What do Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rev. Al Sharpton agree on? Just one thing comes to mind: calling education “the civil rights issue of our time.”

It’s a nice idea – and a rare area of bipartisanship – but it undermines efforts at improving student outcomes, says school reformer Rick Hess.

“It’s an appealing phrase. It’s a pleasant notion. I worry, though, that it’s a distracting notion and one that just doesn’t fit,” Hess, an author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, recently told an audience in Washington, D.C.

Emphasizing the “right” to an education has resulted in too much energy spent on improving test scores and not enough on ensuring students learn.

“Let me ask you, how many of you, when you were 10 years old or 14 woke up in the morning and said, ‘All right, I’m going to go to school today because I’m excited to get proficient in reading and math?’” Hess asked the audience.

Hess said that the U.S. education system has spent centuries trying to move kids, first into the classroom, and then through the 12th grade. But now that universal education is a given, the infrastructure is not set up to take kids to the next level of learning.

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But the failure of students to reach their potential is not a failure of the system alone, Hess said. It is the outcome of demands placed on a system designed to serve a different function. Hess compared it to another misalignment between goals and outcomes.

“Think about health care,” Hess said. “We can talk about somebody having a right to see a doctor, a right to get health care, but it’s hard to say you have a right to be healthy. If I go in and see my doctor, my doctor says, ‘Rick, you’ve got to lose about 30 pounds because you’re endangering your health. Here’s what you need to do in terms of exercise. Here’s what you should eat.’ And I go home and I eat a bag of potato chips every night. We generally don’t say that makes my doctor a bad doctor.”

Watch Rick Hess’s AEI Vision Talk.

Hess said that when “crusaders” see students are not learning, they pass more rules — 1,100 new K-12-related laws in 2013 alone, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. Instead, he said, the mutual responsibility for outcomes must be in the form of a “handshake” between student and teacher, school and family.

“Schools are about creating opportunity. They’re about engaging minds. They’re about stimulating souls,” he said. “We must expect teachers to be professionals and ask that they do terrific work. But we also need to ask students and families to do their share.”

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