Liberal values for our most important liberal institution

George Will has an excellent critique of No Child Left Behind in the Washington Post, today, that sums up many of my concerns with the unintended consequences of a well-meaning law that, most teachers would agree, has very much undermined K-12 education in America.

Getting Past 'No Child'

I want to reiterate what I think is the most important question to be asked about NCLB:

What other Federal law in America controls or ever has controlled the central responsibilities of an industry nationwide and has ever experienced success?

It is the most foolish way to achieve success in a free society that I could possible imagine. And George's analogies to Soviet grain quotas are right on target.

Some of the better lines:

"No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the "soft bigotry of low expectations," has instead spawned lowered standards. The law will eventually be reauthorized because doubling down on losing bets is what Washington does. But because NCLB contains incentives for perverse behavior, reauthorization should include legislation empowering states to ignore it...

...NCLB intensified what Paul Posner of George Mason University calls "coercive federalism." Kenneth Wong and Gail Sunderman of Brown University and the Harvard Civil Rights Project, respectively, say NCLB "signaled the end of 'layer cake' federalism and strengthened the notion of 'marble cake' federalism, where the national and subnational governments share responsibilities in the domestic arena." Hoekstra's and Garrett's proposals would enable states to push Washington toward where it once was and where it belongs regarding K through 12 education: Out."

Dead on.

The Economist also features an excellent column on the results from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment.

The race is not always to the richest

Some of their conclusions:

"Letting schools run themselves seems to boost a country's position in this high-stakes international tournament: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them. Publishing school results helps, too. More important than either, though, are high-quality teachers: a common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates.

Another common theme is that rising educational tides seem to lift all boats. In general—the United States and Britain may be exceptions—countries do well either by children of all abilities, or by none. Those where many do well are also those where few fall behind. A new feature in this year's study is an attempt to work out how differences between schools, as opposed to differences within them, determine performance (see chart). Variation between schools is big in Germany (to be expected, as most schools select children on ground of ability). But results also vary in some countries (like Japan) with nominally comprehensive systems. In top-performing Finland, by contrast, the differences between schools are nearly trivial."

For those wanting to know about the most principled and likely direction for better schools and educations and about freeing up the most important institution in a liberal democracy to be free and for citizens to choose freely, this is the man who has articulated the strongest arguments for liberal values being taken seriously in our most important liberal institutions.

Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation

Thanks for the Christmas present George. It's nice to know that someone in America still believes in liberal values.