Local control is hobbling our schools

Don’t look for author Matt Miller to be a featured speaker at any school board conferences for a while, not after his recent, much-discussed Atlantic Monthly article entitled “First, Kill All the School Boards." Miller’s scathing but compelling piece represents a rare frontal assault on one of the biggest sacred cows of American education: local control of schools. His basic thesis is that American education reform is doomed to failure as long as we continue to insist on allowing 15,000 independent school districts to essentially do whatever they want regarding standards, curriculum and accountability for same. He correctly points out that the U.S. is virtually unique in this obsession with local control, and that it is the main reason why all other industrial nations run rings around us in almost every known measure of academic achievement.

In describing these dismal facts about U.S. non-competitiveness Miller echoes arguments made by Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, which warned of the heavy economic price our children and grandchildren will pay for the current generation’s education folly.

Miller also marshals the support of a credible array of prominent reformers who explain why public officials, foundations, and advocacy groups are “loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teacher unions." Says Tom Vander Ark, former education head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “We’re two decades into the standards movement in this country, and standards are still different by classroom, by school, by district and by state." He further adds that “Most teachers in America still pretty much teach whatever they want."

Marc Tucker, author of the widely hailed report “Tough Choices, or Tough Times,” which won enthusiastic support among Colorado leaders such as House Speaker Andrew Romanoff and former Governor Roy Romer, similarly decries how local control is hobbling our schools, and is “uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance."

It is sobering to reflect on the disasters that have befallen all those who dared challenge the local control taboo.

In the mid-nineties Bill Clinton courageously called for a “Voluntary National Test” and was almost immediately hammered into submission in memorably bipartisan fashion by Republicans who denounced the “national” part while Democrats ripped the “test” part.

A little later George Bush ambitiously launched his No Child Left Behind Act, but in order to round up enough votes to pass the thing he made the fatal concession of allowing every state to invent their own standards, their own test and even their own “passing scores.”

Here in Colorado, Bill Owens with his Realignment Council proclaimed the need for consistently high standards statewide, but ultimately bowed to the political ruckus stirred up in the legislature and the districts by the defenders of local control.

Today Bill Ritter and his P-20 Council are promising to totally redesign standards to deliver high skills for the high tech economy, but just as Bush thought he had learned from Clinton’s mistake, Ritter believes he has avoided Owens’s error by pledging at the outset to “honor local control” -- thereby giving away the whole game even before it begins.

Of late Colorado has seen much attention given to “school autonomy” as a means of energizing lagging reform efforts. Marc Tucker highly praises the approach of other nations where “you’re struck immediately…by a sense of autonomy on the part of school staff and principal that you don’t find in the United States” but he stresses that their success is absolutely dependent on the existence of national standards. Similarly Matt Miller makes an urgent plea to “give schools one set of national expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out of the way”.

It is precisely this kind of collaboration that could be a legitimate expression of local control, but not the mindless notion that 15,000 different approaches to reading standards is somehow okay. As Colorado stands poised for yet another futile exercise in “standards reinvention” we should at least be honest enough to acknowledge the exorbitant price our children and our state will pay for our slavish attachment to a hopelessly outdated concept of local control.

Dr. Moloney was Colorado Education Commissioner, 1997-2007

Taking back the academy

Sure enough, on Sunday afternoon I was barraged by liberals insisting that nothing is actually knowable, for having had the nerve to outline "what Bruce Benson knows" in my Denver Post column that morning. It reviewed the battle lines between those who did and didn't think the businessman-philanthropist should be CU's next president, a job for which he was finally confirmed in late February. My list of ten common-sense propositions -- I dared call them truths -- by which Benson and most Coloradans define their idea of a university was hotly contested in numerous emails. Great, dialogue is the name of the game.

I bet those same dissenters would also choke on another local college president's vision for what his institution, Colorado Christian University, should stand for: "Impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, Biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, free markets, natural law, original intent of the Constitution, and Western civilization."

