Recent "critiques" of  No Child Left Behind from bipartisan associations representing the governors, legislators, state school chiefs and local superintendents, have offered students of management, psychology and propaganda plenty of grist for their intellectual mills.

The groups' common theme: No Child Left Behind constitutes federal micromanagement of state and local education policy.

The speech given by Republican Tom Horne, Arizona’s Superintendent of Education, April 24 at the right-of-center Heritage Foundation, takes the line of argument to its (il)logical conclusion.

From the first page: When a central bureaucracy attempts to manage a complex continent-wide system, extreme dysfunction results. My theme today is that this is as true of No Child Left Behind, with an 1,100 page bill, and an intrusive federal department of education. It is as dysfunctional in attempting to micromanage a complex continent-wide education system, as was true of the Soviet bureaucracy trying to micromanage the Soviet economy....

From the last page: “If you permit a bureaucracy to micromanage a continent-wide, complex system, extreme dysfunction will result. Just ask the Russians.”

To understand what’s happening here requires some simple reminders about the meanings of three words: micromanagement – from businiess, projection - psychoanalysis;  and transference - propaganda and, its modern version, advertising.

Micromanagement

[T]o manage or control with excessive attention to minor details.

Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Micromanagement is about interfereing with “how” goals are achieved.

No Child Left Behind is a lengthy bill.  As Horne points out, it runs 1100 pages. Most of it covers the allocation of funds, specfic programs, and definitions. The bulk of this law is about defining and meeting outcomes. Very little actually precribes state or local processes. NCLB is focused on meeting ends, not pursuing means; on student performance, not how to achieve it.  Moreover,  Horne and others are not saying “we agree with the goal of 100% student proficiency by 2014 - just get the feds out of our way so we can get there." They are asking for relief from the goals – goals that the states set for themselves when the law first passed.

As pointed out in "The Letter from the Editor" in this coming Tuesday’s issue of New Education Economy®:

NCLB’s Section 1111 describes how schools and districts will be held accountable for the use of federal funds. Sec. 1111(b) requires that states:
• Establish standards of learning for students.
• Choose tests to measure student performance, and “cut scores” that determine basic proficiency.
• Require schools and districts to report performance for all students, and groups that been victimized by inadequate resources and the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
• Set out a time line for SY 2002-14, when the law requires that “all students in each group... will meet or exceed the State’s proficient level,” and include intermediate benchmarks that will demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) towards that goal.

The most important thing to remember about these provisions is that their implementation was up to the states and districts. States could choose world-class standards or not. States could select easier or more difficult tests, and set cut scores high or low. They could draw their time line as a gradual slope, a hockey stick, or a steep climb leading to something like a plateau. Students from historically neglected categories could be spread across a district to minimize the number of schools where those students constitute statistically meaningful groups.

Each state set its rules for accountability under NCLB to balance the credibility of its commitment to a meaningful public education; state and local ability add funds, redeploy resources and make other required changes; and political opposition to change. Every state came up with a different balance, but all tended to solutions that would defer an inevitable political crisis.

As we enter the debate over NCLB reauthorization, the fated moment is approaching fast. Under the current rules selected by the states, thousands of public schools in rich, poor and middle class districts have started down the path from improvement to reconstitution status, or can see it clearly on the horizon.

Local and state politicians have three choices:  fundamental reorganization of public education, increasing budgets, or leaning on Senators and Congressmen to change NCLB. The last is the easiest by far. It is the default option whether you are a small government, local-control, tax-averse Republican, or Democratic ally of traditional public education with a strong union ties and oppose standardized tests.

And this brings us to psychoanalysis.

Projection

“[T]he attribution of one's own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects; especially: the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety”

Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary.


Your editor is not about to defend this Department of Education as highly qualified to implement NCLB, but the law itself is not about controlling or directing state or local education agency processes. The Reading First fiasco certainly plays into hands of those who would call the Department a micro-manager. The Department failed to implement No Child Left Behind  properly by defining “scientifically based reading research” and assuring that states had systems in place to make purchasing decisions according to those criteria. Instead, a low level official dictated the products that could and could not be bought. Still, the scandal is better characterized as bad management permitted by a laissez-faire attitude at the Assistant Secreatary level and above, or possibly criminal management fostered by corruption.  That’s not micromanagement, it's plain and simple mismanagement.

To truly appreciate the micromanagement of public education, look no further than those accusing the feds. To whatever extent the feds have served their apprenticeship in the art, their masters come from state and local k-12 bureacracies. Indeed, virtually anyone writing about education reform over the past twenty years – Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, pro-voucher, anti-voucher, pro-union, pro-management, constructivist, progressive or old school - has sent countless trees to their death explicating the fixation of state and local school systems on “inputs” that have almost nothing to do with student performance, their resistance to measuring “outputs,” and their inability to relate outcomes to meaningful accountability.

 f this were law, the proposition that state and local education agencies practice micromagement would be "black letter law."

So when anyone in the system claims NCLB is about micromanagement, they are not only attributing an incorrect meaning of the term to the federal law, they are also externalizing what they fear about their own institutions.

But there is more than a certain amount of self-loathing going on here. There is a powerful tool of propaganda at work as well

Transference

[T]he redirection of feelings and desires… toward a new object

Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary

Sooner or later every political candidate is placed in front of the "Stars and Stripes" and in the presence of our troops. Americans love the flag and support our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Candidates hope some of those good feelings will "rub off" on - transfer to - themselves.

Americans are no great fans of bureaucracy. No one enjoys being micromanaged by some boss looking over their shoulder and continually checking their work. The fact that No Child Left Behind is about outputs, not how the public school gets those outputs – and that the outputs and how to measure them were set by the states -  is politically irrelevant. If the public comes to associate “NCLB” with “micromanagement”, opponents will gain the upper hand in the reauthorization debate.

And if they repeat the conflation often enough, people may just believe it. In propaganda, that's called “the big lie.” And that's precisely what we've been seeing from the system for the past month. Superintendent Horne just took the argument to a point of absurdity that might reveal the strategy's true intent.

The big lie can never be left unanswered. The school improvement industry and supporters of NCLB’s tough standards must take every opportunity to counter misrepresentation with the truth. The standards, measures and timetables in NCLB are reasonable - and were set by the states. Now they can't meet them. Do we turn our backs on historically neglected students and decide to step away from the world’s race to develop the best minds because the traditional system can't deliver - and doesn't seem eager to do what's necessary to deliver? Or now that we are approaching the point of no return, when doubters always protest the loudest, do we keep our promises to these kids and remain part of the global competition? Do we push through? Help for those finding it hard to meet the goal? Absolutely. Retreat from that goal? Absolutely not.