There's been a recent uptick in reformster nostalgia, a wistfulness among Ye Reformy Olde Garde for a rosy past when there was a bipartisan consensus surrounding swell reform ideas like the free market and testing and the free market and No Child Left Behind and school choice and testing (e.g.
Arne Duncan op-ed).
Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute)
has been substacking and gathering an assortment of all the old players to comment of education issues, running the gamut from A to B on various education policy debate topics, and in connection with that had a conversation over at Ed Week with Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) under the headline "
Can School Reform Be Bipartisan Again?" Which is a question that certainly makes some assumptions, but let's take a look at what's going on.
Petrilli's stated motivation is fine. For one, he notices that substack is emerging as a way for people to scratch their writing and reading itch without having to slog through a variety of social media (some of which have become extra sloggy), and he joins a large club there (I know because I attend all the meetings myself). He also misses "the early days of Twitter and blogging, when we had robust debates about policy, tactics, and direction." Also understandable, and he explains what happened:
Unfortunately, as social media became a cesspool and the reform movement fractured along ideological lines, those conversations became full of vitriol and then largely went silent.
Sure. The ed reform coalition has always been complicated. The spine back in the day was a combo of free marketeers. social engineers, and tech/data overlords. Then Trump was elected, and then the culture wars were launched. Point to the moment when Jay Greene left academic reformsterdom and went to the Heritage Foundation and started writing pieces like "Time for the School Choice Movement to Embrace the Culture War."
It's not just that the ed reform movement became infected with Culture Panic. It's that the Culture Panic crowd is, almost without exception, a bunch of very unserious people.
Over the past decade-plus, I've come to understand that the reformster tent is large and contains many different ideas and motivations. The reformster crowd includes folks who have some core beliefs and values that I believe are fundamentally flawed and the way to conclusions that I deeply disagree with. But they are people that I can have a conversation with, who use and receive words like their purpose is to convey meaning and not as some sort of jousting tool.
The culture panic crowd is not serious about any of it. They are veiled and obtuse, deliberately misunderstanding what is said to them and using words as tools to manipulate and lever their desired results. They aren't serious about choice or educational quality or anything other than acquiring a dominant cultural position and personal power. There have always been some culture panic types within the reform tent (e.g. Betsy DeVos), but for half a decade they have been large and loud within the movement. "Let's use choice to encourage embettering competition" was replaced with "Get those trans kids off the track team." One of those is wrong, and one of those is simply unserious.
Petrilli points to what he calls "reform fatigue," the result of two or three decades of hard push by reformsters. He calls it society's tendency to want the pendulum to swing back to the middle. "Eventually, the public grew tired, and the opponents of reform became more motivated than we, its defenders."
He and Hess also point to the argument that Bush-Obama school reform was "simplistic and self-righteous," and Petrilli acknowledges the self-righteous part. Without naming Duncan, he says
I cringe when some reformers return to that self-righteous language, especially versions of “We know what works, we just need the political will to do it.” It’s a lot more complicated than that.
Petrilli also gives the movement credit for getting "big things" right, like the idea that "The American education system, with its 14,000 districts, elected school boards, and entrenched teachers’ unions, is not going to improve without external pressure." And he points to "student achievement" growing during the 1990s and 2000s, by which he actually means test scores.
Well, I think he's off the mark here. Fatigue? Simplistic? No, the reason that reform flagged was because it didn't work. Focusing on high stakes testing didn't achieve much, and most of what it did achieve was to damage school systems in numerous ways, from the narrowing of the curriculum to teaching an entire generation that the point of education is a Big Standardized Test. That and it became evident that test scores were a boon to data-grabbing tech overlords and people who simply wanted a tool for dismantling public education.
The premise of a necessary "external pressure" is also problematic. Petrilli suggests that the pressure can come from "top-down accountability or bottom-up market competition," but I don't believe either of those will do what he imagines they will. Top-down accountability guarantees policies that are mis-interpreted as they pass down through layers of bureaucracy and which result in a compliance culture in thrall to Campbell's Law. Market competition is a terrible fit for education (see Greene's Law-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing). One of the bizarre fundamentals of the reform movement is the notion that educators are not doing a better job because they have not been offered the optimum combination of bribes and/or threats.
Petrilli and Hess do not confront one of the fundamental flaws of reform, which is the notion that the Big Standardized Test is a good and effective measure of educational achievement, as if the question of how to measure something as vast and variable as the effectiveness of education is all settled. When David Brooks says that Republican states are kicking the Democrats' butts in education, all he's doing is comparing scores on a single math and reading test. As a country we have repeated this so many times that it is accepted wisdom, but the Big Standardized Test is just an emperor behind the curtain with no clothes. Will raising this student's BS Test scores give the student a better, richer, fuller, happier life than they would have had with their old lower scores? There isn't a shred of evidence for that assertion, but in the meantime, we keep pretending that a single mediocre math and reading test tells us everything we need to know about education.
