Obama Bloggers–The best thing Obama could do would be to eliminate the Department of Education and get the federal government out of the education business. The real experts aren’t policy wonks who talk education shop on blogs by day and whoop it up in Adams Morgan by night. The real experts are out in the classrooms. Leave this site before its too late.

For the effects of SES: PISA indicates that the best school systems have the smallest achievement gap (<10%) unlike the US which has a larger than average achievement gap. For examining how well our best suburban school districts do relative to the top countries in the world look at math in TIMSS 1999 Benchmarking. Our top suburban school districts were still significantly lower than the *average* school in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

If the Obama campaign came out with a detailed plan that offered detailed concrete solutions to the problems in our schools then of course I would be very willing to change my mind. And yes, children learn better if they are not hungry or have a toothache.

But even if we fixed all of these problems our children would still be learning very little when compared to our peer nations around the world.

Even if you take the issue of deprivation off the table and look at our “best” suburban schools, they compare very poorly with other school systems both in average acheivement and in the acheivement gap between low SES and high SES students.

What we have is a dysfunctional, chaotic school system where everybody has a mandate (feds, state, district etc…) but nobody is actually responsible for ensuring that each and every child receives a quality education.

And these so called reforms that that Mr. Obama’s campaign is promoting don’t even have a chance of improving student learning because there is not one intitiative that even hints at the school system changes that are necessary to promote quality student learning.

The translational research efforts that I mentioned have not been done before by the Feds. (There was one partial attempt in the early ’70s but the results had no impact on schools.) The research that is being funded today would be considered more basic science and not translational science. But education is particularly a practical endeavor. If it doesn’t work in schools, then it really means very little.

Second–and this is for Rory, too–I hear what you’re saying about the BBA and the principles not dealing directly with instruction. But I’ve also taught six years, and I know from experience that my students learn better when they don’t have a toothache, when substance abuse isn’t wreaking havoc in their families, when the weekend’s violence is replaying in their heads, when it doesn’t take them all day to attend a doctor’s appointment because of long lines. Rory, why the myopic insistence on sticking to one discipline at a time? Erin, can’t we acknowledge that there are other factors besides instruction that lead kids to learn better?

That said, I do like your suggestions for things the federal government can do. They are sensible and potentially effective, though I doubt we’ll hear anything in a campaign about them because they’re not politically sexy. And that’s another thing–in this blog, with reps from the campaigns, I’m not surprised at the lofty rhetoric. Though it would be a nice surprise if we could get beyond that.

One more thing–haven’t the feds created education research labs in the past? I had mentors who talked about this type of research taking off in the 70’s.

But neither type of reform will help students to learn better because there are no provisions/initatives for improving classroom instruction, curricula or improving the types of checks and balances that we have in our school system so that the tail(tests) is not wagging the dog (education).

Mr. Obama may be the type of leader that we need, but so far in the education field, his stated “education plan” has not shown the type of leadership that we need to actually improve our schools.

Please consider this “thought experiement.” If we could measure how much better the Bolder Broader Approach, is as opposed to the EEP, or if we could measure how much better the EEP is, in comparison to the Broader Bolder challenge, how big would that gap be? How much good can we do for school children by selecting the very best policy? How much harm do we do by continuing to fight each other?

If we hope to use something like the medical model, then we need to remember the maxim of “first, do no harm.”

I am opposed to NCLB-type accountability, even though I can understand it may have done some good in some schools, because I personally see the harm that the panic prompted by the law has done to my inner city high school students. But under the leadership of President Obama, even the same accountability system would not do so much damage. The damage was done by “true believers” who will not listen to veteran educators.

On the other hand, think of the great potential of the Obama plan. If we in the Bolder Broader school of thought could have a working relationship with the EEP, then could do so much good for children.

Besides, I hate having to fight with other liberals, civil rights groups, and accountability advocates who I know are good-hearted.

I am willing to believe that many in the EEP are sincere. They are just frustrated. And I’m also willing to believe that we who oppose their form of accountability were too slow to embrace reform. If we could just discuss the educational evidence, I doubt anyone would really defend the primitive, overarching, test-driven accountability systems that are available for NCLB II. We in the unions, however, need to push ourselves harder to reorganize schools for the welfare of students as opposed to the conventience of adults. Fortunately, Barack Obama is the type of leaders that can encourage greater collaboration.