That's one of a dozen strategic objectives set out for CCU by former US Sen. Bill Armstrong when he took the helm a couple of years ago. Buy-in by faculty, staff, and students hasn't been instantaneous or unanimous, but it's coming well. That was evident last week when I spoke at the latest in a series of faculty convocations exploring the objectives; this one was on the original intent of the Constitution.

For close to 50 years now, the academy in this country has positioned itself as a contrarian force against the views and values of America's majority. If that's starting to change with new leaders such as Benson at some of the public institutions and Armstrong at some of the private ones (many of which have gotten equally far off center, even those with religious ties), it comes not a moment too soon.

Click here for "What Bruce Benson Knows" in full.

Moloney's World: Teacher Unions Exposed

In the ever-changing kaleidoscope of American education reform we have lately seen, from the local to the national level, an intense scrutiny of the vital but little understood phenomena of teacher labor agreements. Here in Colorado observers have been riveted by the bizarre spectacle of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot before grudgingly embracing the request of two city schools (Bruce Randolph M.S. and Manual H.S.) and their teachers for some degree of freedom from the union contract. Even these reluctantly granted waivers -- hedged by vague language, fixed duration, and a “freeze” on any other schools applying -- left many saying that the DCTA only said yes owing to the tsunami of bad publicity they had just suffered.

Another reason for the DCTA to choose cooperation over confrontation is that an even greater threat to union power looms on the horizon: the proposed legislation recently filed by Democratic Senate President Peter Groff that would give some freedom from union contracts to many other Colorado schools.

Additional developments sparking hope that the glacial pace of school reform hereabouts might be accelerating include serious autonomy initiatives emerging in the struggling Aurora school district and among no less than eighteen geographically contiguous schools in northeast Denver.

Those seeking perspective on what all this means and where it might lead can usefully turn to the recently released report of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, “The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America’s Fifty Largest School Districts.”

In this impressive research opus, district contracts were rated in terms of their restrictiveness as measured by three key components: Compensation, Personnel Policies, and Work Rules.

Of the two Colorado districts among the fifty largest Denver, ranked 26th in restrictiveness and Jefferson County 36th.

Interestingly when the ratings are disaggregated into individual scores for each of the three components, an unusual profile emerges for Denver.

On Compensation only four of the fifty rank higher than Denver in terms of flexibility or non-restrictiveness- a circumstance clearly reflecting the virtue of the nationally praised DPS PRO-COMP program.

On the other two components, however, which were the thorniest issues in the Bruce Randolph imbroglio, Denver’s ranking plummets. On Personnel Policies only nine of the fifty rank lower, and on Work Rules only four district contracts were rated worse (LA, Fresno, San Diego, and Miami).

So what are we to make of all this – signs of genuine hope and change or just another false dawn?

It is significant that the Colorado Change initiatives discussed above all are occurring in urban school settings where student achievement is seen at its worst and parental/political pressures to do something about it, is greatest.

The role of Senator Groff is highly instructive. While he is a leader of the political party that historically has been most supportive of labor unions, he also represents Denver constituents whose children have suffered immensely from the baleful effects of bad education. His attempt to pass a law that will directly challenge union power clearly signals that he has made a decision that the educational status quo simply cannot be allowed to continue.

Unions also produce thoughtful people. One is Brad Juppe, long a leader of the DCTA, and now a DPS assistant superintendent.

Like Peter Groff, Brad Juppe knows that the status quo must change, that unions must change- must stop talking about “reinventing” themselves as leaders of reform and actually do it.

Unions in the private sector changed when a time came where they had no other choice. Public sector unions can and will change when that time comes for them.

Senator Groff and others like him are sending a message: That time has arrived.

Dr. Moloney was Colorado Education Commission from 1997-2007. His columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Washington Times, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News and Pacific News Service.

