California Governor Jerry Brown’s State of the State address last week got the anti-reform crowd all atwitter (and a-Twitter) when he called for scaling back testing and reducing the federal and state roles in California education. Diane Ravitch swooned, writing in a blog post that Brown and his Sunshine State compatriots “may provide the spark that ignites a national revolt against the current tide of bad ideas.” In one respect, both Brown and Ravitch have it right: Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top and conditional NCLB waivers mark a high-water mark for federal intrusion in K-12 education and it is understandable for governors to chafe at such strong-arming from Washington. But California is hardly the place to look for good ideas. Its student achievement results trail other states’ by a mile, and its poor and minority students are doing terribly compared to their peers in other, more reform-minded states. (Texas and Florida come to mind.) We have no qualms with mid-course adjustments to the reform agenda (getting test results back in an expedited manner, for example—something Brown championed). But let’s not just toss all school reform efforts into the Sacramento River, either.
“Brown differs sharply from Obama on education policy,” by Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2012
