- In the wake of the Jeb Bush not-quite-announcement and the Scott Walker boomlet, it should now be clear to all that we’ve entered the wonderful season of presidential politics. In that spirit, AEI scholars and Friends of Fordham Andrew P. Kelly and Frederick Hess have logged some important commentary on G.O.P. hopefuls and education policy. It’s all well and good, they write, for governors like Bush, Walker, Bobby Jindal, and John Kasich to list the ambitious policies they enacted back home, but they also have to square their reform instincts with a commitment to a sensibly limited federal role in schooling. It’s a paradox that conservative reformers especially are familiar with: How do you embrace a bold agenda for change without falling into the trap of top-down edicts and federal overreach?
- Politico has an informative look at higher education’s “wait-and-see” attitude toward the Common Core, at least when it comes to using its associated assessments for placement decisions. While many reformers (Gadfly among them) hope that tests such as the PARCC and Smarter Balanced might one day be used to determine whether students are ready for credit-bearing courses, waiting for more data is a responsible position for now.
- Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention President Obama’s address in Selma, Alabama, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the historic civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Both the setting and the language of the speech—one of the best of his career—succeeded in stoking that elusive feeling the president seized upon during his first national campaign: hope. Ticking off a litany of disadvantaged and minority populations who have seen their lives improve over the past five decades, he raised a vital point about how far we’ve come. “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America....To deny this progress—our progress—would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.” The most stubborn gaps in education and opportunity remain to be fully closed, but it’s important to occasionally take stock, and be inspired by, what we’ve already accomplished.
