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December 4, 2009
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The perfect is the enemy of the good
That's a phrase my father likes to use. And it's a very good fit for how the administration is treating the embattled but incredibly important and effective DC voucher program. From the Washington Times:
It is disgraceful the way Education Secretary Arne Duncan dodges and weaves while back-stabbing some 1,700 D.C. schoolchildren whose hopes and dreams are set on the District's school voucher program. Taking a position of moral and political cowardice, the Obama administration refuses to intervene to save the hugely popular program from congressional Democrats determined to kill it. Mr. Duncan even refuses to address the District's program except by indirection and obfuscation.Studies of the six-year-old Opportunity Scholarship Program by Georgetown University, the Manhattan Institute and the Department of Education itself have found that vouchers foster tremendous parental satisfaction, impressive educational results and a greater degree of voluntary racial integration than in regular public schools in Washington.
At just $14 million annually for the $7,500 individual scholarships, the program is eminently affordable. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and former Mayors Anthony A. Williams and Marion Barry - all liberal Democrats - all wholeheartedly support the scholarships despite their other political differences.
Yet when Mr. Duncan is asked why the administration does not support the program, he repeatedly changes the subject to talk about broader educational policies. Our own editorial page staff member Kerry Picket asked him about it at a forum last Wednesday. Here's what he said:
"At the end of the day the goal is about fixing the system, and I think we have to be more ambitious. As a country we like to save one or two children in a neighborhood and let the other 500 drown and then go home and sleep well at night. I think we have to be much more ambitious as a federal government, as a state government, as a local district. Our goal is to save every single child. This turn-around effort that we're talking about does that. Now I can take you to schools in Chicago, I can take you to schools in Philadelphia, I can take you to schools in New York where the overwhelming majority of students were failing. And by turning those schools around, the overwhelming majority of students are succeeding - not pulling one or two out to save them, the entire community..."
Excuse us, Mr. Secretary, but how does it hurt efforts in Philadelphia and New York to keep a program alive in the District? And how does "saving" 1,700 children hamper efforts to save all of them? Mr. Duncan's mumbo jumbo is thin cover for dancing to the tune of the teacher unions. As representatives of the National Education Association told Congress in March, "Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA." And no wonder: If parents have more control of their children's education, the unions lose their own monopoly control. It is a control that apparently extends deep into the Education Department as well, and all the way to the top of the Obama administration.
President Obama's team isn't bringing any hope or change to our nation's failing urban schools. In fact, this administration is squashing the only hope some families have for getting a decent education. As usual, liberal politics is trumping principle -- and schoolchildren are the ones paying the price.
Perhaps that last sentence will be too partisan for some. So if that's true for you, just substitute this: "Too often when it comes to education reform, the perfect is the enemy of the good -- and schoolchildren are the ones paying the price."
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Comments:
When you want to create innovation and culture change in a large organization with a history of mental rigidity, you don't do it in a way that requires changing the whole thing at once. When IBM wanted to start making & selling personal computers, for example, they did it with an autonomous business unit, not by trying to get it done through their mainstream organization. When GM flirted with the idea of changing the way cars were made & sold, they set up a separate division called Saturn (and if they'd had the guts to keep it separate & resource it properly, rather than folding it back in to the functional baronies, they might have avoided their current pathetic status)
Saying that we're not going to fix public education until we can fix the whole blob at once is equivalent to saying we're not going to fix public education.
I agree with David and Erin here that reform often gets shafted in the name of revolution. However, I think there's another issue here: setting predecent. Once vouchers are given government sanction, a great deal of energy is going to be spent, throughout the country, on spreading voucher systems. Because it's not much of a fix, and because the problem is so immense, vouchers could wind up being more of a distraction from the problem rather than a useful reform of it. We do need some sort of educational "new deal," pardon the expression. It won't be a whole-scale revolution of the system, but it could be a wide variety of reforms. We need more pragmatic tinkering across the board: more experimental schools, more trial and error. Let's open up gigantic Chinese style classrooms, with 100 kids learning math at once. Let's open up tiny inquiry-based schools. Let's try more vocational-oriented high schools, and let's try more IB programs. All of this will require money and a redistribution of funding away from property tax-driven budgets. Let's try more charter schools, and let's get big business involved in other schools. And let's get quality researchers looking, across the board, at all the programs to determine what helps the most under what particular social conditions.
