Education Sector has posted the text of a presentation¹ delivered by co-founder and co-director Thomas Toch. In it, Toch gives a brief but helpful recap of recent educational policy struggles, defines three main areas of tension, and suggests the likely outcome of each:

1. National vs. local authority in school reform; verdict: national standards are inevitable
2. Low-performing vs. higher-achieving students as the focus/measure of reform; verdict: a compromise that focuses on improvement along the entire achievement continuum
3. Regulatory vs. market-based reform strategies; verdict: a “tight-loose” strategy in which policymakers set clear performance expectations but allow entrepreneurs freedom to meet those standards in a variety of ways

Toch presents NCLB as legislation that responded to a need, in a post-industrialized economy, for “most people … to use their minds” and to bring a “far wider range of students to the standards [the educational system] had traditionally reserved for the gifted and the privileged.”

I think this is a necessary and appropriate goal, but I don’t think the current version of NCLB, at least in practice, helps us to attain that goal. The focus of the legislation seems to be, even according to its supporters, on raising “basic skills,” with little concern for “the mind” in any abstract sense, or for bringing students to the level of the “gifted and privileged.” If Toch is correct in predicting that we will move toward national standards (I think he is), then I hope those standards will include room for the kinds of higher-level concerns he implies.²

This is the tension Toch addresses next, accurately capturing the view of the NCLB opposition on this issue: “NCLB, some have argued, has co-opted the entire educational system on behalf of low-achieving students.” On this issue, Toch has a promising response:

there has been a movement to change the ways schools are judged under NCLB, to give them credit for improving and incentives to improve the performance of students all along the achievement continuum

A move that sounds so obviously logical that it amazes me that this has to come as a revision … but at least it’s coming.

On the last area of tension, Toch defines the “tight-loose” strategy he believes will prevail, then predicts a future for education that is both exciting and troubling:

We are moving, inexorably, to a more diversified, market-driven system of public education, one that expands the definition of who public educators are and what public education is.

Exciting because, if true, it opens the door for genuine change. Troubling because all sorts of other things could creep through that door, most with strings attached and tied securely around the wallets of interested parties who may not have education as their top priority.

I also wonder, given Toch’s prediction that school systems will operate more like “airport authorities,” how these systems will be managed. It seems school systems are having a hard enough time with things now. Are they ready for that level of complexity and openness?

1. Toch, Thomas. “Education Sector: Analysis and Perspectives: Three Tensions in Education Reform.” Education Sector 1 November 2007. 13 November 2007 http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=582411. [back]
2. Dept. of Ed. services like What Works Clearinghouse and the new Doing What Works provide some hope. DWW is too new to assess its usefulness or balance, but first on the current list of “what’s coming” is “cognition and learning.” [back]

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