Moloney's World: The trashing of America's education standards

(Denver, Feb. 3) How have the educrats managed to portray decades of educational malpractice as the greatest thing since sliced bread? By systematically debasing four key standards upon which citizens, parents, taxpayers, and elected officials have long relied to make judgments about educational quality: grades, promotion, graduation, and college admission. Note: Dr. William Moloney, Colorado Education Commissioner from 1997-2007, reveals the scandalous effects of debased educational standards in his latest column from Moloney's World. Here is the piece in full:

This year we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of America’s most famous education report: A Nation At Risk. This damning indictment of American public education –“a rising tide of mediocrity” etc.- rightly alarmed the nation and also jump started an educational Age of Reform that has been going on ever since.

The only problem is that a quarter century of effort has failed to reform anything. Despite huge increases in expenditure student achievement has failed to improve and the Achievement Gap has actually gotten worse.

The central reason for this massive dysfunction is the unrelenting hostility -- open and covert -- of the education establishment toward the whole idea of reform. Paradoxically the education reform “movement” has been led by non-educators- elected officials, business people, newspaper editors, and conservative think tanks .

The education establishment hypocritically pays lip service to reform but they commonly represent it as unfair “bashing” or worse an outright “conspiracy to destroy public education”.

When problems cannot be denied -- e.g. appalling urban schools -- the establishment quickly absolves themselves by pointing the finger at poverty, family breakdown or the all-time favorite “not enough money”.

Amazingly, beyond the noted exception of big cities ,the establishment has successfully sold the myth that American public education is in basically good shape, except of course that it’s under-funded.

How have the “educrats” pulled off this massive deception? How have they painted decades of educational malpractice as the greatest thing since sliced bread?

They did it by systematically debasing four key standards upon which citizens, parents, taxpayers, and elected officials have long relied to make judgments about educational quality: grades, promotion, graduation, and college admission.

Historically if a child went to school, behaved well, and worked hard on a rigorous curriculum, that child would predictably get good report cards, promotion, a high school diploma, and eligibility for college admission. At the end they had earned their piece of the American Dream.

For this system to work however it was absolutely essential that the above noted standards rested on measurements that were objective, commonly understood, and rigorously enforced.

Today this system is in near total collapse- more obviously at some schools than others, but no school has been left untouched by this general debasement of standards.

Most sadly, almost all of us know this to be true. We’re not unfamiliar with “grade inflation”, or “social promotion”, or “meaningless diplomas”, or “open admissions”, yet we fail to see that collectively they are a single phenomena which has brought about the absolute implosion of quality in our schools, blinded us to reality, and made us dangerously susceptible to the Kool-Aid of establishment myth-making.

This grand deceit is made possible by the fact that all of the traditional rewards- good grades, promotion, diplomas, and college admission- are still handed out, but they have been drained of all substance and the requirements upon which they depended- discipline, hard work, and rigorous curriculum- are today reduced to an option for the self-motivated few not the universal expectation for all.

For years international comparisons gave clear evidence of American educational decline. This evidence however received limited media exposure and the establishment could brush it aside as “strange tales from strange places”. The advent of state accountability tests -- e.g. Colorado’s CSAP -- however changed the landscape dramatically. These tests received immense media attention, spurred accountability legislation, energized demands for choice, decisively punctured establishment generated complacency, and confirmed what the public had long suspected: the system was broken, and not just in big cities.

The establishment’s anger and resistance to the accountability tests and laws is hugely instructive as is their unyielding determination to repeal or gut them, and return to Lake Woebegone where “all the children are above average”.

If a distracted public allows this unconscionable coverup to succeed we shall have wreaked havoc upon the future of our country and our children.

Those nations who are our 21st-century competitors have carefully nurtured and strengthened their educational standards, while we have merely talked about doing so. William Bennett put the matter well: “We know what’s wrong, and we know what works. What must be answered is whether we have the will and the courage to act upon that knowledge”. Right now the answer is a resounding No.

