An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

We have printed several posts on the direction of President Obama’s educational reform on this blog. (See all) Today we are reprinting with permission an open letter by Professor Daniel Tanner published in Education Week to continue the conversation.


An Open Message to President Barack Obama
By Daniel Tanner
Professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University

Education Week
Published Online: February 1, 2011
Published in Print: February 2, 2011, as An Open Message to President Barack Obama
Vol. 30, Issue 19, Pages 22-23

Reprinted with Permission


A principal conclusion of the American creed is the belief in public education. The United States leads the world with the oldest continuing public school system, universal secondary education, and open-access higher education.

President Obama, when you were elected in 2008, teachers, parents, and most of us with an abiding faith in the public school envisioned a new era of school support and renewal in accord with the hopes and promises engendered by your election campaign. Instead, the centerpiece of your education program so far, the Race to the Top, reinforces, expands, and intensifies the No Child Left Behind Act of President George W. Bush and the America 2000 manifesto of President George H.W. Bush—all of which have embraced nationalized high-stakes testing as the instrument of accountability imposed upon children and teachers. Their presidential agendas, and yours, have promoted the charter school movement. But your Race to the Top competition has gone even further in promoting external testing and splitting up the American school system through the federal support of charter schools.

As with your predecessors, your unrelenting faith in high-stakes testing as the key metric for accountability not only lacks validity, but also is likely to have many unintended deleterious consequences for curriculum and the attitudes students have toward learning. No nation has ever tested itself out of an educational or social problem. The public schools cannot be blamed for children victimized by impoverishment or the failures of other social institutions. Yet our public schools have willingly and eagerly accepted responsibility for all the children of all the people.

Early in the 20th century, John Dewey warned of the need to invest in building and strengthening our unitary school system by providing for adequate facilities and resources, and of a danger in splitting up the school system by forming yet another kind of school even though it might be the cheaper route.

Mr. President, you have repeatedly boasted that our nation has the world’s leading system of higher education. But this would not have been possible without a unitary public school system capped by a uniquely American invention: the inclusive comprehensive high school with its comprehensive curriculum.

Under your initiatives, children and adolescents are being denied access to a full and rich curriculum and facilities with modern studios, shops, laboratories, and libraries where they can really work at their studies. And instead of undertaking the needed funding for a rich, full curriculum for the renewal of the American unitary school system, you are calling, in effect, for it to be dismantled and broken up into charter schools when the body of research fails to support your strategy.

In our large cities, school capacity is commonly calculated by the number of seats. But children and adolescents are not made to learn by sitting and listening for most of the day. Children like to engage in active investigation—in looking into things to find out how they work. They like to construct things; they seek to engage in socialization through language, play, and collaboration; they love to draw, paint, sculpt, and sing; they want to learn to play a musical instrument—and all of this requires some physical freedom from their seats.

Standardized tests are error-oriented. Real education is idea-oriented. At a time when our greatest need is to build a more civil society for American democracy, the American high-stakes testing syndrome has gone to such an extreme that the New York state commissioner of education has declared, as reported in The New York Times, that teacher education programs should spend less time on abstract notions like the “role of school in democracy.”

Back in the years of the Cold War, our public schools were blamed for contributing to the alleged missile gap and the prospect of losing the space race. Federal initiatives resulted in curricular priorities in our schools given to mathematics and science, to be led by university scholar-specialists. What students learned from these initiatives was that they did not like math and science. The consequence was that university enrollments in those disciplines plummeted, leading the president of the American Chemical Society to declare in his 1967 address at the society’s annual meeting, “We have committed a crime against a generation.” Earlier, Harvard University President James B. Conant had called for a moratorium on national testing. The situation is far worse today.

The current assault on teacher tenure and unions also raises a great danger to American democracy. Virtually every modern democracy embraces teacher tenure in recognition that the teacher must be free to teach if the rising generation is to be free to learn. Over the course of our modern history, our schools have been subjected to the censorship of curricular materials, with pressures exerted against teachers who address controversial problems. The external national-standardized-testing epidemic effectively diminishes the prospects of addressing controversial issues or ideas in the classroom.

Your promotion of teacher merit pay based on test scores can be traced to the system of “payment by results” practiced in 19th-century English schools serving children of the poor. For the privileged, such a factory-like production scheme was deemed inappropriate and offensive. Your initiatives under the Race to the Top competition are reducing American teachers to the status of employees, whereas teachers are recognized and treated as professionals in almost every other civilized nation. Year after year, the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll reveals that the public, as a whole, sees the biggest problem facing the public schools as the “lack of financial support/funding/money.”

