‘Top-Down’ Politics, NCLB and Early Education

Via David Hoff, my New America colleague Michael Dannenberg offers a useful insight: The politics of NLCB are more “top-down” than “left-right,” meaning that the real divide of opinion on these policies is between federal- and state-level officials and policymakers who’ve led the charge in calling for increased standards and accountability, and local level educators (and the groups that represent them) who have to actually translate those demands into improve performance for kids.

It’s an important point. NCLB often gets a bad rap for being a top-down reform, but the reality is that there’s a real and important role for top-down reform in education–No one is very good is very good at holding themselves accountable, and educators are no exception. The legacy of different expectations, different resources, and different results for different populations of children bears this out. Pushing local level educators and policymakers to raise their expectations and to behave in ways that are more effective in producing results is an important part of what federal and state education policy reforms must do.

But “bottom-up” reforms are equally important. As Paul Tough wrote at TPM Cafe earlier this week, “a lot of the most innovative thinking and experimentation is happening closer to the ground, in the ranks of nonprofit organizations like Teach for America and New Leaders for New Schools, in the offices of school superintendents and philanthropists, and in classrooms across the country.” Effective education reform requires accountability from the top, but also opportunities to foster “bottom-up” innovation and high performance at the local level, to identify the most promising models, and to scale them up to have systemic impacts It’s not just a matter of educators responding to policy changes; policymakers should also be responding to the work of effective local education reformers, by altering policies to help expand these models and incorporate their lessons into public policy.

Support for this kind of “bottom-up” reform has been notably lacking from No Child Left Behind, and that lack is one of the reasons for the strong backlask against the law. When there is no strong system for developing and identifying effective, locally-driven solutions to the challenges schools face in trying to meet accountability demands, educators understandably become angry with demands they don’t know how to meet. One of the key challenges for the next generation of federal education policy will be reincorporating a “bottom up” reform element into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Andy Rotherham and I have some proposals for this, which will be published in a Brookings Institution paper later this fall.

When it comes to early education, reforms focused on the preschool years have always been strongly bottom-up, by necessity of the fact that the early education system is highly fragmented and lacks a strong centralized infrastructure. Foundations, the federal government, states, and school districts have invested in a wide diversity of local initiatives designed to improve early care and education. Researchers have had abundant opportunities to implement and test innovative models and approaches. Early education advocates have placed a strong premium on responding to parents’ preferences and cultural backgrounds supporting a variety of approaches and programmatic models that meet the needs of different families and communities. This approach has clear benefits: It’s respectful of parent, family, community, and provider diversity, and it has supported a tremendous amount of innovation. But there are also downsides: Quality is highly inconsistent across varying programs, the fragemented early care and education system is confusing and sometimes inefficient, and too many children lack access to quality education and care. There is a clear place for more top-down initiatives, such as state universal pre-k programs, that seek to establish a clear definitition of quality and some consistency in quality standards and access. But there’s also a danger in becoming too top-down in the approach we take to achieve that consistency, and losing some of the very real benefits of the bottom-up approach that has prevailed in early education for so long. In both early education and K-12 education reform, striking the right balance between bottom-up and top-down reforms is a crucial, if tricky, challenge.