It’s almost as if they’re unprincipled

Peter Greene has a good post about the inherent tension between wanting federal aid for schools but not wanting federal control of school policy.

But I really don’t understand the attitude of our federal lawmakers toward school policy. They intentionally designed No Child Left Behind so it wouldn’t directly regulate school policy; it just puts conditions on whether the states can get federal money. But the feds aren’t just “giving” that money to the states; first they’re collecting it from the people of those states through taxation. In other words, federal school policy occurs through putting conditions of the federal redistribution of wealth.

So our federal lawmakers seem to agree that school policy is a state issue that they shouldn’t regulate directly. And many of them would certainly oppose any suggestion that we should redistribute wealth. But apparently they’re fine with redistributing wealth when it enables them to control state issues? WTF?

If “redistribution” weren’t such a dirty word, maybe we could recognize that we’re already doing a lot of it, and that it would be a good thing even if it were unaccompanied by federal intrusions into state policy-making.
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What parent engagement looks like

Guess which task force member was the only one to vote against adopting the Smarter Balanced Assessments (click to enlarge):

Hint: She’s the one with the shortest title.

More on the task force’s charge here..

Little kids, not goblins

Not a perfect analogy, I know, but for what it’s worth: In 2009, our elementary school became a receiving school for families who chose to transfer out of “schools in need of assistance” under No Child Left Behind. About sixty or seventy new students showed up at the school. Not all of them were eligible for free-and-reduced-price lunches (“FRL,” our district’s proxy for low-income status), but enough were that the school’s FRL rate rose significantly. By 2010-11, the FRL rate was more than twice what it had been four years before.

My only point is: This was not a big deal. I can’t speak for other parents, but I had three kids at the school and so was in contact with a lot of other families and kids there. The particulars of the transition were rocky, since the influx of new students overcrowded the school and was announced just days before the school year started. But the presence of the new arrivals at the school just wasn’t a big deal. They were just a bunch of Iowa Citian little kids.

I suppose the orthodox thing to say is that the increase in racial and economic diversity enriched the experience for everyone. Maybe it did, I don’t know. All I know is that, at least in terms of my own kids’ school experience, the presence of the SINA transfers at the school was a big non-event. If we hadn’t been told it was happening (and it hadn’t caused crowding and last-minute logistical problems), I doubt I would even have noticed.

I certainly can’t speak for the families who transferred in. I don’t know whether they found it a welcoming place or whether it improved their kids’ school experience. I wasn’t crazy about the way the school administration reacted to the change. That was the year the school implemented PBIS; it felt as if the administration had decided that the arrival of the transfer kids was exactly the moment when everyone needed a more intense (and more dehumanizing) kind of behavior management. But that was a problem with the administration, not with the kids. The kids were fine.

I know people have a lot of different concerns about redistricting; I share some of them. I don’t like the process the district has used; I was against the particular diversity policy the board adopted; I think there is value to keeping the distance to elementary school short, and to minimizing disruptive changes to kids’ lives. I’m never automatically persuaded by assertions about what “research has shown.” But I don’t need an academic study to convince me that we don’t need to pack the bulk of our low-income families into three or four elementary schools, some of which have FRL rates near eighty percent. I can’t help but think that we can bring those numbers down without doing anything outlandish with the boundaries.

In any event, to the extent that fear of the unknown is playing a role in the discussion, it shouldn’t. It’s easy to imagine stuff that just isn’t real.
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More bogus labels from No Child Left Behind

The newspaper dutifully reported this week that two local elementary schools—both with a high percentage of low-income students—have been designated “persistently low-achieving schools” under No Child Left Behind, because of the standardized test scores of the students. This designation allows the schools to receive federal grant money if they take certain types of corrective action—all of them based on the assumption that there is something wrong with how the schools have been educating the kids.

The district has stated, wisely, that it will forgo the grant money, explaining that the schools are already making changes. I can’t say whether those changes are good or necessary, but I wish the district would address the federal government’s faulty logic more directly. The district, and its school board, should be shouting: This designation, and the test scores that it is based on, tell you nothing about the quality of the education at those schools. Schools and teachers aren’t to blame for the poverty in their attendance areas. That doesn’t mean the schools shouldn’t do their best with whatever kids they have—but No Child Left Behind’s labels are dishonest and its “improvement” schemes are fraudulent.
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Is uniformity worth it? Is it even real?