There is a great danger to our democracy with out-of-school adolescents constituting by far the largest unemployed group. Sigmund Freud held that work defines one’s place in the human community. We cannot continue to ignore the consequences of social disaffection resulting from the massive and growing population of youths who are out of school and out of work.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich belatedly found that his proposal for a German-style apprenticeship system in our country to solve the problem of unemployed American youths was unacceptable to the American public. At the time, I was participating in the annual meeting of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. At the conference, the air was buzzing in anticipation of a national plan for consolidating, or at least coordinating, the last two years of high school with the two years of community college as a four-year unit for vocational-technical education. Through what is known as the 2+2 or tech-prep program, adolescents would be able to bridge the chasm between high school and gainful postsecondary employment and higher education. In the mid-20th century, a committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences pointed out that if the public schools actually tried to carry out the purely academic program advocated for the high school by many university liberal arts professors, our whole national life would be in danger of collapse. Unfortunately, we backed away—beginning in the 1960s—from a commitment to meaningful preparation of young people for life after high school.

Mr. President, your metrics for determining school success treat the problems of education as problems to be worked out with a yardstick—to paraphrase the late American philosopher Boyd H. Bode. As Bode reminded us in his book Modern Educational Theory, “We put shoes on a child to protect his health and not to bind his feet.” The Race to the Top approach is relegating the studies and activities that children love—civic education, the arts, career education—to the bottom rung of the academic ladder.

At the opening of the 20th century, John Dewey, addressing parents in a lecture and essay titled “The School and Social Progress,” declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.” The American people should expect no less of our national leadership.

See Also
For a teacher’s response to Race to the Top, read: "A Letter to My President."

Daniel Tanner is a professor emeritus in the graduate school of education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. He is the co-author of Curriculum Development: Theory Into Practice (Pearson Prentice Hall, 4th ed., 2007) and has written extensively on the history and politics of the school curriculum in the United States and internationally.
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Editor:  Despite his educational reform direction, President Obama knows what kind of school children deserve as illustrated by the choice he made for his own children.  For a look at the kind of education Malia and Sasha are receiving, see our post by David Marshak, entitled, "Obama's School Choice:  Shouldn't the Education that Malia and Sasha Receive Be Available to All?"

Watch for our upcoming issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy on the theme: "The Education and Schools our Children Deserve" scheduled to go online in the summer of 2011.  Our next issue in the summer of 2012 will focus on "The School-to-Prison Pipeline."

Thoughts on Tucson

This isn't an education story, per se. But it's too important to ignore.

The education angle to the recent tragedy in Tucson, Arizona is the fact that the apparent shooter recently attended a local community college. While I think it is unfair to hold Pima Community College responsible for Jared Loughner, this New York Times article and Sunday's Washington Post editorial does raise some smart questions about what could have been done differently, most notably having sought an involuntary mental evaluation of the suspect. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20.

Currently, too much of the public conversation about Tucson is about culpability and about the role of political discourse in fueling the violence. Those are possibly irrelevant or overly simplistic conversations. It is unclear if political discourse had much bearing on Loughner's decision to do what he did. Sunday's New York Times story suggests that his twisted belief that "women should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority" may have been a crucial factor. Clearly, the accused shooter is responsible (although our justice system will make the official determination of guilt). Is anyone else? His parents? Institutions like his former community college? What about the state of Arizona for having gun laws on the books that allowed Loughner to legally purchase his weapon and ammunition? Fundamentally, taken to it logical end, the finger points directly at the collective 'us'. We have elected leaders who have shaped our current gun laws.

And that's the tougher conversation that no one in power seems to want to have: Our current laws on access to firearms are senseless and extreme when compared to other nations. Semiautomatic weapons (such as the one used by Loughner in this tragedy) and extended magazines have no legitimate place in civil society. Why could someone like Loughner legally purchase a Glock semiautomatic handgun and an extended magazine? Why should anyone be able to for that matter?

Nicholas Kristof recent op-ed in the New York Times (Why Not Regulate Guns As Seriously As Toys?) raised some pointed questions in this regard.

Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend community college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a 33-round magazine? No problem.

A few suggestions he offered:

[B]an oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing 10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier.

