Reconnecting Practitioner and Policymaker

My View

As the Obama administration enters its twilight, a revised Elementary and Secondary Education Act is shifting control of schooling back to the states from Washington. This change coincides with calls for more preschool education and investment in teachers and teaching.

The new law tacitly acknowledges that federal efforts to micromanage schools have failed. The new rhetoric largely echoes the recommendations in a 2013 report by a federal advisory committee called “For Each and Every Child: A Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence.”

Commissioned by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the report reflected an unusual consensus. A highly diverse group of educators and policymakers agreed on the need for equitable school funding; support for effective teachers, principals and curriculums; early childhood education; initiatives to mitigate the effects of poverty; and accountability and governance reforms at all levels.

Meeting Reality

These developments are particularly encouraging after years of top-down “shame and blame” policies. Going forward, however, the question will be whether we’ve really learned anything from the experience of the last three decades.

• Policymakers must move beyond inefficient and wasteful “one size fits all” approaches to reform.

The report describes a bipolar American education scene where “U.S. children in low-poverty schools rank at the top of the world [while] those in our highest-poverty schools are performing on a par with children in the world’s lowest-achieving countries.” But will policymakers continue to act as if all schools shared the same problem and promote unitary, across-the-board reforms?

This isn’t a trivial question. Every school can improve, but research shows that different strategies work in different places. Assuming that today’s most pressing issue really is the depressed performance in high-poverty, low-achieving schools, that’s where to focus energy and resources. America needs to invest in better instruction, but more important, we must address the negative educational impact of economic and social inequality.

• Policymakers and practitioners must think together about what the desired reforms actually mean in practice.

It’s encouraging that a wide range of experts have embraced the call for adequate resources, quality professional development and effective early childhood education. These are all desirable goals, but the devil lies in the details.

What does professional development look like when it’s done well, for example? And, how do we assure that early childhood education is quality education?

Recent experience with turning policy to practice is not particularly encouraging. Some of the worst educational mis-steps of the past three decades began with seeming accord on big ideas. Too often, however, those ideas got mangled in the execution.

The maxim that “assessment drives instruction” originally was a statement about curriculum design, for instance. (Designers define what students are supposed to know, develop assessments to tell if they’ve learned it, and work backward from there to outline the course of study. Teachers then teach what the assessments measure.)

There’s a big difference between that commonsense idea and what it became: high-stakes standardized testing that drove teachers to narrow curricula and initiated regimes of test prep.

• Policymakers and practitioners must become authentic partners in reform.

For years, federal and state leaders have acted as if their role was to impose reforms on a feckless, resistant workforce that often was pictured as a main cause of public education’s woes. In reality, nobody has a monopoly on wisdom or virtue.

Authorities can promote policies that are beneficial in theory — create small high schools or require high-stakes testing, for instance. But in practice, effective education is contextual. It takes place in local settings where what works depends on what is. Consequently, the most effective policies reflect local wisdom about what makes sense.

Further, policies tend to succeed to the degree they find support in the field. Local realities, values, relationships and professional capacity determine the degree to which new ideas bear productive results. Not to mention belief and personal commitment.

Finally, policies that leave room for local judgment capitalize on the strengths of America’s loosely coupled systems of education: their individuality and enterprise. As Warren Buffett once observed, he would rather give his divisions leeway and suffer the visible costs of some bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs of a bureaucracy.

Balanced Perspectives

Increasingly, Americans realize that 30 years of so-called efficiency reforms have produced unimpressive and often discouraging results. Student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress improved as much — and the achievement gap narrowed more — from the early 1970s to the early 1980s as in any decade since. Meanwhile, education for large numbers of children is narrower, shallower and more focused on test preparation.

To make real progress, policymakers and practitioners must move beyond the unproductive disconnect that’s divided them and develop explicit pathways for genuine dialogue. Their aim should be to forge true partnerships and optimal balance between the broad perspective of one and the local wisdom of the other.