[caption id="" align="alignright" width="180" caption="Clipping Arne Duncan's sails?"]
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Maybe it's because I live in Washington and am thus immersed in the daily political horse-race (who's up? who's down?), but it's hard not to get the sense right now that the Democrats are in free fall. Evan Bayh's retirement is like a major aftershock to the earthquake that was Scott Brown's election. Now there's talk about the GOP taking over both houses of Congress in the fall, and of a primary challenge to President Obama in 2012.
To be sure, a month from now, and certainly six months from now, lots could change, and we might be talking about an Obama-led Democratic resurgence. If unemployment starts coming down, Americans' optimism starts to go up, and Republicans start sounding like extremists again, this situation could flip once more.
That said, this tumultuous political environment is bound to affect all policy areas, including education. At a time when the Tea Party, anti-big-government, pro-Sarah Palin types have the momentum, it's hard to imagine Congress embracing another Washington-knows-best, let's-fix-our-schools-from-the-shores-of-the-Potomac approach to ESEA like it did with the No Child Left Behind Act (or even with last year's stimulus). It's also easy to picture conservative politicians demagoguing the "national testing issue," like Texas Governor Rick Perry has been doing so effectively.
It's often noted that No Child Left Behind was passed only after 9/11 and the anthrax scare, with both parties in Congress wanting to show the world that America could still do business and get things done. But that's not all; the energy behind NCLB came from the late 1990s, when peace and prosperity reigned and confidence in government was much higher than it is today. Those conditions have changed; reformers who think the Congress--or the public--is in the mood for anything as audacious as NCLB just aren't paying attention.
Arne Duncan often talks about "transforming" our education system; expect his rhetoric to get a lot more measured in the months to come.
(Photograph by David Jakes from Flickr)
--Mike Petrilli
