Education Week - September 24, 2014 - 18

KEY PLAYERS
The 1989 education summit in Charlottesville, Va., gave
momentum to what's known as the standards-based reform
movement, and formed a big portion of the education legacy
for many policymakers who took part.
Reverberations From 1989 Summit
Continue in Arena of Standards
George H.W. Bush
ROLE AT SUMMIT: As president of the United States,
convened the event, after having pledged to be the
"education president" during the 1988 campaign.
POST-SUMMIT HIGHLIGHTS: Championed America
2000, an initiative inspired in part by the
Charlottesville meeting that called for voluntary
standards and tests.
Bill Clinton
ROLE AT SUMMIT: Governor of Arkansas and
co-chairman of the National Governors Association's
education task force. Played a leading role in
hammering out summit statement.
POST-SUMMIT HIGHLIGHTS: As president of the
United States from 1993 to 2001, helped further
the summit's agenda through Goals 2000 initiative
and the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act, both of which furthered
standards-based reform.
Michael Cohen
ROLE AT SUMMIT: Director of education policy at the
National Governors Association. Played a key role
in planning the summit and in helping to bring
the governors and White House to a consensus on
summit statement and the goals.
POST-SUMMIT HIGHLIGHTS: Served in the Clinton
administration as assistant secretary for elementary
and secondary education and as a special assistant
to the president on education. Currently the president
of Achieve, a nonprofit organization in Washington that
helps states align their standards, assessments, and
curricula with the demands of college and careers.
Roger B. Porter
ROLE AT SUMMIT: Served in President George H.W.
Bush's White House as an assistant to the president
for economic and domestic policy. Was one of the
administration aides who planned the summit and
helped write the resulting goals.
POST-SUMMIT HIGHLIGHTS: As a top White House
aide, worked on education and other issues.
Currently a professor of business and government
at Harvard University, where he teaches a course on the
American presidency.
Roy Romer
ROLE AT SUMMIT: Participated as the governor
of Colorado.
POST-SUMMIT HIGHLIGHTS: Was the first chairman
of the National Education Goals Panel, which was
established to monitor the goals that followed
the summit. Served as superintendent of the Los
Angeles Unified School District from 2000 until
2006. Served as the chairman for ED in '08, an
effort funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and
the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation that sought to raise
the profile of education in the 2008 election. Currently a
special adviser to the College Board.
Terry Branstad
ROLE AT SUMMIT: Governor of Iowa and chairman
of the National Governors Association.
POST-SUMMIT HIGHLIGHTS: Served on the National
Education Goals Panel. While Iowa governor, served
as chairman of the Education Commission of the
States in 1996 and 1997. Later served as president
of Des Moines University. Became governor of Iowa
again in 2011.
SOURCE: Education Week
18 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 24, 2014 | www.edweek.org
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
event as the Republican governor of
New Jersey. "We haven't had a moment
like that since, on any subject."
At the same time, there were
some clear fissures that emerged
in Charlottesville and afterward,
as policymakers struggled to find a
framework for moving forward on
the goals set after the summit.
There was disagreement over
education funding; the right balance
among federal, state, and local
control in setting policy; and tension
over whether schools could be held
accountable for student achievement
without policymakers also
being held to account for providing
certain supports, such as preschool
programs for poor children.
Such tensions still reverberate,
most recently in the contention over
the Common Core State Standards
Initiative.
"The common core is a descendant"
of Charlottesville and its aftermath,
Mr. Kean said. "And so is
the debate against it."
Setting Goals
The 1989 summit, to its supporters,
was an acknowledgment that thousands
of school districts-and even
50 states-working alone, without
national leadership, couldn't confront
the challenges enumerated by the
landmark report A Nation at Risk,
issued six years earlier.
That report, which had helped
spawn a wave of state-level reform
efforts, particularly in the South,
warned that the American education
system was falling behind its
international competitors, threatening
the nation's future prosperity.
While the report's premises
were subject to dispute, its impact
was great.
The Charlottesville conference,
which was attended by 49 of the nation's
governors, with the exception
of Rudy Perpich, a Democrat from
Minnesota, received front-page attention
in major newspapers. But
the work was only beginning when
the president and the governors left
Virginia.
After months of meetings-which
generally included Mr. Clinton, at
that time a leader of the education
task force of the National Governors
Association; and Roger B. Porter, Mr.
Bush's domestic-policy adviser-the
goals became a centerpiece of President
Bush's State of the Union address
in January 1990.
By 2000, Mr. Bush told the country,
every child in the United States
would start school ready to learn,
"
A social compact begins today in Charlottesville. ...
The American people are ready for radical reforms.
We must not disappoint them."
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH, SEPTEMBER 1989
and the high school graduation rate
would rise to at least 90 percent.
Every American adult would be a
literate and skilled worker. The nation
would lead the world in math
and science achievement. Schools
would be safe and drug-free.
And, most critically: Every student
would leave grades 4, 8, and 12
having demonstrated competency in
English, mathematics, science, history,
and geography.
The goals reflected a " 'Field of
Dreams' optimism," said Jal Mehta,
an associate professor at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education.
"If we built the goals, then schools
would meet them."
There was no clear path forward
for bringing the goals to fruition,
and no way to measure progress
toward them, said Mr. Mehta, the
author of The Allure of Order: High
Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the
Troubled Quest to Remake American
Schooling.
But Michael Cohen, who played a
key role backstage at the summit as
the director of education policy for
the nga, said the goals were intentionally
aspirational.
"People understood these goals
were high, lofty, difficult to reach,"
said Mr. Cohen, who later served in
the U.S. Department of Education
during the Clinton administration.
And in 1990, the nga's education
task force, led by then-Gov. Clinton,
a Democrat, and Gov. Carroll
A. Campbell of South Carolina, a
Republican, released a blueprint
for meeting the goals that had a
significant impact on subsequent
state efforts to improve education,
Mr. Cohen said.
What's more, he said, savvy governors,
including Mr. Clinton, knew
that the need for assessment measures
would stir the policy pot.
"They were happy to be doing
something that they hoped would
usher in the next generation of
testing. ... Work on standards and
testing and accountability has been
a federal-state partnership since
the beginning, and the beginning
started at the summit," said Mr.
Cohen, who is now the president of
Achieve, a Washington-based group
that helps states bolster academic
standards and played a key role in
launching the common-core standards.
But
Linda Darling-Hammond,
a professor of education at Stanford
University, said policymakers
have ultimately failed to pair
standards with increased resources
for schools and richer professional
development for educators. That's
something that was happening
in states such as Kentucky at the
beginning of the standards movement
but, in her view, it hasn't
been as widespread as it needs to
be in the common-core era.
"Just getting standards and attaching
them to tests, which are attached
to consequences, is not really
enough," Ms. Darling-Hammond
said. Disadvantaged children, especially,
need greater supports if they
are going to meet more rigorous expectations,
she said, which is something
policymakers haven't really
addressed on a national level.
"The inequality question never got
answered," she said.
Federal Fallout
The consensus that educational
standards and accountability
needed to be part of a national strategy
to ensure that the United States
remained economically competitive
gave rise to a cascade of K-12 initiatives,
each identified with successive
presidential administrations.
The first President Bush followed
up the summit with America 2000,
a plan that called for voluntary national
standards and tests. Congress,
which had been left out of the goals
summit, never passed the proposal.
The Bush administration nonetheless
financed the development of voluntary
standards in a range of subCharlie
Neibergall/AP
Ed Andrieski/AP-File
Brennan Linsley/AP
David J. Phillip/AP-File
Education Week - September 24, 2014

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