‘Unresolved Quandaries’

The Weekly Standard calls NCLB “education reform run amok.” Andrew Ferguson’s cover story details unintended consequences of NCLB through the lens of a few new books on education and Big Government Conservatism.

[O]ne way to reverse [the decline in public education], it was thought, was to hold schools accountable for the education of their students: Test the kids, publish the scores, and let parents, armed with the results, decide whether the teachers and administrators were doing the job they were hired to do.

It’s certainly a sound idea–which is not, of course, the same thing as saying it’s an idea that should be imposed nationwide by the employees of the Department of Education. The distinction is usually lost on the practitioners of BGC, however. Their premise, as [Cato's Michael] Tanner puts it, is this: “If something is a good idea, it needs to be a federal program.”

Ferguson wraps up the cover story with an in-depth examination of Myron Lieberman’s new book, The Educational Morass: Overcoming the Stalemate in American Education.

In the end, Lieberman says, how to close the “achievement gap” with merit pay, or charter schools, or smaller class size, or more testing, or any other reform encouraged by NCLB, remains an “unresolved quandary.” And if the quandary is to be resolved, it will be done according to that hoary idea of subsidiarity: at the local level, where reforms can be enacted, monitored, and overseen–and rejected, too, if that’s the wish of the parents and teachers themselves.

This idea of an “unresolved quandary” may be the most radical notion in all the current crop of education books. Imagine an education reformer admitting ignorance! The sentiment is utterly alien to the spirit of Big Government Conservatism, where faith in the power of reformers to alter institutions however they desire, with the ultimate goal of altering human behavior in pleasing ways, is almost limitless. Unresolved quandaries aren’t acknowledged because they slow the march of progress.

Darn, it’s nice to see some acknowledgement that the achievement gap can’t simply be tested into oblivion — and that teachers deserve a voice in ed reform.

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