Race to the Trough

It's so fun to be clever, to play with language. "Race to the Trough"--pretty good, heh? But isn't that just what our esteemed Secretary Duncan and his even more esteemed President Obama have instigated? Do whatever we tell you to do and we will shower money on you. After all, we know what's best for your schools and your students, we who sit here in a Washington, D.C., office.

Oh, I forgot. Mr. Secretary Lord High Duncan sat in a Chicago Public Schools office before he went to Washington. So he does know what a tough urban school district is like, doesn't he? But even if he found out what was best for Chicago (and many Chicago teachers would dispute that assumption, but I will reserve judgment for now), how does he know that's what is best for Indianapolis, or Oakland, or Providence, or Poughkeepsie?

I'm fine with some federal money going into education, by the way. The Hoosier Writing Project, which I direct in Indianapolis, is funded by federal money that comes through the National Writing Project in Berkeley. But the NWP is based on a philosophy that teachers are the best teachers of other teachers, and that guided by our own best practice, our conversations with other dedicated teachers, our reading of tried and true professional literature, and our research into our own classrooms, we can develop the best ways for our students to learn and grow. If the federal government were to tell NWP, "Your grant next year depends on you training teachers in method A and telling them to do X, Y, and Z," I think NWP would decline the offer.

The federal government has asked NWP to demonstrate that its programs are effective. And NWP has done that, even though the federal government sometimes has a rather narrow view of what good research is. Still, without too much overt prescription, NWP has been able to show that teachers become better, their students learn to write more and better, and everyone associated with NWP sites feels challenged and passionate and re-energized.

So please, Secretary Duncan, your Highness, please fund good programs like NWP, and please fund creative, innovative schools and teachers without telling them ahead of time what they need to do. Above all, do not tell school districts to close schools, or convert them to charters, or fire principals and replace teachers. Those decisions seldom result in true change and seldom help students. When those decisions do need to be made--and sometimes, perhaps they do--let someone closer to the situation make the call.

Let's hope the sound of hooves shuffling and snouts snuffling stops soon.