We can also learn from Australia, which in 1996 banned assault weapons... [T]he Journal of Public Health Policy notes that after the ban, the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.

Where are our political leaders on gun control? No where to be found. They're all still playing duck 'n' cover with the National Rifle Association. Even, in Arizona, they say this incident doesn't change anything. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Of course. [UPDATE: Some lawmakers even want to make the state's gun laws even more lax. Apparently, it isn't enough that Arizona is already one of only three U.S. states that allows residents to carry concealed weapons without training or even a background check.]

Frank Rich hits several nails on their heads in Sunday's New York Times. I'll let his words speak for themselves:

Of the many truths in President Obama’s powerful Tucson speech, none was more indisputable than his statement that no one can know what is in a killer’s mind. So why have we spent so much time debating exactly that?

The answer is classic American denial. It was easier to endlessly parse Jared Lee Loughner’s lunatic library — did he favor “The Communist Manifesto” or Ayn Rand? — than confront the larger and harsher snapshot of our current landscape that emerged after his massacre....

Let’s also face another tragedy: The only two civic reforms that might have actually stopped him — tighter gun control and an effective mental health safety net — won’t materialize even now.

No editorial — or bloodbath — will move Congress to enact serious gun control (which Giffords herself never advocated and Obama has rarely pushed since 2008). Enhanced mental health coverage is also a nonstarter when the highest G.O.P. priority is to repeal the federal expansion of health care. In Arizona, cutbacks are already so severe that terminally ill patients are being denied life-saving organ transplants.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and their families. Here's hoping that some good can come as a result of this tragedy, but I'm not overly optimistic.

Fili-Bernie

I've officially given this blog over to Bernie Sanders. Well, not really. But I can't think of an issue more fundamental in defining who we are as Americans and more important to our nation's economic and educational future than what Bernie discussed in his old-school, non-filibuster filibuster on Friday. Economic justice -- along with sensible tax policy -- is something too few on Capitol Hill and too few Americans care to consider. But it's centrally related to the future educational outcomes of our people -- research shows that socioeconomic factors are more important even than teacher quality, a frequent topic of my posts and a central feature of my professional work.

I note that former Labor Secretary and current Berkeley professor Robert Reich, in his Twitter feed (@RBReich) today, backs up a point I made about these proposed tax cuts being a precursor to Republican efforts to launch an assault on domestic spending and entitlements -- using the federal budget deficit made so much worse by these tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires as their rationale.

I said: "I recognize that this issue isn't specifically about education, but it is inexorably linked. Given President Obama's apparent unwillingness to go to the mat for Democratic principles (and his own campaign pledge!), Republicans have succeeded in extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires -- not just for the first $250,000 or $1,000,000 of their income, but all of it up to infinity. The total cost of all the proposal's tax cuts is $900 billion. Republicans' likely next step is too take off their "tax cutter" hat and don their "deficit hawk" cap, saying that the federal government is living beyond its means, and will fire away at domestic spending. You don't think education will avoid being in their crosshairs at that time, do you? You know that this is more than simply a ploy to line the pockets of rich Americans, right? It's part of a plan to bleed government dry and then argue that government programs need to be reduced, eliminated or privatized."

Reich wrote: "$900 b tax cut w/ lion's share for rich explodes deficit and makes future domestic discretionary spending sitting duck for R cuts."

Yes, folks. This isn't just about tax cuts for the richest Americans. This is but a front in the war to reduce the size of government regardless of its collateral damage to Americans who need government the most.

Economic inequality is already at an all-time high in this country -- even higher than prior to the start of the Great Depression. Our educational system only has a finite amount of power to overcome such overwhelming inequities. If these forces are left unchecked, it may become an impossible job, especially as education programs themselves may fall victim to all-too-easily-predictable budget cuts.

The rich, on the the other hand, will continue to party like it's 1929. Only the party's even better this time 'round. So much for the national economy being a collective good.

Bernie Sanders

Vermont's U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is a hero for speaking truth to power, something he has been doing his entire life, regardless of whether it's been politically popular. He's one of the few public officials who has entered the U.S. Senate chamber and not become co-opted by it. Now, I may be biased as a former Vermonter who watched his rise from third-party also-ran to mayor of Burlington to U.S. congressman to U.S. senator. Bernie is genuine, he is forthright, perhaps a bit holier than thou at times. He is the real deal.

