Congress may miss chance to fix schools

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Morton Kondracke Photo/File

September 7, 2010

Anonymous Laurel Leader-Call The Laurel Leader-Call Tue Sep 07, 2010, 10:19 AM CDT

LAUREL — The prospect of finally fixing America’s public schools looks better now than ever, but there’s still a chance that this golden economic and moral opportunity could slip away.

The danger lies in the possibility that Congress will delay action on education-reform legislation and that a left-right coalition of reactionaries will consolidate next year to upend the dramatic progress now under way.

Polls indicate that education reform – including merit pay for teachers – is popular with the public, but teachers unions still resist it. The nation’s biggest civil rights groups do, too.

And now tea party-backed candidates around the country are calling for abolition of the Education Department, the driving force behind reform.

If Congress does not act this year to reauthorize the nation’s basic school-funding law – and chances are, it won’t – and if Republicans take over one or both houses of Congress, the consensus for reform could collapse and funding for it could wither.

President Barack Obama is proving to be a courageous “education president.” He has hired an aggressive education secretary, Arne Duncan, and has promoted elevating education standards, accountability for teachers and reorganization of failing schools, even in the face of criticism from unions and civil rights groups.

Obama and Duncan have accelerated a reform process started by George W. Bush with his No Child Left Behind program.

The Democratic Congress approved $5 billion for Obama to award on a competitive basis to states undertaking reform. Eleven of them have won grants under Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, plus the District of Columbia, and 36 states instituted reforms to qualify for the competition.

Reform has been on the nation’s agenda since 1982, when the Reagan administration published the famous “Nation at Risk” report. Still, education performance has consistently dropped even as the importance of world-class schools has risen.

As Obama noted in a speech to the Urban League on July 29, the United States has fallen from first in the world in college graduation rates to 12th, and U.S. eighth-graders rank 10th on math and science tests.

Moreover, “African-American students not only trail almost every other developed nation abroad, but they badly trail their white classmates – an achievement gap that is widening the income gap between black and white, rich and poor.”

“This status quo,” Obama said, “is morally inexcusable” and “economically indefensible.”

The movement to advance education reform will get major boosts this fall with the national release of a documentary film, “Waiting for Superman,” by Davis Guggenheim, director of the Academy Award-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The movie tracks the heart-rending progress of parents and children participating in a lottery to gain admission to quality charter schools – with a loss leading to placement in an inferior public school and, likely, academic failure.

And America’s Promise Alliance, the youth group founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is mobilizing 400 national business, government and nonprofit groups in a program called Grad Nation, designed to reverse the nation’s high school dropout rate – 30 percent for all students, 50 percent for minorities.

All this is to the good. The danger is that Congress will fail to pass a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, locking school reform into law, or extend funding so that Race to the Top can continue.

If Republicans capture control of one or both houses of Congress, ESEA reauthorization will be further delayed – especially with tea party activists demanding local control of education – and education funding might well be cut amid a general hold-down on domestic spending.

Moreover, one of the nation’s leading experiments in reform may come to a halt if District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty is defeated in a primary election this month. His opponent, Vincent Gray, has refused to say whether he will retain D.C.’s reformist schools chief, Michelle Rhee.

America can’t afford to have its schools less than world class, and a majority of Americans seem to know it. But reform has failed before and could again.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.

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