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Just when you thought the standards-based reform was coming to an end, exhausted from a long series of failed attempts to understand and engage in the realities of schools and the classroom, the standards movement is remaking itself. The education establishment, in concert with the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, is leading 48 states in creating “common core standards.” These they tell us will be world-class and “fewer, clearer, and higher” than the current diversity of standards set by individual states. The peril of not joining this movement is the loss of funding under the “Race to the Top” reform of the Obama Administration.

This new version like the previous ones over the past two decades (i.e., the Goals 2000 Act under Clinton and the No Child Left Behind Act under Bush) promises a renewal of education, a veritable springtime of reform where “excellence will be rewarded” in the words of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. At the same time, accountability will be extended to teachers, and charter schools will be championed as an alternative to public schools unable to meet these “common standards.” And again this standard-setting movement will lead to an enormous investment of energy, talent, and time, first at the national level as states go about the serious business of defining and establishing the curriculum standards. This will then be followed by an even larger investment within states as they implement these new standards at the district level. And finally, the greatest investment of scarce energies, talents, and resources will be made within districts as central office administrators direct and train principals and teachers and other education practitioners in translating these standards into learning progressions, instructional learning guides, lesson plans, etc. This enormous investment in curriculum is further magnified by the corresponding changes in assessment, professional development, teacher education schools, textbooks, and instructional technology to reflect the new standards. Indeed, given the magnitude of all these efforts, one can hardly blame the educators and policymakers at the “top” from glorying in such power to direct those “below;” clearly, it must be immensely satisfying to set forth with relatively little effort such profound activity across the entire education landscape.

While the previous efforts have justifiably led all states and districts to focus on high expectations for all students, this new effort of standards-based reform reminds me of Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” This classic begins against the backdrop of springtime, with nature jubilant with new life and beginnings. In contrast to this liberating reawakening of the world around them, Chaucer’s worthy pilgrims, as was the custom, set off on a moral crusade. They fail to embrace and engage in the beautiful but messy riot of nature as if a diversion from the safe certitude of their spiritual quest. In the same way, our present pilgrims of standards-based reform are resolute in avoiding the realities of community schools, both their strengths and their challenges. They embark instead on a crusade to establish anew standards that are like heavenly first principles ordering and binding together a divine chain of being below. This would be quite humorous, especially when seen through the wit of Chaucer, if not for the tragedy this crusade causes by ignoring the true needs and strengths of real schools, principals, teachers, students, and communities.

True reform unfortunately requires a “strenuous effort” of political will and pragmatic resolve, one that engages in the messiness of schools that grow organically out of their even messier communities. True reform is centered on investment of all energies and talents not in standard setting but in the leadership and quality of principals and teachers. Now the standards-based reform was not always so removed from the realities of schools. As originally conceived, it was guided not only by accountability but also by the civil right, if not constitutional principle, of “opportunity-to-learn,” the idea that you cannot hold children accountable through high-stakes tests for material that they were not taught. Arguably, the current era of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and the pressure that adults put on children to pass state tests, make all such tests high-stakes and therefore subject to “opportunity-to-learn.” But instead of “opportunity-to learn” used as a powerful lever to ensure that students equally as a civil right have qualified principals and teachers, and good textbooks and learning environments, this principle has been interpreted narrowly to merely mean that there must be a state-mandated curriculum. In effect, standards-based reform has been stripped of its very connection to schools and the real needs of teachers and students. And as our education establishment pilgrims prepare for another heavenly crusade, and the enormous costs it will entail, it is critical that we reconsider the entire standards-based reform movement and wonder if there is not a more direct and meaningful way to improve schools.

Fortunately, there is a robust and rich discourse among educators, and many research-based models of school improvement. There are many examples of innovation and excellence, among both traditional and charter schools. The way to guide and spread these efforts across the nation, so that all students truly have “opportunity-to-learn,” is twofold. First, we need to make an investment not in the standards crusade but in the education and ongoing professional development of principals and teachers, to ensure that they equally have “opportunity-to-learn” so that they can be truly accountable for their performance. Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University has outlined a compelling vision of this kind of investment in teachers, a $3 billion Marshall Plan, which she points out is only one percent of the $300 billion spent in Iraq. The Wallace Foundation similarly has published a series of reports on what is needed for excellence among principals.

