Its 8:26 and I’m not teaching today either.

You’ve misunderstood my arguments. I argue that after school remediation which is one of the main tools in the NCLB toolkit is inadequate for improving high poverty neighborhood schools. The “best practices” for improving student performance in lower poverty schools are inherently inadequate for high poverty schools that do not cream. It is one thing to offer remediation to a few dozen students after school. Its another to offer remediation to hundreds at a school when each have a full range of deficits. This should not give us an excuse for going home early. But perhaps you should click the Bill Ferriter link on today’s Core Knowledge blog.

The best idea I have at this moment is not necessarily that good. Our kids don’t need more remediation. They need more high quality classes, as well as the full range of interventions proposed by HZC and the Bolder Broader, etc. The best I could visualize in my school would be that another team of teachers clock in at 3:30, in order to continue the fight.

So now I’m off to the hospital regarding family, and when I return I’ll check out the blogs to see if new ideas have been offered. I hope that the Obama victory and the combination of Obama victory, and seeing people who suffer through so much more than I ever have, will mean that I read comments with an open and charitable mind.

But as I argued in my comment, its time to move beyond slash and burn politics at least when it comes to education.

My kids look forward to voting in Kids Vote, so much so that my nine-year-old daughter was upset in September when our primary did not have a Kids Vote option.

http://www.kidsvotingminneapolis.org/index.html

We should discuss the “lessons learned” of 1990s reforms. For better and for worse, many 1990s reformers were newcomers. They saw education with fresh eyes, and led a successful effort to redefine public education. At the same time, they operated within a larger effort to redesign the old New Deal Consensus. Maybe, some reformers would have agreed that their approach was not necessarily the best policy if we were just looking at education, but they were looking towards a whole new form of progressivism for the 21st century. I see Bill Clinton as the prime example. Sure, he wanted to use testing for accountability purposes to raise student performance, but he had much bigger fish to fry. The principle of accountability was not just a way to show that education proponents could be tough, but that New Democrats could also be tough enough to deal with crises abroad as well as home.

Back then, we Dems had a great lack of confidence in our ability to stand up to the Lee Atwaters of the world. Back then, we had so much confidence in digital miracles that we talked of the Internet ending the business cycle, of mathematical models creating safe Hedge Funds, and even computers doing a better job than doctors of diagnosis. Now, we have a different set of hopes and fears and our strategy should change with the times.

Again, Bill Clinton is illustrative. Now he says we are testing too much. I suspect that the great great majority of educators and policy analysts would agree, but too many are still afraid to say it out loud. But aren’t those fears mostly “inside baseball?” If our profession repudiated (at least for the forseeable future) the idea of “outputs” based accountability and went back to inputs based accountability, how many voters would notice? In fact, the issue is not that sharp. We do not need to abandon all forms of inputs based accountability. We just need to admit that the input models of accountability are not ready for prime time, and will not be ready for the foreseeable future.

If we engaged in an interminable close textual analysis, perhaps we could agree that some models of input driven accountability are not incompatable with innovation, but that strikes me as a waste of time. The more you stress data-driven accountability, the more you discourage creativity. For instance, what would be the answer to the following.

Data-driven accountability is least compatible with:

a) the Soviet Planned Economy,
b) quotas,
c) a culture of compliance, or
d) a culture of creativity, innovation, and entrepeneurialism.

It may be impossible, but we would better serve school children if we replaced the term “accountability” with the term “cost benefit analysis.” Our “value-added” models are not nearly ready for sanctioning teachers, but they would be cost effective tools for locating students who need additional assistance. Why not design sentences for locating elementary students who have been absent for five days, so that interventions can be delivered in a timely manner?

These are just examples and we could all create a long list.

I don’t want to renege on my resolution to stay true to the values of “Yes We Can,” but I have to make an observation about the “Washington Consensus” on education. It claims that there is a researched-based conventional wisdom on “best practices” and that those practices which raise performance for lower poverty schools can transform high poverty schools. Speaking for myself, I resent the implications. Those of you who read the research know that the evidence is far less clear. If the majority of engineers told the political establishment that they misunderstand their profession, the Washington Consensus would listen. When the majority of educators and education experts say that the Washington Consensus on education is flawed, we are dismissed as “special interests.”

If we are going to do more with less at a time of fiscal austerity, we need to think more deeply and have a more open discussion where the actual experiences of actual educators are treated with more respect.