Michael Petrilli, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently suggested that 2017 can be the year we come back together again. Excerpts of his post in Fordham’s Flypaper appear below:
Let me suggest three principles we should all try to adhere to—and what they could mean for education reform in the months ahead.
The first is compassion. Much of 2016’s acrimony came from people of all backgrounds and walks of life who felt disrespected, ignored, left out, or unseen. There’s a whole lot of pain out there, and at least a bit of it could be soothed by acknowledging it in one another. Feeling people’s pain won’t solve our problems, but it’s an essential first step to seeing each other’s humanity, so we can move on to tackling the policy issues at hand.
Those of us in education reform can do better at this. Let’s seek to understand the powerlessness that teachers experience when reform mandates trickle down from on high. Let’s truly see the African-American communities that may lose their low-performing yet cherished neighborhood schools—not to mention some needed grown-up jobs—due to harsh accountability policies or competition from charters. Let’s appreciate the view of Tea Party parents, too, families that feel besieged by a popular culture that’s alien to their values and that want some measure of control over what is taught in their children’s schools. Let’s listen to the ambivalence of working-class parents when we preach that college is the only path to status and success in America today.
The second principle—a cousin of compassion—is humility. I cringe a bit when recalling a younger self, declaring that “we know what we need to do, we just need the political will to do it,” thumping my chest about the moral imperative of “leaving no child behind.” We know some of what to do, sure, but by no means everything. Our schools can’t do it all—not when too many parents struggle to do their part. We won’t close the wide gaps in our society—not overnight, not even in a generation.
That’s not an argument for despair, inaction, or slipping into the comfortable, fatalistic view that the K–12 system can’t really do any good until some sort of large societal revolution takes place. But it does argue for realistic expectations. Individual schools can achieve breakthrough results. But at scale in a big country like ours, progress is inherently incremental. That’s much better than no progress at all, a thought worth bearing in mind in coming months when states publish their draft ESSA accountability plans, which must include multiple targets on achievement, graduation, and much else. Reformers should resist the urge to attack objectives that are less than Utopian—while rejecting those who would settle for the status quo. We might look to states that have made big gains in recent years—Tennessee and Louisiana come to mind—to see what’s achievable. Small steps forward, moving toward but not expecting “transformation” anytime soon, that’s what we should seek.
The final principle is subsidiarity. A Roman Catholic precept, much beloved by Burkean conservatives, it posits that authority should be devolved whenever possible to the lowest level—to those closest to the action. In education, it could be read as an argument for “local control”—but with the important caveat that parents, teachers, and principals, not elected school boards, are closest to the action that matters. They don’t have nearly enough authority today in most places.
This principle is important because it aligns with human nature. People are more bought into a project when they have real say about it. Even most adherents of subsidiarity will acknowledge that there are some benefits to scale and to externally-monitored, results-based accountability. Help and assistance—especially from the state level—will continue to be useful, especially if it is truly a voluntary offering (ahem, curriculum!). But mandates about who should do what and how they must go about it should be kept to an absolute minimum.
For more, see https://edexcellence.net/articles/2017-the-year-we-could-come-back-together-again
