Note to the Times: Leave it Behind
The New York Times reported Tuesday that researchers for the American Federation of Teachers, poring through government data, had determined that the charter school movement supported by policies in President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act hasn't thus far proven completely successful.
The Times yesterday (August 18, 2004) attempted a one-two follow-up punch to that report with both a cover-page story on NCLB and an editorial critical of charter schools; both items are interesting for a condescending tone, gloating diction, and manipulation of fact and emotion.
The introductory melodrama of the page-one story by Diana Jean Schemo ("Effort by Bush On Education Hits Obstacles") is ripping: a troubled school in Michigan is braced for the "momentous consequences threatened in President Bush's landmark education law" – consequences that the even-handed journalist characterizes as "the educational equivalent of a hostile takeover." We bite our nails and daub our eyes at the imminent "elimination of principals and teachers and the installation of new management." Elimination? Heavens. Perhaps the legislation ought have been dubbed the "No Establishmentarian Left Ungarroted" Act.
The editorial ("Bad News on the Charter Front") opines that "eliminating [again] the much-criticized educational bureaucracy seems to have created at least as many problems as it has solved." [Anything wrong with "replacing"? "streamlining"? "improving"?] Further, the editorial tut-tuts that "[i]n some cases, charter schools that boasted about high student achievement have been unwilling to share test data." And, presumably to add a conspiratorial fillip to the Tuesday AFT story, we are told that the researchers' insights were "unearthed from a mound of federal reports, where it seemed to have been buried." Kudos to the intrepid Indiana Weingarten and her crack fellow archaeologists.
No one has claimed that the charter-school concept is an instant panacea to the blight of educational mediocrity. No one expected every experiment to work equally well, or for success in one setting by one set of innovative educators to be instantly and self-evidently transferable elsewhere. One of the highest virtues of the NCLB Act is that it undertook the pursuit of hard and important goals seriously and promised a sustained, flexible and humbly adaptable effort in achieving them.
If one charter experiment fails at least it can, under NCLB, be more readily altered or dismantled than a traditionally entrenched public school regime can be. If a school refuses to show data supporting its claims to have achieved a certain standard, use the plenary authority granted by NCLB to do something about it. That sure beats the traditional system in which the very effort to impose standards could be institutionally thwarted and pooh-poohed at every turn.
It's time for unions, bureaucrats and their media organs to stop trying to make admirable ideals like accountability, creativity and putting children first sound like mean threats, repressions and assaults on professional dignity.
(And, while we're at it, let's fund NCLB more fully; and put the states'-rights grumbling about it to rest, too.)
The Times yesterday (August 18, 2004) attempted a one-two follow-up punch to that report with both a cover-page story on NCLB and an editorial critical of charter schools; both items are interesting for a condescending tone, gloating diction, and manipulation of fact and emotion.
The introductory melodrama of the page-one story by Diana Jean Schemo ("Effort by Bush On Education Hits Obstacles") is ripping: a troubled school in Michigan is braced for the "momentous consequences threatened in President Bush's landmark education law" – consequences that the even-handed journalist characterizes as "the educational equivalent of a hostile takeover." We bite our nails and daub our eyes at the imminent "elimination of principals and teachers and the installation of new management." Elimination? Heavens. Perhaps the legislation ought have been dubbed the "No Establishmentarian Left Ungarroted" Act.
The editorial ("Bad News on the Charter Front") opines that "eliminating [again] the much-criticized educational bureaucracy seems to have created at least as many problems as it has solved." [Anything wrong with "replacing"? "streamlining"? "improving"?] Further, the editorial tut-tuts that "[i]n some cases, charter schools that boasted about high student achievement have been unwilling to share test data." And, presumably to add a conspiratorial fillip to the Tuesday AFT story, we are told that the researchers' insights were "unearthed from a mound of federal reports, where it seemed to have been buried." Kudos to the intrepid Indiana Weingarten and her crack fellow archaeologists.
No one has claimed that the charter-school concept is an instant panacea to the blight of educational mediocrity. No one expected every experiment to work equally well, or for success in one setting by one set of innovative educators to be instantly and self-evidently transferable elsewhere. One of the highest virtues of the NCLB Act is that it undertook the pursuit of hard and important goals seriously and promised a sustained, flexible and humbly adaptable effort in achieving them.
If one charter experiment fails at least it can, under NCLB, be more readily altered or dismantled than a traditionally entrenched public school regime can be. If a school refuses to show data supporting its claims to have achieved a certain standard, use the plenary authority granted by NCLB to do something about it. That sure beats the traditional system in which the very effort to impose standards could be institutionally thwarted and pooh-poohed at every turn.
It's time for unions, bureaucrats and their media organs to stop trying to make admirable ideals like accountability, creativity and putting children first sound like mean threats, repressions and assaults on professional dignity.
(And, while we're at it, let's fund NCLB more fully; and put the states'-rights grumbling about it to rest, too.)
posted by Chet G @ 4:17 AM
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