What a confluence of events when Alfie Kohn, Matthew Yglesias, and Rick Hess take up that question all on the same day.
Alfie Kohn gets it started with an article in the Nation that's (another!) defense of Linda Darling-Hammond, but also goes after "reformers" writ large:
For Republicans education "reform" typically includes support for vouchers and other forms of privatization. But groups with names like Democrats for Education Reform--along with many mainstream publications--are disconcertingly allied with conservatives in just about every other respect.
Yglesias, writing on his blog, disagrees:
I would... deny that this is a "conservative" agenda in any particular way. I think there are two aspects of education policy debates that have substantial linkage with the basic left-right ideological conflict. One concerns levels of spending. The right generally wants to spend less on social services (such as education) and the left generally wants to spend more. Another concerns centralization. The left generally supports federal action, national standards, and a strong center to prevent slippage whereas the right tends to favor decentralization as a means of weakening state capabilities. Nothing on Kohn's list is relevant to the issue of spending, where certainly I like a very conventional "left" person would favor high levels of spending. And on the issue of centralization Kohn has, for no real reason I can see, decided that it's conservative to believe in national standards. In fact it's the reverse, and a strong belief in school decentralization is something many conservative legislators adhere to. It has, therefore, been a useful thing for left-wing NCLB opponents to latch on to in order to build a coalition with right-wing NCLB opponents. But I think it's a little sad to see some people confusing their alliances of convenience with their real principles.
Rick Hess is with Yglesias with this one, arguing in a paper just released on the American Enterprise Institute website that NCLB is why "LBJ is smiling":
Just as some have described welfare reform as Reagan's greatest domestic accomplishment, so might NCLB be termed Clinton's crowning achievement. Welfare reform required Clinton to attract crucial Democratic votes and validate the emergence of a new consensus, just as New Democratic efforts to establish federal leadership on educational accountability required a Republican president to broaden the coalition and quiet conservative concerns. The irony is that NCLB leavened 1990s-style accountability with Great Society-style ambition and race-conscious rhetoric, while lacking attention to the program design that characterized Clinton-era efforts to reform welfare and "reinvent government." The resulting law relied more on moral exhortation than on calculated goals, metrics, or incentives.Whatever one makes of Bush's broader record, it is a stretch to argue that the administration's K-12 reforms reflect conservative impulses. NCLB involved Washington in defining teacher quality, embraced an accountability system that labels children by race, made closing racial achievement gaps a central tenet, and turned bragging about education spending into a bipartisan sport. In so doing, it established expansive precedents for future Democratic administrations and created commitments that might be impossible for the GOP to unwind.
So there you have it. The hard left (a la Kohn) disowns education reform; the center-right (a la Hess) disowns education reform; and the center-left (a la Yglesias) embraces it. You have your answer.
