(Originally posted to the National Journal’s Education Experts blog.)

Perhaps it’s not so unusual that the same person who fought to get a waiver from NCLB’s tutoring requirement is the same person who is pushing a fast track for making the bill’s requirements more flexible. When some of Arne Duncan’s Chicago schools were failing kids, he asked then Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for a waiver from the requirement that students be permitted to leave and take their tutoring money elsewhere. Arne Duncan thought he could do tutoring better than the private sector, so he sought to deliver tutoring rather than send the money out of house. There’s no data on whether it worked, and some in Chicago say not much changed during that period of time following NCLB, other than a heightened awareness of the problem and a tenacity by Duncan to pursue some modest, external reforms (charters, some contracting). Once a school superintendent, always a school superintendent. And while Duncan is not the issue, his brand of reform puts Superintendents and school boards in the driver’s seat. Problem is, last time they drove that car, it kept getting banged up.

But it was NCLB’s teeth - the threat of loss of money or worse - that got people motivated. The hard, fast consequences of accountability, and the spotlight on data, however challenged by differing vantage points, prevented the country from hiding the shameful state of education in our schools, from the world or ourselves…

Read the entire post HERE.

(*Image courtesy of yellowcloud)

(originally published @ National Journal’s Education Experts blog)

You want to know a secret? Parents and community leaders have spent decades talking and pressuring and begging for changes to our country’s education system until they are blue in the face. Want to hear another one? The education system, to a great extent, has spent as much time - though far less energy - ignoring them.

Why? Because it’s easier. Easier than admitting there is a problem. Easier than figuring out a solution. Easier than making a change that might be uncomfortable for a few adults.

Parents have always been the true warriors (and disrupters) in education. They’ve gotten charter school laws passed, demanded real options to failing schools, been teacher watchdogs where union bargaining agreements hogtie school leaders, and pushed curriculum changes when their kids were being cheated.

True, this brand of education reform came about through community engagement and participation in forums and meetings, but it also took grassroots organizing and camping out in legislative offices - blood, sweat and tears.

Parents already know what’s working and what’s not, and they’re out in droves every single day. Requiring their input as a condition of ESEA reauthorization is, quite frankly, silly. Requiring districts and states to make changes based on their input or risk the loss of funding, now that would make a difference.