Check out his 13-minute speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on November 30, 2010 providing a compelling and detailed analysis of historic economic inequality in America and the duplicity of Republicans talking woefully about the national debt and budget deficit one minute and pushing as their top priority tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires that would break the bank the next. Sanders is one of the few national leaders making any sense today and putting economic inequality and proposed tax breaks into historical context. It's probably because he is one of the few that actually cares.

On Saturday, we watched as Republicans voted in lockstep against two alternatives to extending the Bush-era tax cuts to all Americans regardless of income. One proposal would have extended tax cuts to all families first $250,000; another to all families' first million. Even millionaires and billionaires would have continued to enjoy lower taxes on some of their income. Alas, why should the rich settle for half a loaf?

Who else thinks that the current policy debate over tax policy in Washington is absolutely insane? Not enough of us. One who does is Noble Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who in the New York Times on December 3, 2010, laid much of the blame on President Obama:

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

Sad, but true.

I recognize that this issue isn't specifically about education, but it is inexorably linked. Given President Obama's apparent unwillingness to go to the mat for Democratic principles (and his own campaign pledge!), Republicans have succeeded in extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires -- not just for the first $250,000 or $1,000,000 of their income, but all of it up to infinity. The total cost of all the proposal's tax cuts is $900 billion. Republicans' likely next step is too take off their "tax cutter" hat and don their "deficit hawk" cap, saying that the federal government is living beyond its means, and will fire away at domestic spending. You don't think education will avoid being in their crosshairs at that time, do you? You know that this is more than simply a ploy to line the pockets of rich Americans, right? It's part of a plan to bleed government dry and then argue that government programs need to be reduced, eliminated or privatized. [UPDATE: The deal is a "budget buster." (The Atlantic)]

Now, there are would-be Democrats who are in denial and are not considering this likely outcome at all. Rather than reserving their scorn for Republican tax policy, they are attacking progressive Democrats and the likes of Bernie Sanders. Shame on them.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, the President suffered a split lip in a pick-up basketball game. How I wish he were as willing to put his body on the line for economic fairness as he was for a rebound!

I am encouraged that Senator Sanders has expressed a willingness to use the filibuster to put the breaks on extending tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. God knows that Republicans have used the filibuster -- or the threat of one -- for dozens of nefarious purposes, including preventing extensions of unemployment insurance, regulation of Wall Street, and recently more rationale tax cut extension proposals. Imagine! A progressive willing to stand up for what's right and not "punt on third down," to use the words of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.

At this time, I couldn't be more disappointed in President Obama. I have always been a political realist, voting for the "least bad" candidate when necessary, and a life-long Democrat. I honestly don't know what I might do in 2012. I literally couldn't sleep the other night, I was so angry. Maybe it's time to follow Robert Reich's lead and form a "Peoples' Party."

Rhetorically, President Obama is making the same mistake over and over again, putting bipartisanship ahead of smart public policy. I am not criticizing the President because I wrongly fancied him a liberal. Rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy was one of his chief campaign pledges for Chrissakes! I'm criticizing him on the substance of the issue, for walking away from a campaign promise (without fighting for it), and for making the same tactical mistake he made during the health care battle: working feverishly to assemble a bipartisan coalition for health care reform when there was no real willingness among Republicans to meet in the middle. In the current case, he horse-traded away a key campaign plank and agreed to an extension of the Bush tax cuts for two years plus deeper estate tax cuts, while only receiving a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits and one year of payroll tax cuts.

I'll give the New York Times the last word. In this morning's editorial, it writes:

President Obama’s deal with the Republicans to extend all the Bush-era income tax cuts is a win for the Republicans and their strategy of obstructionism and a disappointing retreat by the White House....

The Republicans gave up very little except for their unconscionable stance of holding up all other Congressional action until they ensured that the richest Americans keep their tax cuts.

Alphabet Soup

A recent report raises a fundamental education policy question that requires more than simply refuting the report's premise.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) -- a self-proclaimed "free market, limited government" non-profit, which is really just a spout of Republican policy ideas -- recently released its 16th annual Report Card on American Education. First of all, the LAST thing education needs is another report card. But I have to give it to my friends at SmartALECk which has been nothing less than persistent (in the true conservative spirit), having apparently kept this up for 16 years. Second, I note that ALEC's Board of Directors is populated almost entirely by Republican office holders. Third, I note that the report's foreward was written by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican. It is no mystery for whom ALEC is shilling.

