Both David Brooks of the New York Times and the Washington Post editorial board ran eerily similar pieces on Friday about the two rival camps within the education reform movement.
Both essays categorize the two major education interests as existing at irreconcilable poles. The Post writes:
The different education factions of the party -- those pushing for radical restructuring and those more wedded to the status quo -- were each convinced during the campaign that Mr. Obama shared their particular viewpoints.
Brooks frames it:
On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers' unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.
So pick a side. You're either with the bold chainsaw of "reform" or you're a wimpy defender of the stigma-laden "status quo." Wrap your arms around the testing monomania Joel Klein brought to New York, or you're soft on accountability. Embrace Michelle Rhee's nuclear approach to administering schools, or you're a status quo-hugging wuss.
Here's a snippet from this week's Time Magazine cover story on the hard-charging DC schools chancellor:
"The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she [Rhee] tells me [Time reporter Amanda Ripley] one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn't respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. "People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job."
I get it. Proficiency in basic skills is essential. Do I get slapped with a status quo label for suggesting that there should be other priorities in school (and childhood) besides basic skills drilling for students at risk? Also, Rhee is working with a particularly horrendous system in Washington, DC; is her scorched earth attitude the kind we need as U.S. Secretary of Education?
The status quo-defending enemy has a face. Both Brooks and the Post editorial board name Stanford professor and top Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond as the personification of the education anti-reformist. This is disingenuous. True, Darling-Hammond doesn't want to blow up America's schools the way acolytes of Klein and Rhee may. She does not always side with privatization of schools. She does not view teachers' unions and collective bargaining as categorically repellent. And in 2005, she co-authored a study that was critical of Teach for America's high attrition rate. However, Darling-Hammond's comprehensive body of work, particularly on teacher quality, is progressive and speaks to improving the realities of life on the ground in American schools.
Thoughtful, incremental reform is still reform, and it may be wiser than the corporate-supported nuclear option. David Brooks and the Washington Post do Americans a disservice by waving a chainsaw and shouting you're either with us or you're with the status quo.
Dan Brown is a teacher and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle. He is not a member of a teachers' union.