The big news in education reform these days is the report released last Thursday by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. It's drawn a lot of praise from different circles of the reform debate, and anyone who sees education as a critical means to ensuring the well-being of the American economy will likely find value in the report's bold recommendations. But some groups have criticized one of the boldest steps that the commission recommends: a complete do-over for the way school boards and local communities function in school-policy decision making to effectively make boards school-authorizers who contract out educational services to contractors who then make educational decisions. Coupled with a recommendation to remove local funding streams for education and replace it with a state-based system with new dollars ($19 billion, to be exact) to ensure that well-off communities do not lose any funding from the switch, the commission is certainly not interested in making any friends with the report.

I've sait it before and I'll say it again - there are many ways to skin the cat, so to speak, if our interests are to dramatically improve the quality of education provided to the 50+ million children in America. A contracted school model, weighted student funding reform, standards reform, teacher quality improvement, and many of the other recommendations made in this report and in other reports could all help students, but to me the biggest question that remains unanswered is this: where will the political demand come from to see these changes implemented properly? Last time I checked there were still more than 11 million kids going to school in buildings with inadequate facilities, and as I've already noted, millions of kids can't see the blackboards. Improving education, whether its for economic, democratic, or principled reasons, is not just a problem of technical know-how that this report attempts to answer, it's a question of public and political resolve. And it'll take ordinary citizens, young and old together, who care deeply and want to see a better day for all our children to bring this resolve about.

One other point on this note: the report, predictably, does not mention the importance of valuing the experiences and viewpoints of students themselves in their schools a single time. Even if the frame of reference for the report is how we can create schools to churn out skilled workers, wouldn't it be nice for the adults who wrote the report to admit that the people they're trying to help have important things to contribute too?