That said, the ALEC Report Card grades states based on two criteria: (1) Education Performance Rank and (2) Education Reform Grade. Specifically, a state's Education Performance Rank "measures the overall 2009 scores for low-income children (non-ELL and/or non-IEP) and their gains/losses on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth- and eighth-grade reading and mathematics exams from 2003 to 2009." A state's "Education Reform Grade" is based on the following reform criteria (few of which are central to educational outcomes, but which are all weighted equally): state academic standards, change in state proficiency standards, private school choice, charter school laws, mandatory intra- and inter-district open enrollment, online learning policies and programs, homeschooling regulation levels, alternative teacher certification, identifying high-quality teachers, retaining effective teachers, and removing ineffective teachers.

The state of Vermont provides a case in point about what is flawed about ALEC's methodology and typifies a troubling dynamic in some of today's education policy and reform conversations. ALEC ranks the Green Mountain state #1 with respect to its educational performance, but gives it the lowest grade of any state - a 'D' - on education reform. I guess the question for me is what is the fundamental purpose of the American education system: To warm the cockles of would-be reformers' hearts by adopting their pet reforms? Or to achieve educational outcomes and accelerate student learning? Assuming you don't have trouble answering that question, what does this example say about broader education policies and reform conversations? Well, it reminds me that too often we seem more interested in the means rather than in the ends. And that's a big problem.

At the federal level, the Obama Administration is onto something with its "tight on ends, loose of means" mantra. Arne Duncan's Education Department has attempted to use that catchphrase to articulate a stronger federal role over education policy while reassuring educators and policymakers that it won't make policies too prescriptive if the desired results are achieved. In a sense, it is not entirely unlike No Child Left Behind's accountability system which more or less allowed schools to keep on keeping on as long as they didn't run afoul of adequate yearly progress requirements. As Fordham's Gadfly recently noted, the future of federal education policy is very much in doubt, dependent on the outcomes of November's elections, control of one or both houses of Congress, and whether the Know Nothing Tea Party forces seize control of the GOP agenda.

But prescriptive-ness is sometimes an invisible line. The Race to the Top program probably went too far down the path of requiring certain reforms that don't have much of an evidential basis, aren't ready to be fully implemented, or aren't scalable. In addition, as Vermont Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca (my high school principal at Essex High School in Vermont!) has noted, some of these faddish and sensible-in-certain-context reforms don't make sense or cannot be successfully implemented in a small, rural state such as Vermont. One also could ask whether RTTT scoring insufficiently weighted "improving student outcomes" -- which accounted for only 25 of the application's 500 total points (a mere 5 percent) -- in favor of promises of future reform. Again, is it about educational outcomes for students? Or it is about reform for reform's sake?

Back to the SmartALECk report: It would seem to me that ALEC is right in one sense. There *is* an argument for reducing federal regulation, and in education the answer is to leave well enough alone when a state such as Vermont is achieving great results. Now, we can argue over how those results should appropriately be measured, but that would be a more important conversation than talking about a metric such as 'reform' that is focused on pet approaches to privatizing education, firing teachers and enabling home schooling that likely have little bearing on student outcomes and that have little basis in research.

It is hypocritical of an organization like ALEC, committed to loosening regulations and limited government, to offer up such a prescriptive laundry list of reforms that states must enact to receive an 'A.' By ALEC's own outcome metric, Vermont is doing the best job of any state in the country in achieving equitable educational outcomes for low-income students. (Arguably, that is as much if not more due to Vermont's social safety net and universal health care as anything its schools are doing.) Accordingly, SmartALECk should let those results speak for themselves and save its ABCs and Ds to fill many bowls of alphabet soup during the coming winter.

Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson on Democracy Now

Interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on June 30, we discuss NY State's admission of test score inflation over the past five years, and how the lack of progress in NYC schools reveals the failure of test-based accountability policies to improve schools, even as these policies are being forced on the country as a whole by the Obama administration.

For the full segment on this issue, including clips of the Obama's speech before the Urban League, see the Democracy Now website.

