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At a recent briefing at the U.S. Department of Education, Peter Cunningham, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach, interviewed Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly from the American Enterprise Institute on the role of the federal government in K-12 public education.  The conversation was structured around a recently released book that Hess and Kelly co-edited entitled Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools.  

While I found some of the verbiage typical and maddening (considering the source), there were some statements that resonate and provide food for thought and areas where we can all work together.  Early in the briefing, Hess stated that one challenge with the federal role in public school improvement is that there are so many actors in working in the “space”.  Indeed, 14,000 school districts each with a locally elected community-based school board funded primarily with local tax dollars definitely precludes national rule-making that will change and/or improve all schools.  And, as Hess also stated, too often “Good politics makes for bad policy,” in that elected officials will mollify a constituency in order to keep their job with policy that proves problematic at the implementation level.  This is especially true with public education since implementation is so far removed from national decision-making.

Two other observations also resonated:  First, that the federal government is effective in leading change when it uses the “bully pulpit” to state and support priorities, but less so when it tries to pick “winners and losers” in local implementation.  Second, that at the federal level we spend pennies on the dollar in basic research on what works in education compared to the national investment in health care research.  The federal government could be more effective in providing national leadership with its “bully pulpit” if it invested more robustly in research that informs practice and then ensured the research was widely disseminated.

But for me, the most important statement of the morning came when Hess pointed out that the teacher and school leadership voice has been absent in national policymaking; that practitioners need to help solve the problems we all recognize; and that unions should be partners in education reform.

The members of the Learning First Alliance (LFA) are in strong agreement with that sentiment and are not interested in defending bad practice or low student achievement.  Rather, the individual and collective knowledge and experience represented in the sixteen education leadership organizations comprising LFA are committed to solution-oriented conversations and initiatives.  That can only happen when the “bully pulpit” recognizes the talent and natural resources represented by education professionals who, like all of us, want the very best education for our nation’s young people.

Image by Chris Engelsma (own work) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons