Every so often a new report comes out that leads to a shift in the thinking about education reform. In spite of all guns being deployed by the folks at the National Center on Education and the Economy (Big Foundation funding, an all-star cast to serve as "The Commission," carefully staged pre-release venues, securing of enthusiastic endorsements from every corner and even a Friedman column devoted to the cause), Tough Choices or Tough Times unfortunately isn't one of them. It would be more accurate to sum up this disappointing report as two parts fairy tale, one part melodrama -- topped off with a dash of hubris.
To be fair, Tough Choices or Tough Times is well written and absolutely right in its premise that American schools need to change. But its conclusions about what ought to change and how are based on economic and educational premises that are at best off the mark. Mostly, it imparts a fanciful vision of the transformation of American schools that will cure our chronic underperformance, achieve educational equity for our poor, and manage to keep our workforce gainfully employed. Nearly half the report, no less than 49 pages, is devoted to a futuristic portrayal of what America will look like 15 years from now having bought into the Commission's vision, an unusual strategy for a policy paper to take and perhaps not well advised. The possibility that this vision could end up backfiring isn't remotely entertained. A few pages into this treatise, it became clear that readers are supposed to view the Commission as some form of omniscient deity.
There's not a scintilla of evidence offered in support of this vision, which include a few recommendations we've seen before such as universal preschool, but a number of others which come out of left field, like the creation of a new bureaucracy for recruiting teachers entitled "Teacher Development Agencies." Not even a footnote can be found, even in some of the background papers supposedly providing the impetus for the recommendations made by the Commission. Instead, a primary source of data appears to be a long list of interviews with individuals strategically located in various cities around the world. Comments noted economist Eric Hanushek, "It is nice to have people think big about education policy, but it is also nice to ground statements in evidence, which this report does not."
While there is much to take issue with about the report's view of labor economics, beginning with its modern application of a scare-tactic theory with 19th century roots (America standing at the edge of economic collapse due to encroachment by foreigners), its educational assumptions are no less problematic. While acknowledging the need for basic skills, it makes far too little out of schools' responsibility to ensure students have these skills for future employment, asserting that the far more pressing problem is schools' inability to foster creativity and innovation. As portended in Time Magazine's recap of Tough Choices, we now undoubtedly face the prospect of yet another frustrating flurry of appeals from educators and policymakers that our focus shouldn't be on the "basics" but rather "higher order thinking skills," a fundamental misinterpretation of what either of these essential cognitive functions represent.
Tough Choices talks only in the broadest terms about the most important step we need to take if we are to regain educational parity with hungrier nations: a national curriculum. It dwells instead on the need for better standards, though not without graciously shouldering the blame for the current state standards, in its view born at the urging of the 1990 NCEE Commission report. Of all the bad guys responsible for our educational shambles, the Commission saves its most melodramatic statement for the testing industry, calling for its complete overhaul: "If that is not done, nothing else will matter." The nation's tests, it asserts, need to begin measuring the qualities that really count, those attributes that stand between us and the soup line, including creativity, ability to be a team player, and self discipline.
The Commission fails to mention that the reason we do not have such tests has less to do with the testing industry and more to do with what can be tested. Noted cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham observes that terms like creativity and innovation have "yet to be even well-defined psychologically so measuring them is certainly not in the cards in the near future," certainly not in the 15-year timetable that the Commission establishes. The Commission makes all sorts of assertions about how creativity is inculcated, such as that it is best fostered by means of an interdisciplinary curriculum. It overplays its hand, both because the science is not nearly as far along as it suggests and because it provides no evidence that either an interdisciplinary curricula and the tests of its dreams will produce the results it so boldly asserts.
While no one would argue against creativity and innovation, the central tenet of this paper--that the primary focus of schools should be to foster creativity and innovation in order to stave off the Indians and the Chinese--never gets developed beyond mere opinion. A good case can be made that of all the things that American schools currently do wrong, they in fact may be best at encouraging creativity and innovation. On indicators of creativity (Nobel prizes, the entertainment industry, software development), the United States is still most decidedly the world leader, perhaps not just in spite of our schools for all their failings, but because of our schools.