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Goldstein leaves out the fact that the Duncan's "Race to the Top" and i3 funds are directed by Joanne Weiss and Jim Shelton, both former NewSchools Venture Fund employees.

Shelton had a little foray into "innovation" when he started a for-profit charter chain that was eventually sold to the edu-idiots (and "innovators") at Edison Schools. The DOE is now focused on "driving innovation" rather than compliance, which sounded good at first...but now seems like an old turd wrapped in new garb.

There's a fair amount of B-school logic behind these reforms; one of the Godfathers of venture philanthropy, Bill Gates, recently dismissed the notion that B-schools should shoulder any responsibility for the economic collapse (Mr. Gates, however, will continue bashing K-12 education for future economic troubles). As Goldstein notes, many of these "innovators" are free-market believers; NSGF's former CEO Kim Smith has publicly stated people in Ed "innovation" are free-market people (NSVF's current CEO, Ted Mitchell, is also President of the CA State Board of Ed). There are concerns about allowing market fundamentalism to enter public school policy or "innovation."

"Innovation" does not mean chipping away at the testing regime; it does not mean giving teachers the ability to be flexible; it does not mean turning schools into full-service community centers. "Innovation" mostly means letting a bunch of B-school fools to tell educators what to do.

The only thing we can agree on is that the current state of affairs is unsatisfactory. Thus, the trump cards are held by those who promise the most radical change from the status quo. Unfortunately, the "change agents" who are most popular with the powerful decisionmakers are those that shift the need to change on those with least power -- teachers and students. Evidence of effectiveness is at best a secondary consideration.

Never underestimate the power of a teacher. Each day of the 42 years that I taught, I entered my classroom at 7:15 a.m. and taught by myself until school was dismissed. Only rarely did another adult enter my classroom. One day I thought to myself, "This is like being self-employed, only without the overhead."

When a directive came from above, if I didn't agree with it, I had 1001 ways to be creatively non-compliant, and so I always did what I thought best. Like most teachers, I kept it to myself. When one principal requested that all teachers put their objectives on the board, I copied objectives out of a book and kept the same ones up for months, knowing that he'd never notice. I was right.

Unless the "reformers" can come up with the money to have an administrator in every classroom, teachers will continue to teach subversively. As Stanford professor Larry Cuban used to say, nothing will ever happen without the cooperation of the classroom teacher.

Are teachers involved in making decisions at the national level? No. Are they powerless? No. Once the classroom door is shut, teachers make 100% of all the decisions and will continue to do so. There will be no "innovation" or "reform" without them.

Kenneth--Thanks for your message. I agree with you that "innovation" has been far too narrowly defined. There are many innovative ideas that are currently out of favor with the media and the most influential communities. Still, I'm willing to cut the Department much more slack. They were truly responsive to the Race to the Top comments, and I suspect they'll continue to listen to a wide range of voices. Hence the consternation of the True Believers in the entrepreneur/reformer ranks.

A big problem is that we lack investment in the kind of research infrastructure that could really answer all the questions we ask. Innovation is therefore generally a shot in the dark--even long after implementation. Or worse, the spoils go to those with the biggest PR budgets.

Anthony--thanks so much for your comment on power dynamics. You're right to suggest that no one thinks the current state of affairs is acceptable. The innovation conversation does include a whole lot of PR puffery, but the desire to break out of the status quo is, as you suggest, surely understandable. It's also true right now that rank-and-file educators in public schools--even those who have accomplished remarkable things--are hardly in the cat-bird seat. Do you think practicing educators have allowed the vacuum to be filled by others? Do you think more and better research could correct this dynamic? 

Linda--Thanks for your message. Teachers are certainly the final implementers in the classroom, and so they do hold real power. The model for teacher empowerment I most recently witnessed at a school in Maryland happened not behind closed classroom doors but rather in meetings and other structured occasions where teachers worked together with other school staff to establish policies, make important decisions and create strategies for addressing individual students' needs. It strikes me that innovation won't get all that far without that sort of teacher empowerment.

Linda:

Thank you for reminding me of something I used to know when I was in the classroom but had forgotten: the power of the teacher. I have been having a minor crisis of confidence of late, seeing things develop in the policy world that I fear actively work against what's best for children, and feeling powerless to change. Your message is one I need to remember: keep talking to teachers, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Thank you, Robert. If I were a young teacher today I'd find other like-minded colleagues and start a charter school. In this way, teachers could select a head teacher and make all majors decisions regarding faculty, curriculum and instruction. Frankly I'm surprised more teachers don't see the possibilities that charters could hold for them. With their own schools, teachers would become fully professional.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and to all the people who devote their lives to the education of our children.

