I've written before in this space about the inevitable showdown between the Obama Administration and the nation's leading teachers unions over crucial matters of public policy concerning teacher quality in public schools. For the first seven months of President Obama's term, however, the unions and the White House appeared to be on good terms.

Until now. In a strongly worded letter delivered last week in response to the Administration's bold announcement of its $4.35 billion "Race To The Top" Fund for innovation in school reform, the National Education Association (NEA) finally distanced itself from what it called the President's "top-down approach" to education reform that "misses the mark." Comparing the Race To The Top Fund criteria with the No Child Left Behind Act, the NEA letter underscores a fundamental disagreement between the union and a reform-minded President over teacher quality issues that cannot be smoothed over with vague talking points.

There are three elements of the Race To The Top fund that concern the union the most. The first, unsurprisingly, is the fund's requirement that states allow student achievement data to be used for the purposes of evaluating school and teacher effectiveness--a common sense idea but one that goes against the basic union value of protecting every member (even if it comes at the cost of rewarding good teachers and identifying bad ones). The second conflict is over the fund's requirement that states not have caps on charter schools, a position that the NEA has long opposed. Finally, the NEA takes offense to the fund's encouragement of alternative teacher certification--the idea that we should be lowering barriers to teaching for individuals who show a clear capability and passion for teaching and who demonstrate success in the classroom.

The question now is simple: how will the administration react? If Secretary Duncan proceeds as planned with dispensing the RTTT fund dollars to only those states who have met their reform demands, will that signal the end of the NEA's grip over Democratic officials? Will the NEA cave in before that happens? Or will there be some kind of compromise deal that softens the fund criteria in a way that gives the union a public relations victory?

One thing is for sure: the NEA is in the trickier position here than the President. Typically, elected officials have to respond to interest group demands when the interest group has political liquidity; that is, the ability to move their support and campaign finances to candidates of another party. In education, however, it's exceedingly unlikely that the unions would ever find the Republicans to be more compatible with their views than even a right-leaning President--which gives the administration a great deal of bargaining power to do what it believes is best by children. The only risk for the White House is that it must handle the next weeks period of discussion with the unions in a respectful way so as to avoid the kind of protest like the one below, which took place in Los Angeles last year.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across this article today and was, as always, thrilled to see high school students coming together to make their voices heard for better schools. Duluth is going through some challenges that are fairly common to public schools across the nation in our current economic picture, including a controversial debate over new school construction measures.

What's remarkable about the student organizing that has emerged in the past few weeks is how much media attention they've drawn. The group, made up of 14 student organizers at three Duluth High Schools and some 300+ members on Facebook, was featured in two local TV news stories yesterday. I've embedded one video below (skip ahead to the 1:15 mark unless you want to hear about local Minnesotan reactions to the Brett Favre signing), and the second, better story, can only be viewed here.

As the group spends the next year fighting to ensure that the local school board's policies best reflect the needs of students, the pressing question will be whether that kind of youth engagement--a positive for all parties involved, to be sure--is enough to lead to the kind of serious, systemic reform needed. This is the kind of challenge that faces youth organizing groups in all facets of public policy, the challenge of walking the tightrope between two very different kinds of positive outcomes: civic engagement and participatory benefits for the students versus serious progress on the social and policy issues that the students seek to address.

Not that the two goals are mutually exclusive, of course--see the history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Civil Rights Movement for example. But there are two kinds of messages that the news media and the students themselves can try to sell here. Are the students going to consider themselves successful if they participate in school board meetings, have forums to discuss issues, and get students excited about democratic engagement? Or will they measure their own success based on whether their organizational goals have been met from a policy change perspective.

It sounds like the group is leaning towards the former, by choosing to remain neutral on key Duluth school issues such as the school construction debate. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder whether youth activists are at a disadvantage against other interest groups because observers can chalk up the participation of students in policy debates as an end of itself, and get good press for it without regard for the actual policy goals asserted by the youth activists. For instance, a school board can much more easily say, "we met with a group of students before making our decisions" and come out in a positive light even without doing anything the students ask for, than it can say, "we met with the teachers unions before making our decisions" while failing to cede to any of the union's demands.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is no such thing as an American public education. If a child goes to a public elementary or secondary school somewhere in America, everything that influences her likelihood of success—from the quality of her classroom teachers to the rigor of the standards she and the school are expected to reach—everything hinges on the happenstance and geography of her birth.

If she is born to a well-to-do family in an affluent New England town, the public schools there will reflect her fortune; if she is born into the poverty of the Deep South, her chances of going to college plummet dramatically. The reality is that there are different opportunities, different supports, different worlds for different kids here in America, even in a day and age where America’s children face more in common—international competition in high tech job markets, increasing demands on civic and social participation—than ever before. Yet our schools in America continue to train Californians to compete with Virginians and Georgians to compete with New Yorkers. So much, then, for the “American” dream.

