In the education community, it's hardly a cause for celebration when the latest results of a National Assessment of Education Progress hit the media, as one did this week when the results of a NAEP report on urban school districts was announced. And NO, that's not because NAEP results are always bad, as indeed the results of this latest NAEP are not all bad. And NO, it's not because educators are inherently resistant to assessments. In fact, according to surveys, the vast majority of teachers welcome being assessed based on student engagement, principal observations, and locally made and administered student performance evaluations.
What makes announcements of NAEP and other broad assessments unnerving to educators is that the results are used by politicians and pundits as the basis to propose, well, just about anything.
Unfortunately, some of those people using NAEP and other studies to make ridiculous pronouncements about the state of public education are people who are supposed to be allies of public education, specifically people who call themselves "Democrats." In her weekly blog post, Diane Ravitch spotlighted the clout of a particularly powerful group of Democrats known as Democrats for Education Reform who are actively undermining traditional public schools.
"This is a small and politically powerful organization that involves some of the nation's wealthiest hedge-fund managers. A story in The New York Times explained that when New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wanted entrée to the hedge-fund crowd for his political fundraising, he had first to meet with Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. No money for his candidacy unless he showed a favorable stance towards privatization. Democrats for Education Reform-referred to as DFER (dee-fer)-is active nationally, promoting the candidacy of pro-charter candidates for state legislatures and for national office."
The rightwing is elated at the tendency of people who call themselves Democrats to support Bush-era ed policies that undermine teachers' unions and public schools:
"From enacting new curricula standards to school choice measures such as charter schools, the NEA has been bested by the coterie of centrist Democrats, conservatives, libertarians and idiosyncratic left-learners who make up the school reform movement. The fact that Democrats -- including prominent liberals such as Green Dot Schools founder (and Rock the Vote cofounder) Steve Barr -- are also some of the most-prominent backers of school reform means that the NEA can no longer count on the Democratic National Committee for unquestioned support."
I've often been perplexed at the tendency of Democrats - even those who profess to be progressive - to support education policies that are not the least bit democratic, let alone progressive or even liberal. Is it because the Washington consensus on education policy is just a front for corporate takeover of public schools? Is it because they're all engaged in a global capitalistic plot hatched by the World Bank to subvert publicly funded schools? Is it because there is a failure of the minds of our leaders to grasp, as William Timberman suggested in comments to last week's Left Ed post, the importance of public education in the scheme of all the other overwhelming problems they face?
Today on Left Ed, let's consider another option. Let's explore the idea that much of the Democratic party and its leadership is seriously off-kilter on education and willfully ignorant of the destructive nature of their policies because they suffer from a case of Education Deficit Disorder.
In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama"… [D]rill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you're bound to hit Obama supporters.
And it's important to recall that this hawk/dove split and the elite/rank-and-file split have some causal interaction. Back in 2002, the Democratic establishment found itself trapped in this vicious cycle. Most rank-and-file members of congress were ready to oppose the war. But the leadership in the House and the Senate was backing it. And the campaign committees were advising challengers and vulnerable members to back it. And the conventional wisdom said that anyone who wanted to be elected president had to back it. And so were most of the media celebrities focusing on foreign policy - Holbrooke and Albright and Pollack and O'Hanlon.
My current hypothesis is as follows: for the rank and file of professional, progressive foreign policy types who were opposed to the Iraq war from the start, the Obama campaign is the equivalent of the 2002 Nancy Pelosi leadership, 2003 Howard Dean presidential, and 2006 Ned Lamont Senate campaigns were for much of the activist rank and file. However, while this rebellion is analogous to those earlier rebellions of an anti-war rank and file against a pro-leadership, the cultural gap between wonks and hacks, between insiders and outsiders, and between professionals and the grassroots have prevented it from gaining the same traction as those earlier campaigns.
I try to flesh out this hypothesis in the extended entry.
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