I went this morning for an off-the-record chat with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and some of the other key staffers at the Department of Education. They were mostly talking education policy (naturally) but what they were talking about shed an interesting window on the larger political dysfunction of the United States. Basically when the so-called “No Child Left Behind” version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was signed into law in early 2002, the expectation was that it would last for five years or so and be due for reauthorization and re-writing in 2007. It didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen in 2008 either. No biggie. Reauthorizations often don’t happen on schedule. Then when President Obama took office in 2009, he had large Democratic majorities in congress and a huge recession to deal with. So in addition to recovery measures, he emphasized an agenda that tended to unite his caucus and put ESEA reauthorization on the back-burner as something he was more likely to be able to get bipartisan support for.

So here we are in 2011, the year that was supposed to be the reauthorization year. Except it’s the end of July and we’re having a doomsday standoff over the debt ceiling. Then in September appropriations expire. Then next thing you know it’s the holidays and it’s re-election season. So while the administration still wants a proper re-write and re-authorization, nobody’s counting on it happening. Instead, the plan is to drive policy change by issuing “waivers.” Basically, the Secretary has the ability to grant conditional relief from the law’s requirements. And since the proficiency standards for Adequate Yearly Progress were set very (i.e., unrealistically) high, the waivers will be much in need. So the thinking is that rather than formally re-write the law, the administration will be able to say “well you get a waiver from this and that if you do this and that” and thus, in practice, federal education policy can change fairly dramatically without congress doing anything.

It’s clever, and since it’s probably not the kind of issue around which congress will organize a massive backlash (compare to, say, the EPA) it just might work. But it should also be taken as another sign of the increasing breakdown of our machinery of government.

I’ve seen both Ezra Klein and Cato’s David Boaz except this exact same paragraph about Chicago Public Schools under Arne Duncan:

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

I don’t really understand this line of criticism or even why it’s supposed to be damning. I don’t think that anyone ever said that becoming Secretary of Education was like a prize that’s supposed to be handed out to the urban education chancellor who gets the very best results on the NAEP TUDA. Rather, common sense indicates that if you’re going to pick the chief of an urban public school system that you want to find one who’s delivered positive results. And the data shows, rather clearly, than under Arne Duncan Chicago public school kids improved their performance.

Now it’s true that New York City Public Schools under Joel Klein arguably did even better. But if you look back to press coverage of the choice you’ll see that Duncan’s asset over Klein was never based on denying this. Rather, the feeling was that Duncan and Klein have a similar general approach to education policy—an approach that Obama supports—but that Duncan has more of a reputation as a consensus-builder and Klein more as a fighter/bulldozer type. Duncan, consequently, was deemed more likely to be able to build legislative support for a reform program. Many of the other cities that have shown good results in recent years have school systems that are much smaller than New York or Chicago, so their leadership, while impressive, may not have been deemed as qualified to run the federal bureaucracy.

Chester Finn, in the same piece as that critical graf, had a smart take:

“Chicago is not the story of an education miracle,” said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. “It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes.”

In education, I think we should be suspicious of miracles. Improving schools is hard. Improving whole school systems is harder. Improving educational outcomes is rendered even more difficult by the fact that things that happen outside the classroom make an enormous difference—school administrators are operating a lever that has limited efficacy. But better schools do make a difference for the kids who attend them, and better school systems make a huge difference for the cities that have them. So improvement is worth seeking, especially non-miraculous improvement that can be scaled-up.

On Duncan, long story short he was the chief executive of a large urban school system that implemented some reforms that had theoretical support behind them and that seem to have led to some real improvements. He’s also someone the president knew personally, whose political style matches Obama’s, and whose reputation suits the administration’s political strategy. That seems like a very reasonable choice to me, though there are also other big city school chiefs who have done a good job and a number of different people around the country who could succeed as Secretary of Education.

Albuquerque High School (cc photo by cjc4454)

The extent to which American schools perform well is a legitimate topic of national concern. But education policy is largely set at the state level in this country. Which means that in terms of federal policy there’s a premium on finding clever ways to nudge state governments toward dropping misguided policies. Dana Goldstein reports on one such clever initiative:

The complicated dance between Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the national teachers’ unions continued today. On a conference call to officially roll-out the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” education reform competition, Duncan said states are “ineligible” for the grants if they have laws on the books prohibiting student performance from affecting teacher assessment. New York and Wisconsin are two such states, and teachers’ unions have long lobbied for such laws. In an attempt to encourage states to overturn these prohibitions, the Department of Education will be handing out Race to the Top grants in two phases over the next two years, allowing state legislatures time to revisit issues of teacher compensation.

The New York version of this rule, at a minimum, was snuck onto the books with no debate or public awareness and it’s bad news. You certainly could imagine a scheme to use student performance data in compensation or tenure decisions that wasn’t a good idea. But the idea that all such schemes should be categorically prohibited is nuts. The research is pretty unambiguous that some teachers produce much better students achievement than others. Insofar as schools are able to find ways to identify the highly effective teachers and give them incentive to stay, while declining to tenure the ineffective teachers, the quality of school performance should get substantially better over time.