Religious Groups Oppose Nation’s Educational Policy and “Race to the Top” Strategy: A Call for Justice in Public Education

In an extraordinary letter to President Obama and Members of Congress, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, a community of 36 communions with a combined membership of 45 million people in more than 100,000 congregations across the country, issued a pastoral letter criticizing the direction of national educational policy and offered an alternative vision of public education. Sent as an “Ecumenical Call for Justice,” the report expresses concern about the inappropriate use of the language of business to discuss public education, the de-emphasizing of federal money designed to address the conditions of children in poverty while emphasizing competitive grants, the punitive approach to low performing schools that are struggling, and the demonization of public school teachers.

The letter raises a fundamental question: “While competitive, market based “reforms” may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?” Essentially, do we live in community or merely in a marketplace?

We reproduce the letter below for our readers:



An Alternative Vision for Public Education
A Pastoral Letter on Federal Policy in Public Education:
An Ecumenical Call for Justice

May 18, 2010


Dear President Obama and Members of Congress,

The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA is a community of 36 Christian communions with a combined membership of 45 million persons in more than 100,000 congregations across this country. Our member churches – from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches – do not agree on all things! We stand united, however, in our conviction that the church is called to speak for justice in public education. We affirm that each life is infinitely precious, created in the image of God, and therefore, that every child should be given opportunity for fullness of life, including a quality and affordable education.

We further affirm that our society’s provision of public education—publicly funded, universally available, and accountable to the public—while imperfect, is essential for ensuring that all children are served. As a people called to love our neighbors as ourselves, we look for the optimal way to balance the needs of each particular child and family with the need to create a system that secures the rights and addresses the needs of all children. We know that such a system will never be perfect, and we pledge as faithful citizens to continue to improve the schools in our communities and to make our system of schools more responsive.

We value democratic governance of public schools.
We support democratic governance of public schools. Because public schools are responsible to the public, it is possible through elected school boards, open meetings, transparent record keeping and redress through the courts to ensure that traditional public schools provide access for all children. We believe that democratic operation of public schools is our best hope for ensuring that families can secure the services to which their children have a right. On balance, we believe that if government invests public funds in charter schools that report to private boards, government, not the vicissitudes of the marketplace, should be expected to provide oversight to protect the common good.

Public schools must guarantee each child’s right to educational opportunity.
We value the contributions of parochial schools managed by some of our communions and the contributions of charter schools operated by some of our congregations. We affirm, however, the position of our 1999 General Assembly that “as a general rule, public funds should be used for public purposes.” Knowing that traditional public schools continue to educate more than 90 percent of our nation’s 50 million school children, we again echo the 1999 General Assembly that called “on our members to direct their energies toward improving the schools that the majority of children will continue to attend.” As you craft the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, originally the 1965 cornerstone of the War on Poverty, we ask you to remember that the Civil Rights Movement sought to ensure expanded opportunity for all children through public education. In 1954 the Supreme Court eliminated de jure segregation and guaranteed access for all to public schools previously available only to the privileged, and in 1965 Congress began providing federal funding for public schools serving children in poverty through Title I. We are concerned today when we hear the civil right to education being re-defined as the right to school choice, for we know that equitable access to opportunity is more difficult to ensure in a mass of privatized alternatives to traditional public schools or in school districts being carved apart into small schools of choice. Experimentation with small schools must not cause us to lose sight of society’s obligation to serve all children with appropriate services; we must continue to expect public school districts to provide a complete range of services accessible to children in every neighborhood of our cities. Choice-based alternatives being proposed in local, state, and federal policy pose serious questions that we ask you to consider regarding equal access and public oversight. Here are just a few examples:

• When large high schools are broken into smaller schools or when charter management or education management organizations are brought in to operate small schools, what happens to children with special needs and English language learners when small schools cannot provide the more expensive services such children need?
• 
  In so-called “portfolio school districts” which are projected to manage an ongoing churn of new schools coming into existence and weak schools being forced to close, won’t closing public schools and moving the students increase student mobility in cities where poverty already means that too many children change schools too often? What is the consequence for a neighborhood or a community when a public school is closed or its entire staff fired?
• 
  When there is competition to attract students to a range of small schools or charter schools, and when these schools are sought out by parents who are active choosers, what happens to the traditional neighborhood public schools which are left to serve the majority of special education students, English language learners, and homeless children?
• 
  What happens to children whose parents, for whatever reason, do not participate in choice? We recently heard students whose families simply bring them to register at the neighborhood public school called “over the counter” children. Many of us and many of our children have at some time in our lives been “over the counter” children. We have assumed that universally available and easily accessible public schools were part of the American Dream.
• The federal Race to the Top competition brings federal pressure on states to remove statutory caps on the authorization of new charter schools. When charter schools are regulated state-by-state, how can the federal government ensure that what has been very uneven charter school regulation across the states be made more uniform to protect the public interest?
• Finally as it is proposed that federal grants be made more competitive—in the Race to the Top competition and the President’s recent “Blueprint” for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—by de-emphasizing Title I formula grants and increasing Title I competitive grants, how will we protect the educational opportunities of children in states and districts that are the losers? While the Title I formula program has been too small to make up for the impact of family poverty and the 3:1 inequality of school funding among the school districts in most states, it remains the federal government’s primary tool for distributing funds by formula according to need, for the purpose of expanding opportunity for poor children.

