Yes. indeed, there are rifts nowadays, rifts almost as wide as the Great Rift Valley within both political parties when it comes to education policy, particularly at the national level.??That's??probably necessary, as both parties go through some??soul-searching and repurposing. But this weekend it feels as if the anti-reform crowd may be winning among both Democrats and Republicans.??Friday brought two distressing hints.
First, we learned that the nascent Obama administration has picked Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond to lead the policy side of the transition operation at the U.S. Department of Education. She is a??pleasant and??smart woman but she surely does harbor a lot of retro ideas about education. She's Public Enemy #1 of Teach for America, for example, and for twelve years (since her report, "What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future," came out) has been the nation's foremost embodiment of the view that improving teachers ought to be America's chief reform strategy, the heck with standards-and-accountability on the one hand and school choice on the other. If her policy views dominate the new administration's education-policy stance, groups such as Democrats for Education Reform might as well take a LONG vacation.??The unions and the ed schools will be overjoyed.
Friday also brought??letters to the Wall Street Journal and Detroit News from Michigan congressman Pete Hoekstra, a GOP stalwart and, on the whole, a terrific guy. As ranking Republican on the House intelligence Committee, he has served his country well. But as a member of the Education and Labor Committee, he is increasingly inclined to blame No Child Left Behind (and John Boehner) for the party's political decline and to urge upon his colleagues a return to something akin to blind support for local control and school choice. Maybe that formula still works well in the??pastoral precincts of western Michigan where Hoekstra's district is located, and the local electorate seems to like him well enough. (Earlier this month, he got 62 percent of the vote in his House race.) I don't doubt that his view of education is pleasing to the party's "base." But if it prevails, members of that base may cast the only Republican votes??in future elections--and all those poor, minority and inner-city kids who live in districts other than Hoekstra's will continue to be??trapped in the miserable schools that NCLB, however clumsily, sought to transform (or extricate them from).
