poor children will always be underserved and those who work with them will continue to expend precious energies trying to make up for unnecessary gaps in resources and services. Even long-standing programs such as Title I, have not come anywhere close to bringing educational services in high-poverty districts to parity with their middle-class counterparts within most states. Has the fact that most of what we now label "failing schools" are also the schools that have been historically underfunded and under-resourced registered on those who promote wholesale staff replacements as the key to turning those schools around?

For all our talk, as a nation, about the importance of education, it remains to be seen whether we will bring our policy and our budgets into alignment with our words.

Cross posted at TeachMoore (Teacher Leaders Network)