Why the education reform movement is in trouble

This new education/political chemistry has bubbled up to the White House. Although President Obama started off in a promising reform direction — Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top carrot incentives are the best federal reforms we’ve ever seen out of Washington — Obama himself recently retrenched.

Testing is “boring” and needs to be cut back, Obama declared at a town hall meeting in Washington late last month. Interesting timing the president chose to shoot his own school reforms in the foot — just as a newly energized, anti-testing labor movement, enraged by the Wisconsin challenges to collective bargaining, promises to play a major role in the next presidential election.

Sure, there may be examples of excessive testing, but there are not enough of the kind of quick-turnaround assessments I’ve seen work in urban districts, where students lacking specific skills in math, science or reading get flagged: Johnnie needs a quick re-teach of this topic, perhaps delivered in a different style. If anti-school reformers succeed in their broad campaign against testing, all that is at risk.

As the author of a new book about the school reforms carried out by Michelle Rhee, former schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., I’ve had a front-row seat for watching the signs of this approaching blowback storm. When Rhee first arrived in Washington, the national press idolized her. Today, sensing a momentum change, writers try to savage her record in D.C.

The fact that neither the former nor current negative press coverage was based on any real reporting in D.C. classrooms is irrelevant. Writers were just catching the mood of the moment, which today is trending away from the tough and controversial reforms she carried out — reforms that appeared to be working.

The impact of that anti-reform trending can be seen in Rhee’s new group, Students First, which tries to take the D.C.-style reforms national. To date, only conservative Republican governors have signed on, a sure sign that Democrats know when to duck, when to latch onto the anti-school reform movement that has been energized by the trims in collective bargaining.

In the short term, conservative governors can have it all — education reforms combined with fiscal cutbacks that may require curtailing collective bargaining privileges. But in the longer term, twinning the two will set back school reforms, perhaps for a very long time. And that’s going to do some real damage.

Richard Whitmire is author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District.