Yikes, it’s seven o’clock and there are whole categories of objection to the Common Core that I haven’t even touched on yet. But first, what about the argument that we need a uniform set of standards to make it easier for kids to adjust when they move from one school to another? This concern is especially important, the argument goes, for addressing the “achievement gap” between poor kids (whose families may be less likely to remain in one school district for long stretches) and kids who aren’t poor.

This argument is clearly the best one Common Core supporters have to offer, and really the only one that gives a substantive reason for sacrificing state and local preferences for the sake of signing on to a uniform federally-driven project. How powerful is the argument, though? And does it outweigh the cons of centralization?

First of all, it’s important to notice (despite the assertions of Core supporters) that this argument is completely inconsistent with local or even state control of education. The way to ensure that kids can move freely between school districts without a hitch is to have to have a national curriculum. If this is really the concern underlying the Common Core, why do its supporters hasten to assure us that they find the idea of a national curriculum abhorrent? (Answer: PR.)

But I don’t doubt that kids who move from one place to another are burdened and disadvantaged by the disruption to their schooling. This would have to be a particular problem in a subject like math, where the ability to master some concepts depends on prior mastery of other concepts. (Even then, a much less detailed list of coverage goals would achieve about as much.) As for some of the other subjects, well, I’m less convinced. Has any teacher ever complained that the new kid can’t handle this year’s social studies class because he didn’t learn to “understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action” in the previous year? Has any sixth grader ever struggled because she missed the fifth grade class on how to “understand the changing nature of society”?

But again, either the standards are specific and meaningful, in which case they are tantamount to a top-down national curriculum, or they are broad generalities that are likely to be applied in ways that vary greatly from one district to another. Suppose you teach fourth grade in a Common Core state, and you determine that your lesson plan teaches the kids to “Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.” How confident are you that your fourth-graders are coming away with the same abilities and skills as those of your colleague in a different Common Core state?

Moreover, when a kid shows up at a new school (and maybe it’s his third or fourth new school) and is not at “grade level” in his classes, how often is that because his previous schools weren’t teaching the same skills? Isn’t it quite possible that the student was struggling in his previous school, too? How much will adopting the Core really address the causes of why disadvantaged kids struggle in school?

When I think of all the ways poor kids are disadvantaged in their lives, educationally and otherwise, I don’t come away thinking, “What those kids need is uniform standards.” What I actually think is: What those kids need is some money. While Iowa is spending time and money on developing and pushing the Core, which will require even more spending on standardized tests and on the fancy technology that the new tests require, it has fallen into the bottom half of states in per-pupil spending. Why not give those kids who move from school to school more actual services, more individualized attention, more small class sizes, to help them get to where they need to be? But no, apparently the way to help those kids is by imposing uniform standards and expensive standardized testing schemes on their school districts.

So sure, considered in isolation, it would be great if students could move seamlessly between one school and another, anywhere in America. But Common Core supporters are offering a chimerical vision of that ideal to get us to trade away our ability to have any meaningful say over what goes on in our kids’ schools and what kind of approach to education we want our schools to follow. The Common Core supporters want you to think that the Core is just an objectively correct, expert-driven approach that no one could possibly quibble about. Just like No Child Left Behind was. Who could possibly choose anything other than top-down, standardized-test-driven education for their kids?
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Some debate about the Common Core

I recently got talked into appearing on a local Sunday morning TV show called “Ethical Perspectives on the News,” which was hosting a discussion of the Common Core standards. The other guests on the show were Cedar Rapids School Superintendent Dave Benson and Tania Johnson, a Cedar Rapids kindergarten teacher who was named Iowa’s 2013 Teacher of the Year. Benson and Johnson are both supportive of Iowa’s version of the Common Core, and I think the station asked me to join the group to get another view and also for the sake of including a parent on the panel. I don’t know how well I did in that role, and we could barely scrape the surface of the topic in the half hour that we had, but I enjoyed myself more than I expected to (maybe too much!). The show was hosted by Kirkwood Community College Philosophy Professor Scott Samuelson, known here for his music blog. In case you’re interested, the show runs this Sunday, February 9, at 11 a.m. on KCRG (local channel 9).

