Today at a big wing-ding on federal education research sponsored by Education Sector and several other groups, former Deputy Secretary of Education Marshall (Mike) Smith agreed that it was probably a mistake to have carved the Education Department (ED) out of the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

I was half-serious when I first said this, citing Moynihan and Califano (celebrated opponents of ED’s creation, both) and teeing off Russ Whitehurst’s comment that the Department of Health and Human Services now spends a vastly larger fraction of its discretionary budget on R & D than does ED. Smith was serious, citing evidence that one of the largest contributors to weak student achievement and even worse problems for kids and school systems is health issues (he focused on tooth decay leading to rampant infection leading sometimes to death) besetting American children, especially poor ones.

Greg Anrig is smart, eloquent and likable, as was his dad, whose memory I cherish. (His mom is pretty terrific, too.) But he’s overhasty in declaring that the voucher movement has “stalled” and not until you get to the end of his long piece does he acknowledge the larger point, which is that school choice in its infinite variety is accelerating and that the voucher movement is largely to thank for that.

A majority of U.S. students now study either in bona fide “schools of choice” or in neighborhood schools that their parents chose with a realtor’s help. That’s an amazing change since I was a schoolboy in the fifties and a very positive one. The pity is that the girls and boys with the least access to decent education options today are poor and minority youngsters trapped in wretched urban school systems.

Those are the kids being helped by vouchers in Milwaukee and D.C. and Ohio—and who would be helped in myriad other places if Greg and his friends would allow this to happen (and if a bunch of states would repeal their nativist, anti-Catholic “Blaine Amendments”).

I surely do not suggest that vouchers are the only worthwhile form of school choice, much less that the mere existence of vouchers leads to improved student achievement. The schools have to be worth attending, too, places where quality teaching and learning occur. That’s true of many but not all private schools, just as it’s true of some but not nearly enough district-run schools (and public-sector schools of choice). Yes, I’ve come in recent years to appreciate, along with Sol Stern and others, that choice alone is no cure-all and that “structural” reformers often don’t pay enough attention to curriculum, instruction, and suchlike. It’s true that kids need both (and more).  But it’s just as true, I think even truer, that public education’s panoply of interest groups remains far keener to defend the wretched status quo than either to liberate more kids to attend better schools or radically to transform what happens inside the schools they’re defending. Greg more or less recognizes this—and at the very end of his piece he makes one suggestion I heartily endorse: break down the district barriers that limit the (public) school choice options afforded by NCLB.

Choice is winning, Greg. Vouchers are expanding, too, albeit more slowly due to fierce pushback.  But they’ve taken root on U.S. soil, they’re constitutional (at least under the federal constitution), and the question to be asked about them today isn’t whether America will ever have vouchers but where they’ll appear next. Meanwhile, what’s not yet winning—in anybody’s schools—is student achievement.

The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner is a heckuva smart guy and he’s usually right (as well as Right). His take on A Nation at Risk, and the country’s response to it, however, is only half right.

Yes, we’re spending pots more money on public education today—close to twice as much per kid in constant dollars—than in 1983 when ANAR was issued. But that kind of spending increase was happening for decades and decades before ANAR, too. Indeed, public education spending has risen for as long as we’ve had public education. (See page 200 of my book.) No, spending more doesn’t solve any problems or boost achievement, but neither was it America’s main response to ANAR.

Rather, the main responses were in fact to do a lot more of the two things that Ed praises: lots more school choice (though not enough, and not good enough choices) and lots more accountability (though not enough and it’s not working as well as it should). He decries NCLB as overzealous federal intervention, and I don’t disagree, but it’s not as if repealing it (which only residents of cloud cuckoo land imagine happening) would lead to tons more school choice or accountability. Ed and his Heritage colleagues have a slight tendency to see Uncle Sam as the root of all evil. There’s plenty to criticize in American public education—but the federal government is among the lesser culprits.

After months of jockeying with control-freak governor Ted Strickland, Ohio state education superintendent Susan Tave Zelman is on her way out, perhaps to the University of Oregon as ed school dean.

She toughed it out for a while but the handwriting went onto the wall for her once key members of the state board of education decided that placating the governor was more important than retaining Dr. Z, as she is known at the Ohio Department of Education. It must also be said that she didn’t try very hard to placate him herself, seeming more determined to demonstrate independence than to make nice with Bob Taft’s successor and his agenda. She can, in truth, be ornery, strong-willed, and mercurial, in addition to very bright, boundlessly energetic, and quite creative. But there was no way that a principled educator with her track record could have accommodated the Strickland education agenda, such as it is. Much of it, alas, simply involves seizing control of the system and reorganizing the deck chairs rather than repositioning the ship.

But he’s recommended some repositioning, too, in ways that Dr. Z could not (and should not be expected to) stomach, much less preside over. Ohio’s standards and accountability system leaves much to be desired—but the Governor’s goal is to weaken it, not strengthen it. The state’s charter-school and voucher programs also have their flaws—but the Governor’s goal is to eliminate them, not fix them. Indeed, the only way Zelman could in conscience have stayed in Columbus was if she retained independent control of the education department. Once that became unrealistic, her fate was sealed. That’s a pity. I like her personally, admire her pluck and her what’s-good-for-the-kids-not-necessarily-the-grownups orientation and have enjoyed my various dealings with her. Far more important, Strickland is going to be freer to cripple these vitally important policy domains once she’s out of the way. We’ll miss you, Dr. Z, and the state owes you a far greater debt of gratitude than it’s ever likely to pay.