Unfortunately, developing good systems for gathering and analyzing data isn’t all that easy. But we desperately need to be working on ways to do that job better, not throwing new roadblocks in the way.

It seems that a new, hipper era of governance really has arrived here in the nation’s capital. Seyward Darby explains:

Spotted: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan introducing flame-haired indie goddess Neko Case at the 9:30 Club last night. But … why? Is the Cabinet member a devoted Neko fan, or is she a big supporter of education reform? (A friend who was at the concert said she put in a good word for Obama’s education plans.)

As it turns out, the backstory proves, yet again, just how tied the administration is to the Chicago scene. Last week, the Department of Education hired Tim Tuten, co-owner of The Hideaway, a hip Chicago club, as assistant secretary for communications and outreach. (He’s also been a schoolteacher in the Windy City.) Tuten is friends with Neko, a fixture in recent years at The Hideaway, and he set up Duncan’s introduction. “That’s all Tim making something like that happen, connecting those two things [education and music],” Duncan told The Chicago Tribune through a spokesman on April 1. “No one thinks like him. We need more of that here.” And Tuten’s not the only music promoter on board at the DOE: He was brought on by Peter Cunningham, “a Chicago musician and media specialist,” according to the Tribune.

Good times. That said, I always find it slightly annoying when bands come to DC and bring a political message to an audience that inevitably contains a huge number of people working professionally in the political game. I remember especially being at a Death Cab show in October 2004 and listening to Ben Gibbard explain how important it was to help John Kerry get elected. As if political apathy is a big problem among young professionals in the DC area or something.

But churlishness aside, I think an innovative public relations approach is welcome. Especially as it pertains to government agencies trying to bring messages to people outside the Beltway. One important task for progressive governance is making people more aware of the positive role government programs play in many people’s lives, and of the importance of engaging in the political and policy process. That’s harder to define than “pass a health care bill” but over the long run I think its equally important.

Ezra Klein and Dana Goldstein observe that black-white achievement gaps, as measured on the National Assessment of Education Progress, generally increased during Arne Duncan’s tenure as head of Chicago Public Schools. I looked this up via the useful TUDA site and it’s true. At the same time, the evidence is overwhelmingly good. Of the five sets of metrics available (4th grade reading, 4th grade math, 8th grade reading, 8th grade math, and 8th grade reading) black scores improved on four metrics. And Hispanic scores improved on all five. The trouble is that the small white minority (about 10 percent) in Chicago public schools also improved and sometimes showed a larger increase than did black test scores.

Here, for example, is 4th grade math where you see that racial achievement gaps grew. On the other hand, scores for minority students went up . . they just went up more for white students:

I don’t think that’s necessarily the worst thing in the world. You see the same pattern for 8th grade math:

By contrast, in 4th grade reading you saw the same general upward trend but also a slight narrowing of the white/nonwhite gap:

In 8th grade reading, the whites stagnated while Hispanics improved so that gap narrowed. But black scores got worse. Since Hispanics improved by more than blacks declined, this constituted an overall improvement in average scores:

In terms of writing, 8th grade scores went up across the board in Chicago between 2002 and 2007, and racial gaps narrowed:

To me, this makes Arne Duncan look pretty good. It also exposes some conceptual problems with efforts to narrow the achievement gap. It would have been politically difficult for Duncan to somehow try to implement policies that were designed to prevent white students from improving their performance. Nor does it seems like deliberately thwarting the efforts of the highest-performing groups purely in order to close gaps makes much sense as a policy. I think about the most you can ask of a city superintendent is that achievement broadly increases — including for poor students and minorities — during his tenure. A federal policy maker, by contrast, has the ability to not only back policies that enhance achievement but also to back policies that substantially increase the volume of resources available to high poverty schools and, therefore, will plausibly have some gap-narrowing bite.

Arne Duncan always seemed like the obvious choice for Secretary of Education to me. He works in Chicago, just like Obama. Obama knows him personally. He went to Harvard and he plays basketball. On top of that, he’s had a good record in Chicago. And compared to other reform-oriented big city superintendents he has a much better relationship with teacher’s unions.

Under the circumstances, it seems to me that there was an enormous tactical cleverness in the way Obama let this thing play out with increasing levels of hysteria from unions and reformers about potential choices. If Obama had done the obvious thing early, it’s possible that both sides would have come away disappointed. But by getting everyone afraid of the specter of Joel Klein or Linda Darling-Hammond, he wound up making a pick who makes everyone happy. And, honestly, everyone should be happy! Of course this means conflicts will now be deferred onto subcabinet choices and so forth. But I would say that with NCLB architects George Miller and Ted Kennedy still running the relevant committees in congress and a reformist in the White House, the basic principles of testing and accountability look set to remain in place.

Meanwhile, the team of ballers has just added its most accomplished player. Duncan was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and after graduation he played professionally in Australia for several years. That puts him a cut above the pick-up crew that you’ll see in the rest of the administration.