I hope to post a few more thoughts about the Common Core in the meantime.
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A thank-you to Southeast Junior High

From my friend Doris, a frequent commenter here:

For your blog if you can find a place to post it:

Dear Chris,

More than once on this blog you have acknowledged, to your credit, that because you don’t have experience raising special needs children, some of the concerns you raise may not adequately reflect the experiences of families that do have non-typical learners. Ours is such a family. As we are not participants in organized religion, my approach to giving thanks tends to fall on the secular side. And so here, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to use your blog as a venue for offering some public thanks to all the wonderful faculty and staff at South East Junior High who have made this school year a very good one indeed for our two children—and particularly our child with special needs. Like you, I make no claim that our experience is representative of the experience of other South East families. But from the first time we went over to South East last spring, to get the ball rolling on the process of shifting our children from a small group homeschool program into 7th and 8th grade, respectively, we’ve been treated with courtesy and good cheer by a variety of people who have gone out of their way to help us and our children make it work. In more than one comment on your blog I have criticized a “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” driven attitude that can result in a quite miserable educational experience for children who, for whatever reason, struggle to keep up with an unrealistic pace. I’m not saying that South East is perfect, but in our experience thus far the “vibe” we have been getting is that, like us, they think the best approach is to treat our special needs child as a capable and complicated individual (albeit one with endearing foibles) and to operate with a flexible attitude toward the process of figuring out which accommodations she needs to help her learn and thrive. It’s been good, basically—better than we would have thought possible going in. I have no idea what North West and North Central are like—fine schools, presumably—but so far I’d have no reservations recommending South East to parents of special needs learners in search of a local public middle school. Here, too, I’d like in particular to thank our child’s South East LRE teacher, Mr. Josh Chambers, for all his help this fall. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve dashed off an email about some problem that has cropped up, and typically by the next day he has written back to let us know he has handled things.

Ultimately I guess what I am trying to say is that they teachers and staff over there actually seem to like our special needs child just as she is, and they seem committed to helping her succeed in her own way, not in a way mandated by federal law.

Thanks, too, to you, Chris, for all the work you put into running this extraordinarily helpful blog. I marvel at your dedication and value all the insight I’ve gained.

Doris

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I wish Hoover weren’t an issue, but it is

I’ve just enjoyed a much-needed almost-three-week break from the internet, but am back to blogging as our local school board election goes into high gear. Over at the Patch, I’ve posted my reaction to one candidate’s statement on the issue of “neighborhood schools.”
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Wishful building

Photo from the consultants’ presentation

In the course of our district’s facilities planning process, we’re hearing dazzling visions of what the Classroom of the Future will look like. In the future, the district’s consultants tell us, education will be “student-centered,” so:

Buildings and grounds should provide a variety of spaces for hands-on activities, project-based learning, student collaboration, research and study space, and presentations.

The consultants showed us pictures of spacious classrooms where students work together at communal tables, while teachers work with one or two students at a time. None of the pictures showed a classroom with more than sixteen students in it.

The process has succeeded in getting at least some in the community talking about what kind of education we should be designing our schools for. I’ve recently heard parents, for example, envisioning classrooms in which the teacher is the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage,” and where students spend more time working collaboratively on solving problems, and where there is more “critical thinking” and less rote memorization.

That conversation is great to hear, even if it is just in its early stages. But I have to wonder whether we’re deceiving ourselves that “student-centered” education is the wave of the future. Everything indicates the opposite. State and federal laws have increasingly imposed a standardized vision of education on all kids. The newly imposed Iowa Core standards require teachers to cover a very particular—and extensive—body of content in each grade. They are accompanied by lengthy standardized tests to make sure that everything on the list gets covered. And “accountability,” many argue, requires us to make teachers’ jobs and raises depend on how well their students do on those standardized tests. Meanwhile, our state’s education department has taken the position that “improving educator effectiveness” is a better use of money than reducing, or even maintaining, current class sizes.

If your job depends on making sure a big group of kids knows an extensive, predetermined body of knowledge well enough to score high on a standardized test, how much project-based learning will you allow? How much will you be a “guide on the side”? How much time will you have to “foster creativity”? Anyone want to guess how the desks are arranged in a Kaplan SAT prep class, or how much independent inquiry goes on there? I’m afraid that’s what our standardized-test-driven future looks like.

Our district decides what the buildings look like, but the state and federal governments decide what goes on inside them. During the facilities planning process, we’re being encouraged to picture our dream schools. Once the money is spent and the buildings are built, what type of education will we actually get?
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Pathological

The Times reports that 11% of kids, including 19% of high-school-age boys, are now diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Those are stunning numbers. Does anyone believe that that many kids are suffering from a diagnosable mental illness?

