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In today's Education Gadfly, Checker Finn wrote a thoughtful, at times almost lyrical, meditation on the role of schools in forging national unity. Unlike most voucher advocates, he acknowledges the risk of national balkanization posed by the proliferation of "charters, vouchers, tax credits, virtual schools, magnets, hybrids, and on and on"--in other words, schools that often cater to specific ideological, social or religious interests without championing any larger vision of national identity.

Finn advocates "well-wrought, statewide academic standards joined to well-wrought and forceful state testing-and-accountability mechanisms" but concedes the difficulty of applying this structure to private schools under a voucher scheme. Indeed, private schools that accept public dollars, align their curricula with state standards, and submit to state testing and accountability strictures sound an awful lot like public schools and would most likely be anathema to all but the most temperate privatization supporters. (Apparently, a forthcoming Fordham report will wrestle with this issue.) ...

The NEA has just released a major new paper on the federal role in education entitled Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020. 

In doing so, they join a number of other groups that have deemed it high time to clarify the federal role after seven years of NCLB--and before a new administration arrives in January.  (See, for example, the recent report by the Forum for Education and Democracy and the even more recent statement released by a distiguished task force calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.")

NEA's report begins with the premise that NCLB has thrown the federal role out of whack, creating "top-down, command-and-control, federally prescriptive testing and accountability mandates" that have narrowed curricula, robbed assessment of its power as an instructional tool and failed to close achievement gaps. 

With the aim of ensuring universal access to great public schools by 2020, the NEA document outlines six priorities for federal involvement in education:   ...

Today, the New York Times published Jennifer Medina's story about the success of the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, a small school that sends almost all of its students--the large majority of them poor--to college. The school's inspiring success is a testament to the passion and unrelenting hard work of its staff and students.

Still, an aspect of the Times story left me distinctly uneasy. "To hear the tales of the new graduates is to understand the enormous effort and amount of resources it takes to make a school succeed," Medina writes. "Teachers and other staff members routinely work 60 hours a week....  [School Principal Elana] Karopkin said it would be unfair to say she was burned out, but admitted she was nothing less than 'exhausted,' both physically and emotionally."  Asked about her staff's workload, she replied that "nobody should be forced to choose between educating other people's children and having their own." ...

Over the past week, Public School Insights has been interviewing the distinguished co-chairs of the high-profile task force behind a new campaign calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education."  As we noted in an earlier post, the task force is advocating for a set of policies to reform schools while offsetting the social and economic disadvantages that contribute to academic achievement gaps.

I recently spoke with campaign co-chair Helen Ladd, a prominent professor of economics and public policy at Duke University.  Like co-chairs Pedro Noguera and Tom Payzant, Ladd argues that schools alone cannot close achievement gaps--The nation needs aggressive school reform strategies as well as policies to minimize the impact of poverty on student performance. ...