To see but one example of why we can’t trust local school boards to lead meaningful reform efforts, see this post from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). Regarding this recent Wall Street Journal article on No Child Left Behind’s lack of “bite”* for failing schools, NSBA says:

If the system that judges school performance is innately flawed, should we be rushing to sanction these “failing” schools or should we be rushing to fix the system? Until NCLB gets its diagnosis right, schools should not be forced to make radical changes that are disruptive to students and their learning environment.

Well, yes, NCLB surely labels some schools as “needing improvement” that are pretty decent, such as those that are succeeding for most of their students but not for kids with learning disabilities, or those that are not up to standards yet but are making big gains over time. But all evidence indicates that the vast majority of “failing” schools are just that, and we shouldn’t waste any more time (or come up with any more excuses) before we intervene aggressively in them. NSBA’s proposal is a prescription for paralysis. Which is fitting, because most local school boards have resisted real reform forever.

Update: *As Liam notes below, Washington, D.C.’s, school system is instituting real reform. And guess what? It reports to the mayor, not the school board. Hardly a coincidence.

The Economist has an article about the challenges confronting South Dakota’s rural schools and school districts.

In many of these cases, virtual education could be a solution. Education Sector’s Bill Tucker recently wrote about virtual education, albeit as a catalyst for high-school reform, in The Gadfly.

Mike tells me (as he runs out the door to catch a flight) that he’s already answered my question about standards and tests thusly:

Particularly if all schools work toward common statewide academic standards, and thus have some degree of sameness when it comes to the content of what kids are learning, allowing them to differentiate when it comes to their approaches to discipline, school culture, the celebration of holidays, extra-curricular activities, etc., doesn’t seem like such a tragedy. And if my wife and I, as parents, don’t like the trendy, eco-friendly, ultra-PC ethos of my local Takoma Park school (we have another 4 ½ years to decide), then we can always, well, move.

Maybe. Wouldn’t segmented schools, though, want freedom to innovate in all areas (i.e., standards, curriculum), and not only the tangential stuff? I wonder if the lines Mike draws are possible to maintain.

The obvious rejoinder to Mike’s post is that when people cluster in “communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics,” they also cluster among people of the same race and socioeconomic status.

The impulse to seek out those similar to oneself isn’t new, but today’s society offers people many more methods by which to act on it. Marketers know this. Chris Anderson writes in his book The Long Tail, “If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches.” Successful companies are producing less of more, that is, to appeal to the clustered masses.

Some will say the drawbacks of racially or socioeconomically homogenous classrooms, classrooms that Mike rightly calls undesirable, far outweigh the benefits of schools where pupils parents agree on “what good education looks like.” Maybe. But as long as adults like to send their kids to close-to-home schools (they do), and as long as they live near others like them (they do), individual schools will be racially and socioeconomically uniform.

The Thernstroms (among others) convincingly document that this isn’t as bad as it seems. The alternatives, which all depend on busing, are far worse, in no small part because they shift schools’ focuses away from learning. Clustered schools, by contrast, could focus even more attention on learning. Mike writes, “As geographic sorting occurs, neighborhood public schools will have the same ability to customize themselves to fit the values of the local community.”

Is this the future of public schools: a confederation of classrooms customized to fit the preferences of their customers? If so, where does this fit in with standardized testing (not to mention Fordham’s dreams of national standards and tests)?

Yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal’s expanded opinion pages, Alan Ehrenhalt reviewed Bill Bishop’s new book, The Big Sort. Its thesis:

As Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics.

Both men are concerned about this trend, representing as they think it does a decline in interaction among people of differing views. I see the results of this trend where I live in Takoma Park, Maryland, known as the Berkeley of the Washington, D.C., region. (In October 2004, a college kid in a DNC t-shirt almost fainted when he asked me to donate to “get that bum out of office” and I told him I was actually in the Bush Administration. “I haven’t even come across another Republican,” he replied.)

And I agree that this development isn’t great for civic discourse or, ultimately, our democracy. But it might not be so bad for our schools. After all, one of the primary motivations of the school choice movement (which I support) is the ability for parents to sort themselves into schools that match their own personal beliefs about what good education looks like. More conservative parents can get a back-to-basics school and more progressive parents can get something more along the Montessori model. Nobody has to compromise toward a mushy middle.

As geographic sorting occurs, neighborhood public schools will have the same ability to customize themselves to fit the values of the local community. Particularly if all schools work toward common statewide academic standards, and thus have some degree of sameness when it comes to the content of what kids are learning, allowing them to differentiate when it comes to their approaches to discipline, school culture, the celebration of holidays, extra-curricular activities, etc., doesn’t seem like such a tragedy. And if my wife and I, as parents, don’t like the trendy, eco-friendly, ultra-PC ethos of my local Takoma Park school (we have another 4 ½ years to decide), then we can always, well, move.

When I first started reading this Slate piece by Alexander Russo (”Chicago School Days: Obama’s lackluster record on education“), I felt my head spinning. Not only would I have to reassess my admittedly optimistic views of Barack Obama, I’d also have to concede that Russo might (in this case, at least) know what he’s talking about.

Then I finished the article and reclaimed my equilibrium. As it turns out, I wouldn’t have to change my mind on either front.

Here’s the rub. Russo dives into an important dispute from a decade ago that is little known to national audiences: whether Chicago’s local school councils—a.k.a., “mini school boards”—should have the power to fire school principals, as a 1988 law allows. At issue was an ugly history of minority-dominated boards firing white principals for little reason other than their race. By the mid 1990s, Paul Vallas, Chicago’s then-superintendent, wanted to strip the boards of this authority because he was tired of good principals getting thrown under the bus. As a state senator, Obama shadow-boxed around the issue, Russo claims, and then eventually sided with the local boards once the issue was resolved in their favor (not surprising for a former community organizer).

I don’t know whether Russo captured that part of the story accurately or not, but his analysis for what this could mean for NCLB is preposterous:

Based on Obama’s actions in Chicago in 1999, it’s hard to imagine him taking charge of the continuing debate over whether and how No Child Left Behind should be renewed. Forced to take a side, Obama’s record suggests that, ultimately, he would be sympathetic to local autonomy. But there’s not much evidence to show that he would be able to help mend deep and abiding schisms between testing hawks and local-control advocates.

But local autonomy, Chicago-style, is school autonomy. It’s about “power to the people”—at a very, very local level, more akin to charter schools than typical school boards. Outside of Chicago, “local control” is about district autonomy—and is promoted mostly by Republicans and status quo types who don’t want the feds pushing them around. The “testing hawks” are mostly liberal groups like Education Trust that want to use federal power to bust the school district oligarchy to give power to the people—poor and minority parents. So to argue that Obama would side with the pro-school board, generally conservative “local control” types over the liberal testing hawks acting on behalf of minority communities is... well, it’s typical Russo.

It’s nice to feel back to normal again.