Today's much ballyhooed Obama education speech (delivered near my hometown of Dayton) and accompanying "fact sheet" contained more than a few good ideas about where U.S. education should go in the years ahead. But as an exercise in specifying what would actually happen??to U.S. education under an Obama administration, and what is and isn't feasible for the federal government itself to make happen, it recalled Bill Clinton's second term, awash in little, crowd-pleasing programs and program ideas, nearly all of them on the periphery of the public-education behemoth and on the periphery of real federal education policy.
Under four crowd-pleasing headings in the Obama fact sheet??("scaling choice and innovation in the public school system", "investment in innovation and technology", "ensuring effective teachers and school leaders", and "responsibility for parents and Washington"), I counted??a dozen separate programs, commitments and initiatives. None of them addressed the really tough issues surrounding No Child Left Behind (who sets standards, what constitutes adequate progress, what exactly to do about failing schools, etc); or about the big Title I program that is its centerpiece; or about special ed, HeadStart, or anything else that comprises the semi-dysfunctional corpus of existing federal programs and policies. Rather, another whole layer of programs would apparently??be added, several of them reaching far beyond anything Uncle Sam has ever gone near before, like getting states to issue individual report cards to every parent on the educational progress and prospects of every child??in the land.
Just picture federal bureaucrats trying to manage that one!