Second, and most difficult, we need to rethink accountability so that it is not an abstract system but one connected to the organic vitality of school communities. It should not only evaluate fully the quality of schools but also engage local school communities in evaluating their schools themselves. This means the use of “multiple measures” and a system of balanced assessment, as envisioned by Jim Popham and Rick Stiggins. It also requires that we follow the practice of “world-class” school systems such as Britain where schools are evaluated not by test scores alone but by rigorous onsite inspections that look at all the meaningful indicators of school quality. The inspections could be done according to statewide and even national criteria. This would free schools to innovate, to teach a full and rich curriculum, to engage parents and communities in their improvement efforts. These parents and community members, so engaged, would in turn provide informed input into the school inspections. Evaluating schools on a rotating basis, perhaps once every three years, could lower the costs of these formal inspections. Moreover, by engaging communities in the life of their schools and in a real sense making them accountable too for the quality of their schools, local communities could formatively evaluate their schools between inspections. These efforts could be enhanced by widely publicizing examples of excellent schools as well as the criteria for quality. And in a nod to the top-down policy levers of the standards-based movement, NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, along with OECD’S Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), could be used to ensure consistency across the states and competitiveness with our international counterparts.

Of course, this kind of reform requires great political will and resolve, both at the top and below. It requires engaging communities in their schools. It requires an investment in the leadership and quality of principals and teachers. It requires hard work, embracing and celebrating the strengths and resources of schools and their communities while honestly and fully confronting their needs. Certainly, it is far easier to simply go on another standard-setting crusade. Chaucer would understand.

David Broder in his January 22 Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "Born to Build Bridges," argues that President Obama, "by virtue of his birth date and birthplace, is spared the psychological burden" of the battles that mark the baby boomer generation.  He implies that this generation can be summed up and dismissed from history in the old and tired debates of "our two baby boomer presidents," Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. President Obama, however, by virtue of his birth is actually a baby boomer himself, a generation spanning all those born between 1945 and 1964. A richer insight into the generational significance of these three baby boomer presidents may be that the former two symbolize the tragedy and the latter the triumph of this generation.

Clinton clearly represents the prodigality of talents and passions that characterize the creative and affluent coming of age of his generation during the 1960s. But ultimately, his legacy is the tragedy of unfulfilled promise due to self-indulgence and moral aimlessness. Bush, in turn, represents the moral certitude of the truth-seekers of his generation and correspondingly the tragedy due to a failure to listen and appreciate the complexity and diversity of perspectives and cultures that is required of both leadership and citizenship in our modern age.

President Obama, on the other hand, represents the triumph of his generation by his appeal to the enduring values and truths of our democracy and his style of strenuous pragmatism to fulfill these values in the realities of our present time. His ascendancy is not a passing of the torch from one generation to the next, but rather a clarion call to all generations to lead and to serve, to be responsible and accountable. This synthesis of idealism and practical accomplishment is a hallmark of effective community organizing and it is this ebullient optimism in the power of people to come together to effect change that is perhaps the lasting legacy of the baby boomer generation. The true gift that Obama so well illuminates is to have the charity to see what is best in everyone and every generation and then to expect that they see it themselves and act on it.

In a recent report by McKinsey & Company, How the World's Best-Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, this prominent consulting company finds that school success hinges on recruiting and supporting high-quality teachers for all students. The report looks at the world's top ten high-performing school systems, according to OECD'S Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and seven rapidly improving school systems in the states. These school systems are characterized by these three attributes: 1) highly selective teacher hiring process, 2) a focus on developing effective instruction, and 3) access to high-quality teachers for all students. In brief, they invest in teachers as their most important asset, their human capital.

Interestingly, the business leaders and other "free market" advocates who have greatly influenced public education policy over the past two decades have not shared with educators this relentless focus on human capital, which is common sense in the best and most innovative companies. Instead their focus for improving schools has been on a stodgy version of standards-based reform, driven by accountability and testing from the top-down. In this view, federal and state education officials and testing companies, along with psychometricians and educational researchers, carefully calibrate incentives and penalties based on test data. Their intent is to pressure schools, principals and teachers to move in the right direction with this simulation of market forces. Whereas the leading companies strategically recruit and develop their talent as the foundation for their competitive strength, these thought leaders and advocates of standards-based reform continue to seek to perfect accountability and assessment, thinking of human capital as an afterthought if at all.