The article disappoints in its discussion of why. It briefly blames parents who want to gain a competitive academic edge for their kids—“some parents are pressuring doctors to help with their children’s troublesome behavior and slipping grades.” There is no discussion at all of the role of education policy—specifically high-stakes testing—in pushing kids toward these diagnoses.
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Are school boards just glorified student councils?

Schools everywhere have student councils; here in Iowa City, we even have them at the elementary level. In theory, participation in a student council teaches students about democracy and self-governance. What it teaches in practice, though, is another matter. I think it’s fair to say that most schools allow student councils to decide only those issues that the school authorities do not care enough about to decide themselves—and even then schools often make heavy-handed “suggestions” about what the student councils should do. Putting a facade of self-governance on institutions that are fundamentally autocratic is a funny way of teaching about democracy.

It’s hard for me to watch our local school board in action without seeing a resemblance. Our board talks endlessly about how many schools to have, how many kids fit in each one, where to draw the boundaries, which mix of kids to put within each boundary, and how much it all costs, but when it comes to what goes on in those classrooms educationally—the most central educational issue—where’s the debate?

It’s not as if there’s nothing to talk about. For example, there are plenty of people, including me, who think that high-stakes testing is having devastating effects on education—everywhere, including in Iowa City. It’s arguably the single biggest educational issue of this generation. But if our school board members have any opinion whatsoever about it, you’d never know it from what they do.

True, the issues that most directly affect our kids’ educational experience are often exactly the ones that the state doesn’t let school boards decide—even though state officials are far less democratically accountable on educational issues than local school boards are. High-stakes testing, and many of its associated ills, are state-mandated policy everywhere in Iowa, period. We’ll make those decisions, the state says, but we’re happy to let you school board members do the work of setting budgets and drawing school boundaries. We’ll even let you hold a bake sale or a car wash!

A school board can respond like a well-behaved student council and confine itself to the less central issues, or it can think critically about what’s happening in its own schools. If state policy is harming our kids’ education, our school board should be pushing back against it, vocally criticizing it, and doing everything it can to mitigate its effects. To treat the whole topic as moot because it’s a state issue is to abdicate that responsibility. Board members should act like elected representatives, not like dutiful state employees.

On the other hand, if they intend to passively administer whatever dictates the state hands down, maybe it’s time to make their state employee status official. Doing the state’s grunt work should at least get you minimum wage.
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New principal at Hoover Elementary

Our district has announced yet another new principal for my kids’ elementary school. Next year’s sixth graders will have had six different principals (counting interims) since they started kindergarten. You can read about the new principal here.

The qualities I’d like to see in a principal are almost impossible to assess through a Google search, so I’ll just hope for the best. I do think it’s interesting that he taught art for fifteen years, and that he is currently principal at a school that has a Montessori classroom. On the other hand, I was disappointed to see that many of his school newsletter articles focused on standardized testing. One example:

Is your child where they need to be academically for this time of year? This question is on our teacher’s minds continually, it should also be on yours. We have just completed our first quarter and our first parent-teacher conferences. Your next question should be: what would it take for my child to exceed the standards? Our current Standards will be fully replaced next year with the new Arizona Common Core Standards. These new standards are comparatively more rigorous. A child who achieves “Exceeds” on our current AIMS assessment will be lucky to score “Meets” on the new assessments that will be aligned with the AZ Common Core.

AIMS tests will be replaced in the 2014-2015 school year with the new PARCC assessments. Students who are currently reading at their own grade level by today’s standards will be expected to read at least 1.5 to 2 grade levels ahead of where they are now. Based on these new expectations, a 3rd grader who would finish the school year at grade level would need to be reading at an early 4th grade level at the end of the school year.

Our teachers have been working and preparing for these new rigorous standards for two years. Are you prepared to support your child and help them move towards these new standards?

Another:

With the ever increasing academic expectations of the new Arizona Common Core standards, 3rd Grade Move on When Reading, and soon to change AIMS assessment, your child’s future depends on our cooperative efforts.

We have created a process at Pomeroy over the last few years where our teachers and support staff continually review and monitor your child’s progress in reading and math and when needed, we provide as much extra support as possible.

