[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="469" caption="Caption: Too tight - like some recent education reform proposals."]
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Usually bad news gets released on a Friday afternoon in this town, so what does it mean that the Obama Administration is about to make its ESEA reauthorization proposal public? They are briefing reformers and education groups now (yours truly not included--I was disinvited a few hours ago out of fear that having a blogger in the room would chill the conversation; I'm not making that up!).
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No doubt newspaper articles will examine how reform-minded the proposal is. Does it stick it to the unions? Back down on accountability? Push hard on merit pay? Double-down on the achievement gap? But this is the wrong lens to look through, because of a delicate thing called federalism. It's not enough to call for tough-minded reforms; the Administration also has to be realistic about which reforms might succeed from Washington.
In our view, that's a short list. We've been arguing for over a year for "reform realism"--an approach that is humble about what can be achieved from the shores of the Potomac, but still seeks to provide political cover for reformers at the state and local level.
To that end, the real question is not how reform-minded the proposal is, but to what extent Arne Duncan lives up to his promise to promote a "tight-loose" approach (tight on the results expected but loose on the means). Between Race to the Top, the recent civil rights announcement, and the move to link the adoption of college-ready standards with Title I money, we're seeing an awful lot of "tight" where we're supposed to be seeing "loose." If Duncan doesn't reverse that trend, he could be running into the buzz-saw of anti-Washington fervor that is boiling up around the country.
Stay tuned!
P.S. You can find a great cheat-sheet on the reauthorization at Politics K-12.
(Photo by miketembo from Flickr)
-Mike Petrilli