Moreover, our international peers like Finland and South Korea, outstripping us in student achievement in mathematics and science, recruit teachers from among their top college graduates because they have made teaching attractive not just in terms of money but in professional stature and decision-making authority. Yet our business leaders and education researchers have joined with the state education officials in a united front in the campaign to tinker with NCLB accountabiliity. As seen in the proposals for ESEA reauthorization, lobbying groups like Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors' Association (NGA) are offering tweaks at the margins of NCLB, suggesting, for example, growth models for accountability to better account for individual student growth, and differentiated consequences for varying degrees of failure to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). They would bring a substantial increase in the top-down system of testing with their proposal for "multiple measures" (i.e., adding local tests and other measures to the statewide tests for accountability) and the next generation of performance-based assessments. This reform consensus would continue to leave teachers and the public disenfranchised.

This would be more testing, more data, not less. It would make education even more complex, further removed from the simple wisdom gleaned in the McKinsey report that educational excellence depends foremost on investment in quality teachers. The utter failure of the current leaders in education policy to see and pursue investment in human capital reveals the impoverishment of the education bureaucracy. It suffers from a want of imagination, energy and creativity. What can explain this? It may be that business and educational researchers are highly vested in the current system of data-driven, not people-led, accountability and assessment. For business, aside from the obvious self-interest of test publishers and other vendors who profit directly from it, the emphasis on data and the focus on results is to speak their language. It shifts the very discourse about education to the language and methods of business management and thereby allows business leaders to speak from a superior position in shaping schools at the local, state, and national level. Similarly, the educational research world benefits from the current overemphasis on data, for this enables powerful research paradigms and the work of multitudes of scholars and students. Finally, given the exalted position of these two groups, educators themselves are self-selected to positions of authority in the education bureaucracy to the extent that they speak this language of data, accountability, and assessment. This vast preoccupation with testing and building systems of data-driven decision-making is blinding education reformers and leaders from the seminal insight that investment in human capital, recruiting, developing and supporting high quality teachers, is the single-most important factor in supporting achievement, confidence, and self-efficacy for all students. One wonders why the education system fails to act on this insight. It can only be that there is such a closed system of thought.

Given this state of inertia, it would be naïve to think we can reform the education system with mere legislation. Such is the complexity and interdependence of the many parts of this system that reform efforts are unsustainable and quickly overwhelmed by the status quo. The "education industrial complex," to paraphrase President Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military industrial complex," composed of bureaucrats, business leaders, and researchers, is continuing to tighten the bindings of data systems and accountability algorithms. Those closest to students -- teachers and principals -- are the least influential in this vast enterprise. Their voice is further diluted by the public face of teacher unions, regrettably caricatured in the press as jealously protective of the status quo, of various collective bargaining rights, work rules, pay and seniority. The real challenge of getting meaningful change, one based on investment in human capital, begins with restoring the stature and credibility of teachers and their unions as leaders in support of world-class schools and high quality learning for all students.

The current system, however, is highly resistant to change. In April 2006, in response to yet another error by a testing company resulting in wrong test scores, Secretary Margaret Spellings called the major test publishers to Washington D.C. to demand that they get together and fix these systems. She stated that they needed to create error-free systems to keep the public faith in accountability and assessment. Following this meeting, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) offered to convene the top state education leaders and the test publishers into a collaborative enterprise to resolve these problems in testing operations. But tellingly, this initiative never got off the ground as there was little real interest in the endeavor. One of the stumbling blocks was the demand by the state testing directors that test publishers include a code of ethics, and in particular a promise that they would no longer directly lobby education chiefs or governors. This missed opportunity to improve the quality and accuracy of the testing systems belies the reality that the education industrial complex is motivated by its own interests, not those of students. Another example of this is when a test publisher tried to rush through data reporting at the request of a state client, foregoing the usual regime of quality control checks, the resulting errors in scores revealed the fragility of these systems. They are increasingly coming under strain as pressure mounts due to the increasing volume of testing and the demand for quicker reporting. Interestingly, over this same period, CCSSO, a non-profit organization, has aggressively pursued business partnerships for revenue, selling access to the education chiefs through various forms of membership and sponsorship to most of the top companies in education, including the major test publishers.

