Education Week - September 21, 2016 - 20

ELECTION 2016
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Missing: A Conservative Education Agenda
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hard to create great schools when teachers are
paralyzed by policy.
Moreover, this is a big, diverse nation, and it's
almost inevitable that the same idea will help
in some places and hurt in others. This is why
federal mandates are such a flawed tool of school
improvement, and why Clinton's laundry list of
new pre-K and higher education mandates is so
disconcerting.
Policy is a blunt tool. Federal policy can
make states and districts do things, but it can't
make them do them well. When doing things is
enough, like with mailing Social Security checks
or setting noise ordinances, policy can work well.
But policy is far less effective when it comes to
complex endeavors where how things are done
matters more than whether
they're done. And, in education, where human relationships are key, how things
are done is usually what
matters.
What's worse, federal
policy unspools like a game
of telephone. In Washington, the U.S. Department of
Education issues guidance.
When officials in 50 states
read that guidance, they won't all understand
it the same way. Those officials then explain it
to thousands of district coordinators, who provide direction to school leaders and teachers. By
that point, there's a lot of confusion, fear, and
half-hearted compliance. Now, multiply that a
hundredfold for the deluge of directives that rain
down. This kind of bureaucratic malaise isn't
anyone's recipe for good schools.
Trump or Clinton might not grasp any of this,
but 16 years of Bush-Obama education policy
have offered Americans an intensive course of
study. The Every Student Succeeds Act sought to
correct for some of the Rube Goldberg-esque overreach of No Child Left Behind, the previous version of the law, while retaining the law's healthy
commitment to transparency. In 2017 and beyond, the conservative mission, in part, will be
to protect families, educators, communities, and
states from being whipsawed by the whims of excitable federal bureaucrats and their attorneys.
It's not enough to settle for consolidating the
modest improvements of ESSA, however. Much
more can and should be done to reform how
Washington approaches K-12 schooling:
* Work to scrape away decades' worth of rules
and guidance that trip up schools. The next president should establish a blue-ribbon commission
of education leaders and classroom teachers to
identify where well-intended but outdated regulatory requirements are wasting time and energy,
distracting school leaders, and shortchanging
students. Heck, you can call it "Erase to the Top."

* Help district leaders break free of outdated
constraints. Congress should create a mechanism that enables districts creaking under the
weight of inherited vendor agreements, work
rules, and contracts to chart a new course, if
they so wish.
* Give states the flexibility to use federal
funds to expand choice options, if states so wish.
Washington can encourage states to use ESSA's
flexibility to establish course-choice programs
and districts to take advantage of the law's opportunity to pilot weighted student-funding formulas. They should amend ESSA to allow states
to make Title I money portable.
* Champion expanded investment in educational research. Basic research is a public good
that states and the private sector will tend to
skimp on. Washington could triple its investment
in basic education research
for about $600 million a year,
offsetting the cost by modest
reductions in any number of
existing programs.
* Push to update the Family Educational Rights and
Privacy Act. First intended
to govern the proper handling of paper files, it is now
impinging on educational
decisionmaking and valuable
research. Conservatives are well-positioned to balance crucial privacy and parental rights with our
ability to inform parents and improve schools.
* Put an end to Obama-era freelancing by Education Department bureaucrats and the agency's
office for civil rights. When it comes to school discipline, budgeting, locker rooms, and more, cease
the use of legal adventurism to bully state and
local officials operating within the letter and plain
meaning of the law.
* Move past the "achievement gap" mindset
of the No Child Left Behind era and toward
a broader excellence agenda for all students.
NCLB-style accountability narrowed the scope
of schooling to little more than reading and
math scores. It's time to pursue a vision of accountability that reflects the concerns of parents
more than the convenience of policymakers. This
means encouraging schools to unapologetically
embrace vocational, gifted, and civic education;
science and technology; world languages; and
the arts. And it means supporting states as they
devise how to help parents and communities
gauge school and system performance.
Americans need higher-quality, lower-cost
higher education options. We need flexible, family-friendly, cost-efficient early education. We
need more terrific public schools that empower
educators and families. Washington can and
should help in all of this. But doing so requires
a more modest and disciplined vision than that
offered by Ms. Clinton or Mr. Trump. Ah well,
there's always 2020. ■

Unfortunately,
no conservative is
running this year."

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 21, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Truth, Education,
And the American Voter
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on; only Fox understood you; only Fox News could be trusted to tell
it like it really is.
None of this was done casually. Ailes' team dreamed up these
grievances, but only presented them on the news once they had
been carefully field-tested with their audience, so they knew they
would work. This is how "anchor babies," "birtherism," and "Ground
Zero mosque" came into the public square, Poniewozik points out.
The facts were irrelevant. The facts, and the experts who offered
them, were tools used by "the other side" to fool people. What mattered
were emotions and the art of playing on people's emotions. A firewall
was built against the facts, against analysis, against expertise.
Enter Donald Trump onto this carefully prepared ground. Thomas
Jefferson's worst fear personified: loud, angry, ignorant, and perfectly
attuned to the fears and grievances that had been so carefully identified and nurtured. And yet, this should never have happened. This is
exactly what mass education was supposed to inoculate us against.

Our students need to develop a respect for the
facts, for empiricism, for reasoned argument,
and for one another."
What went wrong?
I submit that there is no more important function of American
education than to give students the tools they need to preserve democracy and the freedoms and liberty with which we are blessed.
How do we do that? It may be difficult, but it is not complicated.
Our students need to understand the origins of freedom, liberty,
and constitutional government from their beginnings in ancient
Greece, to their revival in the Scottish enlightenment, to their expression in the cauldron of the American Revolution. Our students
need to understand how fragile democracy is, and they need to
study how freedom, democracy, and constitutional government
were undermined in the interwar years in Weimar Germany. They
need to know how our government was designed to work, and how
various forces over the years have compromised that design and
have reversed it.
But, at the root of it all, our students need to develop a respect
for the facts, for empiricism, for reasoned argument, and for one
another. There is no doubt: Roger Ailes should have been brought
down because of the appalling way he reportedly treated women
at Fox News. But what price should he pay for paving the way for
Donald Trump, for deliberately creating an electorate that deeply
distrusts the facts and anyone who has expertise, for creating a
world in which voters are willing to suspend reason in favor of
turning their lives over to people whose expertise consists entirely
of knowing how to press their emotional buttons?
I hope American educators will seize the opportunity to ask
themselves what went wrong here and to consider what changes
need to be made in the curriculum and how it is taught in order to
develop a citizenry that is not so easily led by emotion rather than
clear thinking. Ailes may be gone, but Fox management has announced that the Fox News formula will continue. American educators should be working overtime to make it a whole lot harder
for that formula to succeed. ■

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Education Week - September 21, 2016

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