Race to Nowhere

There's a comprehensive piece in the NYT Magazine on the state of Barack Obama’s education reform effort, which, it seems, mostly revolves around a $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” contest. 

That’s out of an $80 billion education aid package. (And we spend maybe $600 billion annually on K-12 education.) So what’s the big deal?

The piece – written by Stephen Brill -- suggests there are a host of folks in a “reform network”   (mostly Democrats) that are willing to challenge the unions and do what’s right for kids. What’s right? Well, they seem to think teacher pay for performance is a big deal. They also want more of the same “full bore testing regime” that was championed by George W. Bush. The other thing seems to be a rise in the caps on charter schools.

At the end of the story, Brill gets a token Republican school superintendent (from Louisiana) to call all this stuff a “game changer.” But what game has been changed? 

Much as they might pretend to be pushing for real reform (and Brill seems to lack any skepticism about this), the Obama administration will never truly confront the unions. Why? I thought this paragraph was all that needed to be said:

If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.   

Indeed, this piece ("The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand") is laughably mis-titled. 

The unions aren’t threatened at all. They can afford to make a few concessions for PR reasons. They will throw (Education Secretary) Arne Duncan a few bones and it won’t do anything to change the fact that 50% of kids in American inner cities are flunking out (despite annual spending of $15-20K per student).  

As Lisa Snell points out in Reason, there’s nothing impressive about this administration’s approach to education:

Judged as a whole, the Obama/Duncan education program has been more about massive amounts of new spending than anything like real education reform. The stimulus package allocated $100 billion to public education. This unprecedented federal funding, nearly twice the Department of Education’s annual budget, was touted as a vehicle for transforming public education rather than doubling down on a failed system. But most of the $69 billion released as of this writing has gone to backfill state education budgets and maintain teaching jobs. 

We seem to be a very long way from addressing the problems that remain so manifestly clear. While Duncan may see himself as "Nixon going to China" (a Democrat confronting teachers' unions to modernize education for the 21st century), the reality is he isn't going anywhere.

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