By Morton Kondracke
With student performance still dismal 23 years after a federal report proclaimed “a nation at risk,” it’s just possible that a decisive, bipartisan “grand bargain” can be struck to improve the public schools.
The deal would be: Republicans agree to more equitable distribution of school funding – including higher teacher pay – while Democrats agree that teachers should be paid for performance, not just seniority.
Two national initiatives give rise to hope that that the decades-long right-left battle over education, accountability versus money, can be broken at last and the public schools improved.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched a project along with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the liberal Center for American Progress and the moderate America’s Promise that will start by publishing report cards on each state’s progress on school reform.
Following up its campaign against trial lawyers, the chamber is likely to target teachers unions that resist reform. The presence in the chamber coalition of the liberal CAP, headed by former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, could clear the way for other Democrats to challenge the unions.
At the same time, Podesta’s CAP is urging correction of fiscal inequities between school systems to accompany higher national standards, which chamber officials say they would consider supporting as part of overall reform.
Separately, the conservative Thomas Fordham Institute has assembled all-star, cross-ideological backing for “weighted school funding,” whereby federal, state and local school money would follow children into the classroom and be allocated more on the basis of socioeconomic need.
Besides the chamber and Fordham initiatives, I ran into compelling anecdotal evidence last week in Aspen, Colo., that American elites are fed up with the dismal status quo in education.
A star figure at the second annual Aspen Institute Ideas Festival – attended by several hundred, mainly liberal intellectual and financial glitterati – was Joel Klein, the former Clinton aide who is now chancellor of New York City public schools.
Klein made a riveting case that teachers-union contracts are the main obstacle to improving urban education.
“The contract protects the interests of adults at the expense of kids,” he told a rapt audience, describing how it bars pay differentials based on student performance and service in difficult schools; makes it impossible for principals to fire underperforming teachers; and allows teachers to choose their own professional development tracks, regardless of supply-and-demand needs, such as those for more math and science teachers.
The U.S. chamber initiative clearly is targeted at the teachers unions, although chamber President Thomas Donohue is approaching the schools more gently than in his aggressive campaigns against the trial-lawyer lobby on tort reform.
The nation’s foremost business lobby has been ranking the states’ legal climates, taking out full-page ads headlined “Please Don’t Feed the Trial Lawyers” and working for tort reform at the state and national level.
Over the past two years, the chamber has scored notable victories in former “jackpot jurisdictions” such as those in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida. It also won class-action reform in Congress.