Sometimes children need more review and practice then we have time for during the school day. This is where you play a key role. We have events during the school year when we try to give parent’s materials and training on activities you can do at home to help your child succeed academically. Gobble up Reading, Mornings with Mom, Dads on Deck and many others were devised to make learning fun and educational. I encourage you to do your best to attend all these events. . . . Help us make your child as successful as we know they can be.

More here. Notice that there’s no discussion of whether the new standards make more sense, or are more age-appropriate, than the ones that were so important the previous year. Whatever the standards are now is what we must care about. We have always been at war with Eurasia!

This stuff is par for the course now, and may well have been demanded of him by his central administrators, so I wouldn’t assume that it sheds much light on him as a principal. It’s standard procedure simply to assert that meeting arbitrary test score benchmarks is what school is all about, and to presume without discussion that all parents will naturally be on board. Needless to say, I’m not on board. I hope that if our new principal makes statements like these, parents will push back against them. He’s not responsible for the policy of high-stakes testing, but if he’s going to be the public face of that policy and advocate for it, he needs to hear how people feel about it.
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What is “test prep”?

After a day’s consideration, I’m inclined to stick with my definition of “test prep”: single-mindedly pursuing higher test scores at the expense of other values that are cumulatively more important.

I don’t yet know Jason Glass’s definition, but in his comment to my last post, he says that “simple fact/recall, memorization of likely test facts, guessing strategies, and test time management strategies” would qualify. Under his definition, apparently, it can’t be “test prep” if the school is using strategies and programs that he considers “evidence-based,” regardless of what other values are sacrificed in the process. (Never mind for the moment whether the “evidence base” consists of anything other than test scores.)

By contrast, I think a school that focused exclusively on tested qualities, to the neglect of untested and untestable qualities, would fairly be called a “test prep academy.” If lunch were cut to almost nothing, recess and “specials” eliminated, the school day extended, and the kids made to sit through nothing but reading programs that Glass considers “evidence-based” all day with little or no down time, all for the sake of raising literacy scores, I would call that test prep, even if those scores accurately reflected real gains in literacy. Apparently he would not.

Of course, we can disagree on the semantics. Maybe what I’m describing would better be called “edu-myopia,” or some such term. In any event, I’m happy to agree that what Glass is describing is a more limited phenomenon than what I am describing, however you might label the two. I wish he would agree that both phenomena should be avoided.
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Is there anything we shouldn’t do to raise test scores?

I just engaged in a lengthy (and ongoing) Twitter exchange with the director of our state’s Department of Education, Jason Glass. Earlier this week, the Department held up as exemplary a school district that cut recess time to raise literacy scores. (Teachers and students “weren’t happy with some of the things we had to drop, such as morning recess time because we really don’t need that,” one principal said.) Many people chimed in to point out that there’s no reason to think that cuts in recess help kids learn. What I wanted to know was how the department could be sure that the test score increases represented meaningful education, as opposed to just test prep. If there is a difference between the two, and Glass agreed that there is, then the test scores themselves can’t help you distinguish one from the other. So I asked what Glass’s criteria are.

You can be the judge of whether the discussion is going anywhere. But it seems clear that Glass must have a different definition of test prep than I have. Mine would be: single-mindedly pursuing higher test scores at the expense of other values that are cumulatively more important. One such value is providing a humane school experience. Another is preserving a child’s enjoyment of learning. Another is not teaching authoritarian values. Another is giving enough attention to subjects that aren’t tested or don’t lend themselves to testing.

I suspect his definition would focus more on whether the test score increases reflected a meaningful improvement in the particular quality they purport to measure. That would be a defensible definition, but it doesn’t excuse him from asking what has been sacrificed for the sake of that improvement. How does the DOE measure those sacrifices? I don’t think it does. If it did, how would it determine what sacrifices are “worth it”? Though Glass keeps referring to evidence-based practices, the latter question cannot be answered empirically, because it entails value judgments.

How does the DOE make those judgments? In what meaningful sense are they informed by the values of the families they affect?
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The Gumby Syllogism

So many education proposals seem to rest on this logic: “It would be great if everyone knew x. Therefore we must make everyone learn x.” If kids were Gumby figurines, whom we could just twist into whatever poses we wanted them to assume, this syllogism might make perfect sense. But kids actually have minds of their own, and individual personalities and predispositions, and emotions, and desires, including the desire for control over their own lives. In other words, they are human beings, and can’t be counted on—any more than adults could be counted on—to go willingly along with someone else’s plan to “improve” them.

