Many DFER supporters read with interest some of the recent profiles of Washington, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee, including Clay Risen’s piece in the November Atlantic Monthly.
The new issue that arrived in the mail the other day carried a letter to the editor by former Bush administration education staffer Susan Neuman (former assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education) arguing that people need to understand there are limits to what schools, teachers, administrators, etc. can accomplish with children.
Neuman, who was tasked with overseeing the federal No Child Left Behind Law when she was a Bushie, these days argues that beyond excellent teachers, students need quality pre-school programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that help parents become better partners in their children’s learning. (She even cites the Bigger, Broader, Bolder approach, one of the dueling manifesto’s from 2008.)
After her letter, the author of the original piece, Clay Risen, was offered a chance to provide a truncated response which caught my interest. In it, he argues:
She is undoubtedly correct that improving teacher quality and improving a student’s social milieu are not mutually exclusive, and are both important means to improve student outcomes. However, education policy is not made in a vacuum, and cannot be. This is where so much of education policy breaks down: there is, sadly, a broadening gulf between teacher-quality advocates and those aligned with “A Broader, Bolder Approach.” Arguably, the answer lies in a mixture of the two. Whether we can find that answer depends much more on improving our education politics than on improving our education policy.
It struck me that Risen probably had a lot more to say about the topic, having been forced to make a coherent argument in such tight space. So yesterday, I reached out to him via email to see if he would expand slightly on his remarks.
His response is below:
DFER: What did you mean by “improving our education politics” as opposed to “improving our education policy?”
Clay Risen: From an outsider’s perspective, one of the most frustrating aspects of the education policy debate is that both sides are right. Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and others correctly point out the poor state of the nation’s public teacher corps, and their focus on improving teacher quality and teacher accountability strikes me as an obvious step toward improving the state of inner-city schools. At the same time, the Economic Policy Institute and others are correct to focus on the broader environment in which lower-income students move–and too often fail–must also be a central focus in a successful national education policy. It seems bafflingly obvious that change must come both inside and outside the classroom.
And yet these two groups, both working toward the same goal and with policies that should be mutually compatible, are too often at odds politically. Rhee and Co. are, in my view, too eager to reject policies that addresses anything other than teacher quality and too hostile toward anything that smacks of establishment thinking, from unions to teacher colleges. And they’re not entirely wrong–I fear that while many of the signatories to EPI’s “A Broader, Bolder Approach” manifesto are well-intentioned (the list, after all, includes Education Secretary Arne Duncan), too often this wing of the education sector falls into the roll of stalking horse for those who prefer the status quo to the disruptive changes that true reform would bring.
Thus a painful paradox: At a moment when education policy is making real strides, our education politics is stuck in a narrow, short-sighted, antagonistic framework in which each side would rather paint the other as anti-student than admit that it might actually have something to contribute. That’s the irony of Michelle Rhee: As a policy thinker and a force for change she is precisely what Washington needs, but she is so politically untuned, so antagonistic toward unions and teacher colleges and the City Council and anything else that might require negotiation and compromise, that she is preventing her policy vision from being realized.
I wrote my response to Prof. Neuman before Barack Obama named Arne Duncan as his education secretary, but had that chronology been reversed I certainly would have hailed the selection as a promising first step toward a new education politics. As many observers have noted, Duncan is one of the few education leaders able to straddle the divide between the two camps and develop programs that address both the classroom and the educational millieu beyond the school walls. And his selection shows that President-Elect Obama understands the need to bring all sides to the table, not to minimize dissent but because everyone has something to contribute.
DFER: What might this new politics look/sound like? Could someone like President-elect Obama conceivably be the one to get everyone focused on the big-picture changes that are needed to provide opportunity for every child (both in and out of the classroom) and then putting differences aside for the sake of moving forward toward that grand vision?
Clay Risen: I am enthusiastic about Obama’s presidency in part because, as in so many political arenas, I think the education debate requires a strong voice to bring the different sides together. It appears that Obama’s thinking on education is still evolving, but he does seem to recognize that education policy is a fundamentally grassroots endeavor, with ideas bubbling up from disparate places. And I am gladdened to see him resist the calls by some in the Democratic Party to cast out the unions completely, while still leaving the door open to a tough-love approach to their role in reform efforts.
I think a new education politics would, first and foremost, require all sides to recognize the validity of each other’s thinking and appreciate the goals they are seeking to achieve. Michelle Rhee is not the avatar of racist white developers who want to turn D.C. into a yuppie playground, and the unions are not corrupt, anti-student teachers’ clubs. At the same time, we need some humility. Each side has to recognize their own limitations: Reformers from Rhee’s circle are too often coming from the outside, and they have little insight into what it takes to make a classroom work. But unions and teachers have to recognize that, at the same time, they themselves are biased toward protecting their own jobs, even at the expense of students, and even if they believe they have students’ best interests in mind.
As a result, each side would have to concede certain policy principles. While teacher accountability is a vital element of reform, for example, it is vital to recognize that teachers are also workers, parents, and taxpayers, not automatons who can be expected to sacrifice everything to student achievement. Nor should we expect them to build lasting relationships with their students if they are spending all their time worried about their job security. While some aspects of teacher tenure and job protections should be relaxed, making them at-will employees is asking too much.
On the flip side, teachers need to recognize that they are not just another class of workers, and that they cannot always make the same demands that, say, teamsters do. Districts need the flexibility to demand a little extra from them, even if it means longer hours.
This isn’t easy, and it’s not something that many people can achieve on their own. That’s where a leader like Duncan or Obama can play such an important role: as negotiator, as coach, as conciliator. This is not the same as being an honest broker. It’s important that Obama and Duncan have clear views on what makes for an effective policy. But it does mean creating an environment in which all sides can access their better angels and admit that we are all working on the same thing.
DFER note: If you like Clay Risen’s work, be sure to check out his new book, which hits the shelves this week, “A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination.” The book can be ordered here.