“Harkin’s bill would return control to the state departments of education and the local school districts, and they’re the ones that got us into the mess that No Child was designed to fix,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who headed the Department of Education’s research wing under President Bush. “Districts and states have not been effective in delivering quality education to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so why should we think they’ll be effective this time around?”Okay, okay, states and districts haven't always taken the lead in promoting achievement. Or rarely. We can debate that. But it's not like NCLB had much to say about instruction and achievement, either, except to set pie-in-the-sky goals of universal proficiency by 2014 and impose punitive consequences (that were actually pretty easy to escape through the "other" option of school turnaround) for those not on track.
The idea that simply raising motivation to get improve achievement was sufficient to get the process going failed on two fronts. First, it left states to fix, fiddle, and nip data to "show" proficiency. Second, it's proposals for creating better options for kids were a) tutoring and b) transfer. Leaving aside whether this is actually an effective way to raise all boats, only tiny, tiny numbers of kids took those up. NCLB didn't deal much with capacity of teachers and schools, nor with good fallback plans.
Harkin's bill may not be stellar--I for one am interested to learn more--but it's slipshod to hold up NCLB as the original, responsible alternative.
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