Petrilli makes a passing reference to how unions never liked "testing, and especially accountability" (he has maybe forgotten their full-throated, member-opposed embrace of Common Core), which is just a rage-making assertion, because teachers and their unions have never, ever been against accountability. What they have opposed is accountability based on junk that has no connection to the work they actually do. Let's not forget that test scores soaked in VAM sauce gave us accountability measures that fluctuated wildly or that had to be run through other mechanisms in order to "evaluate" teachers via students and subjects they didn't even teach. The "accountability" created under Bush-Obama involved an awful lot of making shit up.
Did test scores go up for a while? Sure. I was there. They went up because we learned how to align the schools to the test. Not to the education-- to the test.
Petrilli muses about the nature of the reformster coalition, like the old one with members on the "ideological left, including Education Trust and other civil rights organizations" and I must confess that I never saw much "left" in the reform coalition. Petrilli says maybe we'll get back to a world where the parties fight over the center and then business groups and civil rights groups will become involved, and maybe, though reform has had plenty of chance to demonstrate how it can lift up minorities and the poor and it, well, didn't do that. If "populism" stays big, Petrilli muses, maybe they'll have to get involved with parents' groups and alternative teacher organizations "like the one that Ryan Walters now runs."
Well, except that would take them right back to a tent full of unserious allies who are not on the left, but are further right than Ye Old Reformy Garde.
I'm inclined to ignore the right-left thing when it comes to ed reform. I think it's more accurate to frame the sides as pro- and anti- public education, and pro-public education voices have always been in very short supply in the reform coalition. Instead, reform positions on public education range from "Let's rebuild everything" to "Let's dismantle it and sell the parts" to "Burn it all down."
Petrilli's smartest bit comes at the end:
For the people in the trenches, I’d encourage them to remember that student learning depends on student effort. And whenever they face a big decision related to curriculum, instruction, discipline policy, grading, AI policy, or anything else bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools, they should ask themselves: Is this going to make it easier or harder for my teachers to motivate their students to work hard and thus to learn?
This is actually pretty good, and it points to my suggestion for the imaginary new revived ed reformster coalition.
Include some actual teachers.
I get there is a challenge here. In the same way that policy wonks and bureaucrats don't have real on-the-ground knowledge of teaching, teachers don't have real on-the-ground knowledge of policy wonkage and promotion. But ed reform continually misses the viewpoint of the people who have to actually implement policy ideas.
Ye Olde Reformy Garde has come a distance since the days when they were hugely dismissive of teachers. Many have caught on to the fact that maybe deliberately alienating the people who have to implement your policy ideas is a poor choice. Maybe, just maybe, they've deduced, most teachers are in the profession because they really want to do a good job, and not because they are lazy sinecure-seeking slackers.
But reformsters still miss the actual aspect of how their ideas play out on the ground, and those insights could save everyone a great deal of time.
And no-- all those education reform leaders who spent two years with Teach For America do not count. Two years is bupkis; a real teacher is barely clearing her career throat after two years.
Would working teachers just defend the current system so fiercely that no reform could happen? Of course not-- walk into any school in the country and the teachers there could tell you ten things about their system that should be fixed. Would teachers support accountability? Of course-- if it were real and realistic. Teachers have a powerful desire to teach next door and downstream from other teachers who are doing a good job.
Lord knows I have no nostalgia for the old days of reform, when every year brought new policies that, from my perspective, ranged from misguided all the way to ethically and educationally wrong. Neither am I nostalgic for the days before modern reform. Public education has always needed to improve, and it always will, because it is a human enterprise.
It would be great to have a reformy movement based on asking the question "How can we make schools better," but way too much of the reformster movement has been about asking "How can we get free market activity injected into the public school system" with answers ranging from "inject market based school choice" all the way to "blow it all up." It has marked itself by and large as an anti-public school movement since the moment that the A Nation At Risk folks were told their report had to show that public schools were failing and we were subjected to decades of pounding into the "common knowledge" that American schools are failing. And if the reform movement wants to revive itself, I suggest they start by owning all of that.
We could have school choice, if that was what we really wanted, and we could have it without the segregation effects, the inefficiency and wasting of taxpayer dollars, without the pockets of really terrible education, without the instability of bad amateur players, without, in short, all the effects we get by trying to create free market school choice (I've explained how elsewhere). But the reformster movement has long seemed far more interested in the Free Market part than the Improving Education part. They have spent forty years explaining that public education is failing because that's the justification for going Free Market (and national standards and high stakes testing) and yet it turns out that none of those things have been particularly helpful at all.
I do sense a new trend in Ye Reformy Olde Garde, and it's there in Petrilli's last paragraph-- a focus on policies "bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools." It's a good choice which might yield some productive discussions, particularly if those discussions are expanded to include people beyond the A to B gamut, because I know where you can find about 3 or 4 million people who are familiar with those day-to-day realities.