The failure of the testing industry and education chiefs to regulate itself means we can expect further errors, and potential harm to students, every testing season. The implementation of NCLB and the emergence of this education industrial complex has subverted the integrity of testing and disastrously influenced the development of standards, curriculum, and instruction. It has corrupted the very processes of teaching and testing. And most tragically, it has blinded us to the true insight for reform, investment in and support of teachers and principals -- human capital -- that the top nations and top businesses understand to be the simple commonsense for achieving excellence.

One rarely reads a story or report on K-12 education these days without witnessing the invocation of student test data as evidence of the many ills in public education. Soon to follow is “data-driven decision-making” as a kind of “deus ex machina” brought in to resolve the thorny issues that apparently the actors failed to manage on their own. Our age is thoroughly saturated with data and testing, performance metrics and accountability algorithms. A decade ago, it was perhaps too easy to dismiss student achievement data and systematic research as having only limited practical use in evaluating the richly complex reality of schools. Today, broad claims for data-driven decision-making and research-based practice have moved us to the opposite extreme. Data now makes us very efficient observers of education. It saves a lot of thinking.

To address these problems in the overzealous appeal to data, however, it is first important to recognize how NCLB has moved the nation forward in its equity mission. In 2002, educators, civil rights advocates, business leaders, and teacher union leaders praised NCLB for its emphasis on improving education for all students, including those living in poverty, students of color, students with disabilities, and English language learners. There was bipartisan support for the law that seemed to transcend the politics of division for the sake of mobilizing the nation behind education reform. NCLB was created as a deliberate catalyst to compel states and school districts to embrace standards-based reform (SBR). For their record under the voluntary guidance of similar previous legislation, the Education Goals 2000 Act and 1994’s Improving America’s School Act (IASA), had been spotty, uneven and inconsistent. There were a few shining exceptions that pursued SBR creatively (e.g., Connecticut, Nebraska, and Kentucky). But clearly a voluntary national framework was not working. As the 18th century English moralist Samuel Johnson once said, “there is nothing like a hanging in a fortnight to concentrate the mind wondrously.” NCLB has definitely concentrated the mind wondrously!

The astonishing and historic achievement of NCLB is that it has clearly concentrated all minds on the moral imperative of equity and excellence in education. All states and local school districts, teachers, principals, and parents, and policymakers and other stakeholders in public education are aware of the NCLB goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2014. All understand the imperative of building the data infrastructure for SBR and the importance of using good data to analyze the performance of various groups of students by ethnicity, poverty, special education, and English language learners. These are real accomplishments. Further, by insisting that all students are entitled to “highly-qualified” teachers, the law has stimulated recruitment efforts in states where low-income and minority students have experienced a revolving door of inexperienced, untrained teachers. Because of NCLB, we now have a shared sense of direction and a common language that powerfully unite the country around the SBR revolution of high standards for every student. This changed mindset is genuine progress in preparing students for full participation in the political and economic life of an increasingly diverse and interdependent world. We cannot and should not turn back.

Yet the progress in education is still very slow. Fewer than 20 percent of U.S. eighth-graders are on track for college and many are unable to catch up during high school, according to a new ACT report based on 216,000 students who took precursors to the college-entrance exam in the eighth- and tenth-grades. "What we're saying is college and career readiness is a process that includes high school but is not exclusively a high school issue. It's a K-12 issue," said Cyndie Schmeiser, president of ACT's education division. Treating teachers, students, and schools as data points clearly isn’t working.

