Like Dana, I think the oddly ferocious criticism of Linda Darling-Hammond, head of Obama's education transition team, is is rather overblown. Over at The New Republic, for instance, Seyward Darby penned an article entitled "Old School" that gives us a look at "Obama's union-loving education guru." The article pits Darling-Hammond against "reformers," which in this case simply means people who approve of Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. It's an odd construction. Ask Darling-Hammond if she's a "Status Quoian," and I rather doubt you'll get an affirmative response. But nowhere does the article examine, or even so much as mention, Darling-Hammond's own ideas for reform. Which is strange given that Darling-Hammond is a longtime reformer who helped write Obama's education plan and is considered a leading expert on teacher quality. Indeed, the very credentialed reformers over at Education Sector have taken a deeper look at Darling-Hammond's ideas and are more comforted by what they see:
Darling-Hammond has spent a lot of time studying the teaching and testing systems of high achieving industrialized countries and likes them better than ours. Among other things, she says, they teach fewer topics in greater depth; focus more on reasoning skills and applications of knowledge rather than on coverage of content; and rely heavily on open-ended questions "that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and write extensively," in contrast to US tests that "rely primarily on multiple-choice items that evalute recall and recognition of discreet facts." She's right about that.Darling-Hammond points approvingly to a "growing emphasis" in high-performing countries on "project-based, inquiry-oriented learning" that has led "to an increasing prominence for school-based tasks, which include research projects, science investigations, development of products and reports or presentations about these efforts"--so-called performance tests. The bulk of the article (written with co-author Laura McClosky) describes approvingly locally administered performance assessment in countries ranging from Finland to Australia, Hong Kong, Sweden, and the UK...if Barack Obama gives Linda Darling Hammond a major role in his administration, we're going to have a big policy debate over testing in American education and whether we should move beyond NCLB accountability to something potentially very different. Such a debate wouldn't be a bad thing.
It would be a good debate to have. But the current debate has gotten very strange. There is a camp of people who are concerned about issues of tenure and union strength and merit pay and they are called "reformers." Then there are people who believe those strategies inadequate or wrongheaded and are more interested in human capital development and universal pre-k and smaller class sizes and economically integrated classes and these people are called "union loving." But there's no evidence that the first group has figured out a policy strategy that will prove effective, nor that the second group, which includes Darling-Hammond, has not. Rather, we get a lot of stuff like this: "Even if [Darling-Hammond] does not secure a position in the Obama administration, the symbolism and influence she has in this preliminary stage are troubling. Vexing education's boldest change agents won't help Obama substantiate his still-murky education reform credentials and forge bipartisan policies." Arguably, the history of education reform suggests that vexing education's strongest interest groups just ensures your changes flame out. You get a lot of good press along the way, as Michelle Rhee has found, but your reforms perish. Moreover, the point of education policy is not reform credentials or even bipartisan policies. It's better policy. But the composition of better policy is often assumed rather than argued. The debate over education policy has become unmoored from education policy and is now a debate over whether you are an "old" style Democrat in hock to the unions or an awesome new style reformer who has two! separate! blackberries! That's not good. It's possible that Darby or others want to argue that Darling-Hammond's ideas are bad ones, but thus far, we've not seen much of that.