While competitive, market based “reforms” may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?
We reject the language of business for discussing public education.
Not only has the language of the marketplace entered discussions of school governance and management, but we also notice that the language of business accountability is used to talk about education, a human endeavor of caring. The primary mechanism of the No Child Left Behind Act has been annual standardized tests of reading and math for all children in grades 3-8, followed by punishments for the schools that cannot rapidly reach ever increasing test score production targets. We worry that our society has come to view what is good as what can be measured and compared. The relentless focus on testing basic skills has diminished our attention to the humanities, the social studies, the arts, and child and adolescent development. As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings, created in the image of God, to be nurtured and educated.

ESEA Reauthorization must expand educational opportunity.
As you craft the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we call on you to be faithful to the law’s original purpose: expanding educational opportunity by providing additional support for the schools that serve our nation’s poorest children. We ask you to address what are too rarely named these days: the cavernous resource opportunity gaps—from state to state and from school district to school district— underneath the achievement gaps that No Child Left Behind has so carefully documented. We ask you to allocate federal resources for equity and insistently press states to close opportunity gaps. It is time to guarantee for all children in the United States a comparable opportunity to learn that includes a quality early childhood education, highly qualified teachers, a curriculum that will prepare students for college, work and community, and equitable instructional resources. It is also time to recognize that the blessings of healthcare remain unequal among American children, as do enrichments like after school programs, and summer experiences.

We value public school educators.

Our biblical heritage and our theology teach us that we live in community, not solely in the marketplace. As we strive to move our imperfect world closer to the realm of God, we recognize that we are all responsible for making sure that public schools, as primary civic institutions, embody our love for one another. We are called to create institutions that serve families and children with hospitality. We are called to work as citizens for the resources that will support a climate of trust and community within each public school. We are also called to value those whose vocation is teaching. Lately we have been dismayed by federal policy that encourages states to change laws to eliminate due process, to devalue the credentials of excellent teachers, and to fire teachers and principals as though that were a tested recipe for school reform, when we know that no research supports the President’s proposed “turnaround” model that purports to improve a school by firing the principal and at least half the staff. We look for a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that honors the professionalism of teachers and treats these individuals with respect. Wholesale scapegoating of public school teachers is an ugly and unfortunate development in federal policy.
We pledge to partner with you for just reform.
We pledge to partner with you in prayer and action, working for reform that values the whole child as uniquely created, values teachers, and encourages and equips the family and community to participate in nurturing the full development of every child. We pledge to partner with you by:

• encouraging congregations to value public education and teachers through sermons, worship, and prayer;
• supporting parent education and adult literacy;
• encouraging congregations to partner with public schools to provide tutors, school supplies, exposure to computers and many other supports;
• supporting out-of-school supports like better and widely available pre-school and after school programs; and
• continuing to educate our members about the value of Community Schools that surround public schools with social supports.

We ask you to partner with us to challenge the unfair and detrimental language of the current discourse in educational reform, to re-examine untested assumptions about public education policy, and to ensure that untested models of school reform are not imposed from above in our nation’s most fragile school districts. Too often criticism of the public schools fails to reflect our present societal complexity. At a moment when childhood poverty is shamefully widespread, when many families are under constant stress, and when schools are often limited by lack of funds or resources, we know that public schools cannot be improved by concentrating on public schools alone. They alone can neither cause nor cure the problems we face. In this context, we must address with prayerful determination the issues of race and class, which threaten both public education and democracy in America.

Sincerely,

The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary
The Rev. Peg Chemberlin, President

On Behalf of the Governing Board of The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA


To view the letter and a list of the members of the governing board, go to:
http://www.ncccusa.org/elmc/pastoralletter.pdf