What is needed is the right balance of forces, a way of mobilizing the multiple perspectives on education across the many levels of decision-making involved in the education of children. As shown by international research as characteristic of the leading nations in student achievement, we should create a balanced accountability and assessment system. This more mature though common-sense use of data enables a creative tension between top-down use of statewide data to provide a “first glance” but limited look at school performance and the “bottom-up” use of student portfolios, rigorous course-taking, performance-based tests, and other evidence of student learning to complete a full portrait of school performance. In this way, we can restore human judgment and deliberative thoughtful decision-making to our understanding of the state of education and the progress yet to be made.

Why is it that the loudest yelps for accountability in schools come from those who themselves are unaccountable?  Not only are they unaccountable in the world of education, where the punitive measures of accountability are limited to students, teachers, principals, and superintendents, leaving policymakers, business leaders, and bureaucrats astride education like a colossus. But also are they free of accountability in the worlds of business and politics; in the former this absence of ethical concern is a matter of ideology and in the latter the bounty of hard-won and costly campaigns, the coin of the realm. 

Everything is upside down. We bear witness to the shame of nine year old children suffering the consequences of accountability (such as the stigma  of failure) that are righty due to the failure of adults. A prominent architect of NCLB argued very sincerely before the Texas State Board of Education that the new state tests will be the way to get schools to address "opportunity to learn" concerns. Despite not having the teachers, textbooks, and buildings needed so that students have the opportunity to learn before being tested, he reasoned in the upside down logic of the current accountability system that the tests would force the schools to do what they had not done for decades. This is to ignore a fundamental civil right, that you cannot be tested on material you did not have the opportunity to learn! In this laissez-faire world view,  states have the comforting delusion that they have done their fair share in helping schools by simply establishing standards and a curriculum, creating tests, and calibrating the accountability system. It is now up to the schools and districts to do the rest, that is, the real work of education. While local institutions should be held responsible, this accountability for only "those below" reglects the long history of national and state neglect for issues of equity, teacher quality, adequate funding, and academic excellence.

Accountability is thus a concept for those below, not for the leaders who require unfettered freedom to create wealth or to manipulate influence into legislation. This is work  not for the feint of heart and clearly not for so quaint a notion as accountability.  Indeed personal integrity, remaining true to a set of humane values and depth of character, is now reserved for the private sphere, for family and community life, but it is only a hindrince in the "rough and tumble" of business and politics. Like the Puritan censors of the town commons, they find comfort by projecting their own unbridled passions onto others and hence conceive of them so ungoverned that they must be held in check by the punishments and incentives of a rigorous accountability system. The very premise of such a system is that students and teachers, as well as superintendents and principals, are not giving all of their discretionary effort, that they cannot be relied upon to act according to their own intrinsic motivations.

It is this lack of accountabiility for the policymakers that causes concern with the dominant reform for ESEA reauthorization, that being, mainly to transfer power from the federal government to that of the states. It fails to address the need for a more comprehensive system of accountabiility, holding all actors fairly and equally accountable. This transfer is necessary but not sufficient. For state agencies have many masters -- governor, business, labor, legislators, various interest groups, the U.S. Department of Education, other parts of regulatory system. This is a massive complex of interwoven interests and influences that profoundly circumscribes the independence of various agencies to follow their separate mission. It is highly unlikely that the state education departments can serve the true interests of local school districts, students, and teachers. Their authority is highly mediated by opposing interests. At the same time, the agency itself is comprised of many parts, each often acting on its own and in conflict with other parts. It is a buzzing Leviathan of incoherent directions and interests. This makes it inevitably remote and unresponsive to their constituents and clients.

For conceptual shorthand in the liberal arts, such as in the study of philosophy, history, and literature, there can be said to be two sensibilities, the romantic and the classical. The romantic is the one seeking liberation, new forms of expression, new ways of feeling and seeing. The classical is the one of traditional order, harmony, or preexisting forms and universals of thought and feeling. The creative tension and frisson of both informs the very flowering of the arts, the clashing sensibilities unleashing a tumult and clamor, an energy and passion, that arguably would not be as intense and expansive if only one sensibility were dominant.

In politics, the romantic sensibiility tends to the democratic. It is celebrated in the simultaneous liberation of the free individual and the inspiring unity of a purposeful community, the elan vital of a gathered people, in the exultations of poets like Walt Whitman. Today this sensibility sees the unprecedented promise of modern science for advancing knowledge, standards of lliving, individual freedom, civil society, and social justice. Yet it fears the equal danger of enslavement through the abuse of scientific methods and instruments.  As a romantic philosopher of the 19th century once said, "the disenchantment of nature is due not to the triumph of science but to the triumph of the scientific method."