Not so many moons ago, Boston University’s college of education was the brightest spot in the dim universe of U.S. ed schools, full of heterodox thinkers on important issues (e.g., Charles Glenn, David Steiner, Kevin Ryan, Steve Tigner). Some of those thinkers are still there, but the school’s leadership—recently in Glenn’s able hands on an “acting” basis—is about to be turned over to a far more orthodox sort.

Last month B.U. announced the appointment of Dr. Hardin Coleman, a psychologist specializing in counseling, currently at the University of Wisconsin, a well-known warehouse of conventional thinking. Coleman’s main stated interests are topics like “identity formation” among “culturally diverse” adolescents. He is reportedly hostile to charter schools and high-stakes accountability and just about everything else worth being in favor of nowadays—and just about everything that Massachusetts is celebrated for doing well.

As B.U. heads back into the ed school sheep pen, let’s at least note that it wasn’t always there and didn’t have to return.

The White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools, underway at this moment, has about 300 attendees, all of whom already agree with each other about nearly all the issues on the table. No bad thing to rally the troops or (changing metaphors) preach to the choir. But I didn’t spot anyone there whose mind needed to, or was likely to be, changed by the proceedings. Hence the main value of this event beyond the Ronald Reagan Building amphitheater (normally occupied by the satirical Capitol Steps) depends on whether word of it percolates out and anybody pays heed.

Four more takeaways, two of them admittedly churlish:

• The President gave a good talk, peppered with positive examples from the world of Catholic schools (never mind the ecumenical audience and many flavors of faith-based schools) and from the recent Fordham Institute report on same. He called on states to repeal their Blaine Amendments. He was in excellent humor and form but also showed faint signs of final-year-in-office enervation.
• Though the Fordham Report and its case studies permeate this event, it is never named, quoted from or referenced. Even session moderator Scott Hamilton, who edited it and has a Fordham tie, is identified on the program by another part of his work life. We don’t need to ask why the systematic shunning. It’s payback for Mike’s and my occasional truth-tellings about the Secretary of Education (here, for instance).
• The social science evidence offered (mainly by Cal State’s Bill Jeynes) on behalf of achievement-gap closing by church-affiliated schools left something to be desired. No mention of selection effects and no true measure of school effects. And no mention of the reluctance of these—and just about all—private schools to have their performance assessed via instruments that lend themselves to valid comparisons with public schools.
• Despite the Summit’s generous support from the wonderful Bradley and Friedman foundations, everyone attending the opening reception had to pay for his/her own drinks—starting at five bucks for a Pepsi! I hope some of that margin makes its way into inner-city faith-based schools or scholarships for kids, but I’m not counting on it.

I’m looking forward to Thursday’s White House “summit” on inner-city kids and faith-based schools, both because it’s a really important issue and because a number of panelists (and at least one moderator) are involved with the promising projects and programs recently profiled in Fordham’s Who Will Save America’s Urban Catholic Schools?

But I’ve also learned a thing or two about “summits” over the years. When they accomplish anything (rare), it’s because tons of groundwork has been done in advance to forge near-agreement among key players on an action plan or program to be announced or inked at the summit itself. Also, they’re usually small events where a few really important decision-makers meet with each other “at the summit”—i.e., somewhere above the hillsides inhabited by bureaucrats and staffers and assistant secretaries and such.

What’s coming up this week is more like a conference than a summit. There will be a cast of thousands. Problems and ideas will surely be aired, perhaps brilliantly examined, but to the best of my knowledge, no action plan will be announced for none has been agreed to. I worry that the tone will be set by the President’s remarks at the prayer breakfast the other day that Catholic schools need to be “saved.” That’s oversimplified and naïve, at least for elected officials. (The pope and his bishops are another story.) However, helping more poor kids to attend such schools is a legitimate public policy objective toward which actual programs can be mounted. If Thursday’s event gets us any closer to such programs, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works. Nowhwere is this clearer than in K-12 education, where the CATO crowd, indistinguishable nowadays from the “separation of school and state crowd,” basically doesn’t believe in any form of public education. They believe in private education, purchased in the marketplace by parents who want and can afford it for their kids from schools that are not accountable to anybody for anything except keeping those tuition payments rolling in the door. The heck with everybody else’s kids. The heck with an educated polity or transmitted common culture. Check out Neil McCluskey’s review of my book.

Talk about bizarre piggybacking and ahistoricism.

Ronald Reagan didn’t make many missteps, but one blunder that’s widely acknowledged by just about everyone who follows education was the White House’s bungled initial reception of A Nation at Risk in 1983. The “vision” that the President laid out on that occasion had just about nothing to do with what the Excellence Commission said or recommended. It was ships passing in the night.

After dawn broke, Reagan and his team (including Ed Meese) realized that the Commission’s report had struck a nerve—even though it had absolutely nothing to do with school choice or with reducing the federal role in education. Whereupon the President began gallivanting around the land with Education Secretary Ted Bell—18 joint events in 11 weeks, it says on page 99 of my book.

But as he traveled he sang from the Commission’s hymnal (higher standards, tougher courses, better teachers, etc.), not the one that our good friends at Heritage (and Senator DeMint) are trying posthumously to place in his hands.