And so much for America’s leaders who might claim to be the guarantors of the American dream. Eight students representing the more than 25,000 members of Our Education, a national non-profit youth organization dedicated to empowering the student voice in efforts to improve K-12 education, gathered in Washington, DC for two busy days of meetings with lawmakers from both parties and both houses of Congress to make the needs of students loud and clear. The results were not encouraging. Only four out of the forty Senators and Representatives who met with us declared their support for guaranteeing all American children the right to a high quality public education as a fundamental right. Put another way, 90% of the national officials asked did not say they would support a constitutional amendment to make high quality public education a right for every child.

But why is such a right necessary? This was a common refrain offered by the Representatives and Senators. After all, isn’t education supposed to be a matter of States rights?

The answer to this question depends on what one thinks is more important: the collective future of America’s children, or an ideological squabble over theoretical concepts of federalism and the role of government. Every day that our nation’s leaders prioritize the latter over the former is a day that exacts huge consequences on our children and our society as a whole—over one million high school students drop out of school each year, and gaps between U.S. students and international students cost the nation more than $2 trillion each year.

Support among American officials was a little bit more encouraging for national standards, legislative incentives to increase student representation on local school boards, and a federal Students Bill of Rights—the three other priorities expressed by Our Education’s student advocates. Nine elected officials declared their outright support for national standards; sixteen expressed support for federal legislation to encourage local student participation on school boards; and eleven were in favor of some form of Students Bill of Rights.

All told, two bottom lines are clear. First, without a major grassroots push to make public education a national priority, the current system of fifty state standards and 15,000 district providers of varying quality will continue to rule the day. This disjointed system will work cost the nation enormous sums in terms of economic, civic, and social deadweight loss, and it will short change millions of youth along the way. And second, no voice is better suited to stand up to change the status quo than the very young people who are affected by it in the first place.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See if this description of a major public policy debate sounds familiar:

- A major public service and its related public policy area need serious reform
- The current industry providing the service has a monopoly over the service. To the extent that choice within the industry exists, it exists only among extremely similar establishment institutions that are markedly similar in the structure of their systems and in their incentives.
- One political party believes that a necessary component to fixing the public service is to break the existing industry monopoly over that service by creating or empowering a new kind of service provider to compete with the establishment
- The other political party believes that creating or empowering such a new service provider would spell ruin for the industry and the American public as a whole.

What issue am I talking about? If you thought "education" - you're right. And if you answered "health care" - well, you're also right. But something weird happens depending on which issue you're talking about: the two political parties completely flip sides of the debate.

In the health care arena, Democrats these days are pressing the argument that the "establishment" health care provider--health insurance companies--are doing a shoddy job and that the system is broken. In education, it's conservative Republicans who say that the establishment education provider--traditional public schools--are broken.

In health care, the Democrats want to inject competition as a way to hold the inefficient health insurers accountable--and they see a government health care plan as the most effective competitor. In education, it's the opposite: Republicans want the private sector to compete with the government schools, most commonly through voucher programs to subsidize the cost of private education. What's important to note is that there already is competition in both arenas--competition among various health insurance companies and competition among public schools and charter schools within a given locale.

But both parties argue that this kind of competition is not good enough, as evidenced by spiraling health care costs with little public health benefit and unacceptable levels of student achievement and graduation rates What they want is a paradigm shift in the kind of competition--not just competition within the industry provider but competition between the industry as a whole and a completely different kind of provider (a government health plan in health care; private for-profit schools in education).

So what should we make out of this strange role reversal?

One conclusion is that both political parties are simply logically incoherent. If the Democrats really think that competition and choice between the private sector and government is good in health care, shouldn't they think the same thing about education? And if Republicans really support competition between private schools and public schools, shouldn't they also support competition between private health insurers and a public option in health care? The fact that both parties change their minds might mean that what's really driving their policy preferences is naked political gain: health insurance companies largely fund GOP candidate campaigns while teachers unions typically support Democrats.

Or maybe it's not so simple as that. Maybe both parties are being logically consistent, not about choice and competition, but about the role of the government versus the private sector writ large. Maybe Democrats really think all of health care should be government run, just like all of education--and maybe Republicans think both services should be exclusively privatized. If that's the case, all of this talk about "choice" and "competition" is just a front; neither party could care less about government and private industry battling to do best by customers. But if that's the case, recognize what it means: the government health care option may really be a wolf in sheep's clothing designed to eliminate private health insurance altogether in a slow, steady march to a western European health system. And Republican pushes for charter schools and vouchers may represent an attempt to torpedo public education as we know it.

But neither party has the political capital to go as far in either extreme--some members of each party wouldn't even go that far. So what we're left with is this strange political reality where Republicans believe choice and competition is good for Kennedy Elementary School but not for Kaiser Permanente, and where Democrats think the opposite.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)