Claus asks:
Do you think practicing educators have allowed the vacuum to be filled by others?

I think that was more true a few years back. In the past few years there has been a great deal of work done by practitioners to offer solid solutions informed by our perspective at the ground level. I think these "policy muscles" are still a bit weak, because they are so rarely used, and so often ignored. When teachers are asked their views, as I recently did on my "Teachers' Letters to Obama" project on Facebook, they are quite eloquent and constructive.

Do you think more and better research could correct this dynamic?

Honestly, I do not. We are seeing excellent research appear that shows us clear lessons -- about charter schools, performance pay, the harmful effects of over-reliance on standardized tests -- but none of this research aligns with the political imperatives of the corporate "reform" movement, so it is ignored. It is useful, but I do not think it will correct this dynamic. Imbalances in power are corrected when people get active and use their power, not when they find a great study to cite.

US educational policy is presently running on buzzwords, with "innovation" just an element of the buzz. No one asks: What innovation are you referring to? "World class" "High Quality" "Turn Around" "Merit" "Data-Driven" And on and on.

It's the Stone Soup fable without the stone or the pot. Educators are being "incentivized" and "facilitated" to convert wishes into horses (pardon to soup and horses, which aren't metaphors).

Meanwhile, there is reality. Well-conducted IES research has determined that the leading edge of The New Science of Reading has no impact. The best remedial reading programs have no impact at grades 3 and 5. Intensive after-school tutoring in reading and math has no impact. Supplemental instruction in "reading comprehension" in middle grades has no impact.

The National Academy of Sciences has warned that none of the four reforms of the voluntarily compulsory "Race to the Top" has any scientific/technical foundation.

NCLB, the current law of the land, has every public school and school district in the country headed for being designated "failing" by 2014.

Surreality doesn't long trump reality--ordinarily.

Dick--

Policymakers could counter that we lack solid research to justify any course of action--but they feel the need to move ahead with strategies to promote improvement. How does one answer that question?

"Quit doing harm" is one answer.

As one example. The disaggregation of test scores mandated by NCLB has been widely praised. An article published November 20 2009 concludes:

In the face of inescapable validity concerns, continued use of aggregated and disaggregated scores to assess educational quality begs the question: Are those advocating the current educational accountability policy unaware of these issues, or purposefully ignoring them? Given the information available to them, educational policy makers cannot claim ignorance anymore and schools cannot ignore the potential evil inherent within the policies that govern them. The use of invalid accountability systems to make high-stakes decisions must stop; our children’s education and our nation’s future depend on it.

http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v17n22/v17n22.pdf

"Invest in building the domestic public school education enterprise rather than bashing it--as part of domestic nation building" is another answer.

"Dust off the R&D methodology and the few product/protocols that were produced by federal investment in educational R&D in the 1960's and 70's but that were discarded for general and professional political reasons" is another answer.

I could list other "answers," but the Race to the Top" is already in motion. If "policy makers" won't listen to the National Academy of Sciences, they're not going to listen to a blog comment.

Claus,
Regarding your reply to Anthony, I don't think it is a case of practitioners allowing others to fill the vacuum. The reality is there has been a concerted effort to define educators as the source of the problem and thus marginalize their views in the reform dialogue. Evidence for this abounds not only in the blame the teachers rhetoric with its fixation on firing "the bad" teachers but in the very nature of TFA or the Broad Superintendents program whose philosophy is that educators can't lead and we just need some corporate CEOs or retired Generals and Admirals to straighten things out. While this has been going on for more than a decade the most telling example was the vicious attack mounted on Linda Darling Hammond by the so-called reformers when they thought she might be named secretary. here is someone with a long track record of innovation who was trashed as a defender of the status quo. According to these reformers anyone actually knowledgeable about teaching and learning is the old guard.

Thanks for your comment, Lewis. I shared your dismay at the organized attacks leveled and Linda Darling-Hammond. I also agree that educators have been marginalized. We try to showcase these educators whenever we can, and we hope that they can gain a stronger voice in the national debate.

"According to these reformers, anyone actually knowledgeable about teaching and learning is the old guard." Those words epitomize our problems in education. As long as we have a lot of citizens who are anti-intellectual, we will have an educational system that reflects that point of view.

I have confidence in President Obama, a highly intelligent and superbly educated man. Sooner or later, he'll go knocking at the door of Professor Darling-Hammond and other scholars who have the knowledge that will lead us to authentic reform. Perhaps politics kept him from doing so at first, but now there isn't anything to prevent him from making the most informed decisions.