When I wrote, about E.D. Hirsch, that “it’s as if he’s completely excluded psychology from learning theory,” that’s what I was getting at. (Not to mention the other age-old obstacles to implementing grand schemes, such as human error, inefficiency, corruption, and susceptibility to snake-oil salesmen.)

When people start wishing away the fact that kids have minds of their own, or seeing it as an obstacle to education, something has gone very wrong.
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No toddler left untested

Universally available, non-compulsory preschool, subsidized based on means-testing, is worth doing purely because it would help low- and middle-income families deal with the difficulty of raising a family while both parents hold down jobs. It would also be a great form of economic stimulus, since both the recipients and the providers of the service are likely to be low- and middle-income people. Even if it had no lasting educational benefits, it would be a good idea.

It also has a lot of potential to give low-income kids a chance to become well-educated adults on a more equal basis with kids who come from money. That’s all to the good.

But please: let’s not create another layer of test-driven obedience schools. Unfortunately, that’s what we have every reason to expect from the people who brought us No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. The people running education policy today are among the very last people I would entrust a three-year-old to. I wish I thought otherwise.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love high-stakes testing

If the premise of your article is “High-stakes academic testing isn’t going away,” you won’t reach a happy conclusion.

h/t StepfordTO
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News from the cutting edge, Volume 1

Well, having decided to try my hand at something different to mark the end of the blogathon, I now have newfound respect for Matt Groening and the old Life is Hell cartoons. I do love the two talking heads down in the corner, though—my collaborator’s contribution.

Click the image to enlarge.

(Image © 2013 C. Liebig & I. Samuelson for ablogaboutschool.blogspot.com. Public domain baby photo from Wikimedia Commons.)
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In defense of the protest vote

As I wrote yesterday, I’m voting for the RPS (our school district’s revenue-enabling ballot measure). But I don’t get as exasperated with the people opposing it as Jason Lewis does. Government is supposed to be a negotiation, not a take-it-or-leave-it enterprise. Many people reasonably think the district is not responsive enough to the community—as reflected in many of the seventy-nine pages of comments here, for example, or my selection from them here. When the district then wants those same people to step up and approve tax revenues, it’s hard to blame them for concluding that their dollars are the only thing the district listens to—the only effective bargaining chip they have in this particular negotiation.

When an employer and its employees can’t agree on a contract, and the employees go out on strike, you can’t just automatically blame one side or the other. The negotiation failed, and you can’t assess blame without examining how reasonable each side’s positions were. I don’t think all of those commenters in the Synesi report were selfish prima donnas. Many of their criticisms are perfectly reasonable, and it’s the district’s failure to address them that is unreasonable.

In this particular instance, I think that voting for the RPS will do more good than voting against it. But I’m sympathetic to the logic of the protest vote. Sometimes casting a protest vote is the least-likely-to-be-futile way of trying to get elected officials to change the way they interact with the public. It’s a big part of why I voted against our county’s new jail proposal this past November.

There will never be perfect harmony in a community where people’s values differ. But the best way to get the school board and district administrators back in sync with the voters is to have them start working for us, instead of for Governor Branstad and Arne Duncan. If you’re frustrated with the level of tension between community members and the school system, it’s worth thinking about how much the lack of local control is at the root of it. (Related post here.)
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Cracks in the wall?

From Gov. Jerry Brown’s State of the State speech yesterday in California:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level—with school boards.

I don’t know how much Brown can back those words up; there’s a limit to how much local control you can allow if you don’t opt out of No Child Left Behind. But it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I think the bipartisan consensus favoring centrally-driven school “reform” is finally starting to break down. It is increasingly associated with polarizing right-wing governors like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder. Reformer-in-chief Michelle Rhee is increasingly identified as a “right-wing” figure. (Charles Pierce, a blogger revered on the left, takes on Rhee here.) The Democratic Party activists who populate DailyKos see school reform (accurately) as an attack on unionism. I’d love to see the approval ratings of the standardized testing industry. And now the governor of the largest state in the union is declining to follow the crowd.

It’s got a ways to go. (Blogger Atrios recently tweeted “a liberal member of congress spoke to me about michelle rhee as if she was jesus.”) But if large parts of one party’s base start turning against the top-down “reform” project, how long before “local control” becomes the safest, most people-pleasing position?

Previous post on Jerry Brown here.
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