Moloney's World: Why Our High Schools Flunk

Toward the end of his State of the State address on Jan. 9, Gov. Bill Ritter unveiled his plan to fix Colorado high schools once and for all. Promising a “revolutionary shift in education policy” the Governor focused on high school standards and, in effect, said they were a mess. He’s right. Existing standards are incomplete, hopelessly vague, and generally ignored. To fix this mess, the Governor wants to get everyone together -- K-12, higher education, parents, business people etc. --to define exactly what kids need to know and be able to do. He also wants the kids to pass some tests to prove they’ve mastered the right stuff. This sounds good. It also sounds familiar, because it’s exactly what Governor Romer said when he signed Colorado’s last standards law fifteen years ago.

So, you’re asking, why didn’t Romer’s standards law work out, and why should we think that Ritter’s will do any better?

These are very good questions, and we get a real good clue to the answers from Ritter’s supporters, who say that if Colorado pulls off this grand reform we will be the first state in the nation to do it. Such statements always appeal to local pride, but they also suggest that there may be some good reasons why our 49 sister states have flunked this test so far.

Fixing American high schools is not a new sport. A few greybeards may date it from James Conant’s landmark book The American High School Today (1956). More people will remember a bunch of books by folks like Ted Sizer, Ernest Boyer, and Mortimer Adler that blasted high schools as clear evidence of that “rising tide of mediocrity” highlighted in the famous report A Nation at Risk (1983).

Throughout this period, Americans have been highly ambivalent about what high school students need. Some thought they needed more discipline because they’re still kids. Others thought they needed more freedom because they’re almost adults.

Our earlier history and all contemporary polling show that most ordinary Americans come down on the “kids/ discipline” side of the question, but unfortunately the bulk of the education establishment fell in love with the “adult/freedom” viewpoint and over time countenanced a revolutionary “deconstruction” of the American high school that mindlessly aped college mores, and spawned a level of disorder, curricular sprawl, and near-terminal mission confusion to be found nowhere on the planet save the good old USA.

Romer’s attempt to bring order to this confusion resulted in very mushy standards because the Noah’s Ark of stakeholders couldn’t agree on restoring the narrow, and rigorous specifics that thirty years of educational malpractice had blown apart. To their credit, Romer and the Republican legislative majorities that backed him found another way to skin the cat. Their law built in state accountability tests -- the CSAPs -- that were as specific and 3-Rs based as the standards were not. Their rigor was proved when the first CSAP results in 1997 showed that most kids had flunked, thus revealing the depth of the educational malaise that afflicted our state.

These results shocked the state and galvanized our governors -- first Romer, then Owens -- and legislators to pass tough accountability legislation with the potential to set Colorado on the long road to recovery.

While a great many rank-and-file educators knew the truth when they saw it, and were more than ready to bite the bullet on behalf of their kids, the education establishment went in a very different direction. They would spend the next decade complaining about and undermining everything those mean old politicians were trying to do. They yearned for the day when a fortuitous change in the political weather might allow them to overthrow this reform nonsense in general, and the hated CSAP in particular.

Now that day has come.

Of course, this establishment demolition agenda will travel under a variety of false flags, but anyone who watched closely the composition and proceedings of the Governor’s much-touted P-20 Council can clearly see the handwriting on the wall.

Unlike the serious bipartisan effort of 1993, Governor Ritter’s standards initiative has every indication of being a smokescreen for dismantling the valuable though imperfect education reform legacy of the Romer-Owens era.

Bill Ritter’s intentions are the very best but he lacks something his two predecessors had in abundance: extensive personal experience of education establishment stealth strategies.

We are thus left to wonder whether he will discover what’s inside the Trojan Horse before it’s too late.

Dr. William Moloney, a featured columnist on BackboneAmerica.net, was Colorado Education Commissioner from 1997-2007. He also served three terms on the governing board of NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.