Chris Cerf on the politics of school reform

NYC Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf was the guest blogger on Andy Rotherham's Eduwonk blog (www.eduwonk.com <http://www.eduwonk.com> ) last week and contributed five outstanding pieces.  I sent one a few days ago on Picking the Right Leaders (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/08/picking-right-leaders.html) and below are the other four.  Well worth reading.
 
Cerf on the (disgraceful) politics of school reform:

Second, you don't need to be a  disciple of Adam Smith to know in your bones that competition and  accountability for results drive innovation and quality. For the most part,  however, both are anathema to public education. When they are embraced at all,  it is usually after fierce resistance and in watered down form. Witness the  fight-to-the-death opposition to charter schools, the hostility to merit-based  compensation, the opposition to using evidence of student learning to evaluate  teacher performance and even (incredibly) the concern that NCLB is problematic  precisely because it focuses too much attention on which schools are  succeeding and which are failing. It is simply too facile an explanation to  suggest, as many do, that this resistance is the inevitable reaction of any  monopolist that wants to keep the good times rolling. I am convinced that the  antipathy to competition and accountability has deep cultural roots that go  well beyond narrow self interest.

Third, the politics of  school reform pretty much guarantee inaction, or at best incrementalism. I am  especially distressed by the failure of courage in my party, the Democratic  party, even to engage in a serious debate about the kind of structural reforms  that might really make a difference. As Robert  Gordon recounted ( <https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20050606&amp;s=gordon060605> ), John Kerry’s hasty retreat from a strong opening salvo in the 2004 election is sadly typical. The party that prides itself on social justice consistently avoids pushing the envelope on serious reform ( <http://www.dfer.org/>  ), resorting instead to  comfortable sloganeering like "more money," "fewer tests," and "lower class  size." The worst part? In private, the better candidates totally "get it" but  tell you that now is not the time to rock the boat. While Republicans are more  likely to "call it like it is," they have succeeded in marginalizing their voice in the debate through excessive reliance on market-based solutions,  overheated union bashing, and an often suspect track record on other civil rights issues. The result of this left/right dynamic is political inaction  (<http://www.mattmilleronline.com/book.php> ). And as  bad as this is at the national level, the more local you get, the worse it  becomes.

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Some Political Musings
Opinions here are my <http://www.broadacademy.org/fellows/fellow.php?alumni_id=21&amp;category_id=4> own and not those of the NYC Department of Education, where I serve as Deputy Chancellor.

How in the world did we get into the fix we are in today in urban public education? When the average African American and Latino 12th grader reads at a level equivalent to the average white 8th grader , when we find ourselves rejoicing when graduation rates rise to a mere 60 percent, and when we know that these aren't bloodless statistics but remarkably good predictors of life outcomes, including staggering unemployment and incarceration rates and depressed earnings potential, it is high time that we confront the question as forthrightly as possible. Sure, we are making some progress as a nation, especially in the early grades, and here in NYC every important trend line has a steep upward gradient, whether measured by graduation rates, math scores, literacy performance or the number of economically disadvantaged children now taking AP courses and college readiness tests like the PSAT. But, the hole urban school systems collectively dug for themselves over the last several decades is mighty deep, the human cost beyond unacceptable. Forward progress is better than the alternative. But the moral measure that counts is the absolute number of young lives that we are failing to launch into adulthood prepared to participate in the American dream. By any measure that number is orders of magnitude too high.