In his essay in today's Education Gadfly, right-leaning Republican education policy guru and Fordham Foundation head Chester E. Finn. Jr. does a succinct job describing the GOP's inclinations towards federal education policy in recent history.

He offers two broad options for Republican presidential candidates to compete with the Democrats on this matter in the 2008 election.

Finn's policy preference is a platform that takes the party back to choice (i.e., vouchers) and deregulation as the way to address the educational needs of the poor - for example, offering states exemption form NCLB in return for what your editor can only describe as "really high" levels of performance.

His political preference is a promise to narrow NCLB's reach to schools serving the poor and "set out a smorgasbord" of pro-consumer proposals "for the middle class" - like a national database of performance data fo individual teachers.

Neither option is all that attractive to the school improvement industry. In the first instance the new Republican President will find a Congress ready to go with the exemptions, but likely to accept performance levels that put the industry in state markets that resemble the world eight years before NCLB more than eight years after. In the second case, the industry will lose that huge part of the market consisting of middle class schools now in need of improvement in the likes of Fairfax County, Virginia and Prince Georges County, Maryland because they neglect their minorities of disadvanted students.

To your editor what is truly striking about Finn's essay is that it never even mentions school improvement providers.

What does this mean? First, that the industry is not exactly an important constituency of the Republican Party. Second, that the industry is not considered part of the solution to the party's problem of challenging the Democrats on education policy in the upcoming election. 

These two facts should be the stuff of crisis to our trade group's boards and managers.

And that points to a great longstanding blind spot in the leadership of the Education Industry and the Software and Information Industry associations (EIA and SIIA's Education Division). They have some papers and press releases, mostly defending their member groups in the industry against one attack or another. They lack one solid white paper, a flimsy memo, or a few paragraphs in the form of a Washington Post or Education Week commentary, laying out how their members fit with the agendas of either party, let alone broader national education policy. These are examples of a flawed approach to industry representation: responsive to events, defensive, and perpetually behind the curve; rather than proactively making news, assertive, and five minutes ahead of the pack.

(Your editor examined our trade groups' political shortsightedness in the April 19, 2004 issue of New Education Economy - then known as School Improvement Industry Weekly.  Listen to some other relevant "Letters from the Editor" on industry trade groups in the 2006 volume of NEE®: May 30 here, July 19 here, and July 26 here.)

It might be forgivable that neither organization has developed a position paper for the Democrats, although the time spent collaborating with the party's DLC/PPI wing would have put the industry in a much better political position for NCLB reauthorization than it finds itself today. But not having a paper for the Repoblicans only testifies to a stunning political naiveity - an expectation that the GOP would always and naturally be on its side. This Department of Education's handling of Reading First and the edtech report pretty much proved that assumption to be false. In the first part of his essay, Finn explains why that assumption is not even borne out by the national party's history. Not having a single commentary or opinion piece in a mainstream media or trade publication making the industry's case in the national interest is just plain sad.

The bottom line is that when the incredibly influential Finn sat down to write an essay that is bound to frame how Republican leaders think about Presidential campaign policy on education, there was literally nothing at hand from our industry to inform his thinking.  That is more than an oversight on the part of the two trade groups, it borders on incompetence.

Unlike EIA and SIIA, the Knowledge Alliance (formerly the National Education and Knowledge Industry Association) has always had such policy documents. Its leadership has understood the importance of embedding its member's specifc interests in a solid argument for the national interest - grounded in history, appealing to basic national values, and built on public policy reasoning.  At present, this group's membership remains mostly nonprofit education research organizations with government contracts. Knowledge Alliance seeks to be more, and if you are committed to the use of research and evaluation in education products, services and programs, you might look into joining.

Bur regardless, it is high time to start thinking about a case for the industry that informs the federal education platforms of the Democrats, Republicans and their Presidential candidate. Because if we are not part of the platform and the cadidate's promises, the industry will remain pawns of the political process and nonentities in the negotiation over NCLB reauthorization now underway.