Dare I put myself in the "Bush camp" on some issues?

I am going to admit something to you, nonexistent readers. I am a conservative. Shocking, I know, since most you have believed me to be a liberal of the bleeding heart variety for quite some time now. But as it turns out, on education, the thing I care most about, I fall very squarely in the conservative camp. Me and Bush, together forever (minus vouchers). On this issue, it's not a bad thing. What was Bush's rhetoric on education? Accountability, standards, and get rid of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." I'm not sure Bush knew what he was saying when he made that remark, but it strikes me as one of the most profound statements made about education since "A Nation at Risk" was published. So the fact that Obama has been voicing and repeating many of the same concerns about education as Bush doesn't disturb me in the least. Go here for an article in EdWeek comparing the two on this point.
The aspect of the tentative Obama education agenda that didn't get any play during the campaign (how could it? education was like 50,000th on the list of issues, even though nothing could possibly be more intimately tied to the economic future of this nation) is the issue of national standards. Check out an NY Times article discussing the "toughening of standards" that makes mention of an Obama admin push for national standards. For non-ed people out there, this won't strike you as particularly strange, but let me tell you : this is about as hot-button an issue as you can get, and political ground on which I thought Obama would not tread. Allow me to back up: what is up with standards?
So No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as many of you know, conditions receipt of federal funds on meeting certain proficiency benchmarks. It also mandates annual testing in grands 3-8. What it does not mandate, however, is how you (state) decide to measure proficiency. What if I told you that in 2005 87 percent of Mississippi's 4th graders were proficient in reading? If you weren't looking too hard at other stats, you might think that there had been some kind of revolution in the deep south and Mississippi had finally lifted itself out of poverty and generally miserable social welfare into some kind of oasis of learning. Alas, as much as I'd love to move to Mississippi, those numbers mean nothing. Mississippi was 50th out of our 50 states on the NAEP, the only national educational assessment of student performance. NCLB, in its current state, is all about gaming the system. Principals, teachers, superintendents, governors...everyone is so scared about losing their jobs and losing funding that they sacrifice the intent of the law for their own self-interest, and the bill simply wasn't written with any mechanism to hold states accountable on this point (ironic for a bill whose entire purpose was increasing accountability in education, no?). I am of the opinion that the only way to ensure that states mandate sufficiently high standards for their students is to set them at the national level. We are a national economy with free flow of human capital. You don't need specific permission to apply to University of Oregon if you went to high school in Louisiana. Presumably, a high school degree in New York is the same as a high school degree in South Dakota. But this is far from true (actually, high school degrees within the same state don't even mean the same thing, but that's another issue altogether). Those who oppose national standards claim it will restrict pedagogy severely, sucking any creativity and in-depth learning out of the classroom and turning the next generation of students into mindless robots (on that last point, I think we can blame myspace and a lot of video games before we start pointing the finger at what is going on inside classrooms, but I digress). I wholeheartedly disagree. I think you can create assessments that measure skills. Teaching skills need not lead to a mandated and uniform national curriculum. If you are trying to teach students about literary structure and theme, you can choose whatever book you think will most interest your students and serve that purpose. If students need to be able to simplify fractions, you can use whatever lesson plan you so desire...give them a worksheet or use manipulatives. Schools where principals force teachers to teach test prep only, thus leading to the rallying cry that national standards and accountability force the inherent evil of "teaching to the test," shouldn't be the rule. That is the easy and stupid way to approach education. That response to standards is not the fault of the standards...it is the fault of the people (principals or superintendents, or maybe some teachers) who are frantically making a foolish choice about how to educate their student population. There is nothing inherent in having learning standards and skill outcomes that necessitates rote memorization and drill and kill all day, all the time (this is a topic for a different time, but a little rote memorization never hurt anybody....how else do you get your times tables down? we need to get over the rhetoric that memorization in education is evil...it's actually essential for the fundamentals).

So in sum: national standards will hold states accountable for graduating students with the skills that are supposedly associated with a high school diploma, increasing national productivity and the overall quality of our workforce. Make if happen, Obama. Add me to your list of "conservative" supporters.

sometimes we need to reflect on the good...

If you want to smile, go here.
I wish there were more of these stories to tell. Obviously the goal is to make it easier for students to achieve these things, but while barriers remain, it's good to remember that some kids manage to make it. One of them is a future Cornellian....go big red!