Those were the days. Let’s not go back. (Photo by Ralf-Finn Hestoft-Pool/Getty Images)
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The first hundred days are over, and education is slowly shifting from crisis management to finding a new normal. The Biden administration is poised to invest a historically huge pile of money in education, even as the education department has been picking up key appointees with Obama era gigs in their resumes.
Joe Biden promised to avoid Trump/DeVos era mistakes; that’s an easy enough task. Biden has yet to offer any insights about lessons learned from the mistakes and bad policies of the Obama/Duncan education department, and that continues to be concerning. Here are some critical lessons that Biden and Education Secretary Cardona should keep in mind moving forward, so that we don’t suffer through the mistakes of the past again.
Enough With The Big Standardized Test Already
We have had test-centered accountability for two decades. We could delve into the arguments about the quality of the tests, the wisdom of testing, the distortion of education, the uselessness of the “data” at the classroom level, and the validity of a single-test measure of education. But let’s just settle for this—an entire generation of test-centered accountability has not moved any needles. It has led to none of the “improvements” that were promised as a justification.
Test-centered accountability doesn’t work. And it comes with huge financial and opportunity costs. It’s past time to find another way.
No Competitive Grants
Making states and districts compete for resources is backwards. It’s like saying, “Many of these runners don’t have decent shoes to run in, so let’s have a race and give nice new shoes just to the top three finishers.” The ability to compete effectively for a grant is not necessarily, or even probably, linked to actually needing the grant.
Do Not Dictate From The Top
There are many lessons to be learned from the Common Core debacle under Obama/Duncan, but a major lesson is that top-down policy edicts that have to be implemented in thousands of different classrooms in different communities with different students are doomed. As a policy rule moves down through layers and layers of organization it becomes like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. When the government policy arrives at the actual classroom, it will be up to the classroom teacher to resolve the inevitable conflict between the official rules and their own professional skills and knowledge.
Taking a Common Core approach to pre-K or civic education will turn out badly.
Talk To Teachers First
Obama/Duncan education policy was predicated on the notion that teachers were the problem, not the on-the-ground workers with the professional expertise needed to achieve success. Consequently, that administration didn’t listen to teachers (unless they were carefully vetted and selected to be in tune with the administration).
There has not been an education policy failure in the last twenty years that was not greeted by teachers saying, “I could have told you that wasn’t going to work.” Talk to teachers first.
Policy Expertise Does Not Equal Educational Expertise
Dealing with agencies, elected officials, policy development, government meetings, all the high-level back-and-front-room maneuvering that keeps DC functioning—those are all skills. The fact that someone has developed those skills to the point that they are good at “doing education policy” does not mean they know a good policy from a bad one.
Teach for America has cranked out hundreds of policy experts who use their two years passing through a classroom as a sign that they are education experts. Do not be fooled.
Schools And Businesses Are Different
There’s an old saying—when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. Well, when you mix education and business, you get business. There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about business interests, but they are not the same as educational interests. Schools do not exist only and exclusively to fill the needs of businesses. Businesses asked to address education needs and concerns can be expected to put those lower on their list of priorities than the needs and priorities of the business. If this administration wants to support public-private partnerships for education, it must take a role of watching out for the interests of schools and the communities they serve. Market forces are no substitute for reasonable government regulation and oversight, and the administration needs to remember that charter and private schools are, mostly, businesses.
After decades of the modern reform movement backed by both parties, it’s time for something else from DC. Here’s hoping the current administration can provide it.