The classical sensibility of order and universal truth, which can instill a sense of the sublime and grandeur in the political thought and relationships among people, tends to tyranny and has informed the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.  In this way, it has led to profound tragedies of unprecedented scale. It used the power of science in a mechanical and rational oppression and destruction of peoples. This potential horror of this otherwise humane sensibility is why one should have deep concern over the present corporate hegemony over thought and feeling.  This is a tyranny where possibility is confined to what will support the ruling order.  It is one where political and social enslavement is based on consent, not coercion, and hence the highest, most sophisticated form of political and cultural domination.

This classical tyranny begins with an "escape from freedom," the failure of citizens to be actively engaged in the political life of their communities and nation, which is the foundation of real freedom. It is a failure to be vigilant and vigorous in the defense and growth of their rights.  The authoritarian or totalitarian mindset actually depends on two personalities, the authoritarian leader and the deferential follower.

In the same way, the disenchantment of education, the steady erosion of the sense of magic, wonder, joy in learning, the removal of these feelings from the learning process, is being carried out by the dance of these two personas, the authoritarian and the deferential. This disenchantment is due not to the triumph of testing, but to the triumph of the testing method. The logic and dictates of the testing method -- standardization, order, discrete knowledge, conformity to technology and rules -- are infusing and transforming the rest of education. As a kind of Darwinian logic, whatever is similar to the dictates of the testing method, supportive and amenable, survives and grows; that which is resistant, the romantic, withers away.

The true science of testing, which offers a way out of this disenchantment, is that of two approaches, formative and summative. There are different types of assessment for different purposes and uses, for informing and enhancing insights and decision-making at all levels of the education enterprise.

In particular, there is a type of testing, formative assessment, or assessment of learning, that is completely crowded out by current focus on statewide standardized testing. Yet this is the only form of testing that has been shown by research to lead to significant gains in student achievement, motivation and self-efficacy. One can only think this is the great folly of our age, which the historian Barbara Tuchman described as when leaders and/or a people persist in a sustained course of action that is disastrous despite knowing of a better alternative.

President-elect Barack Obama?s election is as historic as that of FDR?s in 1932 and promises a ?rendezvous with destiny? not only for African Americans but also for all of the American people. He has inspired millions of Americans to get engaged in the democratic process and to continue to want to participate in and lead change at the national, state, and local level. But, while the election may represent the achievement of Martin Luther King?s dream, the real work lies ahead and requires every citizen to take an active role. Genuine transformation in a democracy requires change from both the top down and the bottom up. Public education is the best choice to build upon and fulfill this renewal of American democracy. Here, as seen in the minority achievement gap and the national crisis in dropout rates of up to 50 percent among African American and Hispanic students, the reality of failed promises and dreams demands our attention and energy to make this a true rendezvous with destiny. And the strengths of public education, its model of community empowerment, makes this possible.

Arguably, the greatest harm of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), with its top-down and prescriptive test-driven system of accountability, has been its enormous condescension to the real change agents in education ? teachers, students, and parents. There has been a myopia in state capitols and Washington D.C. that bureaucrats, test publishers, and policymakers can effect change simply through the design of tests and the calibration of incentives and penalties based on test data. This is education reform on the cheap and results only in superficial change. It is reform with the ?people? left out and thereby fails to tap into the wealth of social capital that makes America exceptional. If we are to prepare our children for the 21st century, classrooms and schools must be 21st century learning and leading communities, and this requires making optimal use of all available talents and resources. Fortunately, there is international research that shows how we can do this, while building on the foundations of standards-based reform and the noble intentions of NCLB.

The astonishing and historic achievement of NCLB is that it has clearly concentrated all minds on the moral imperative of equity and excellence in education. And yet, the hoped for gains in student achievement have failed to materialize under NCLB even after six years of implementation. Even more distressing is an analysis by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) that predicts, given the current trends, at least 90 percent of schools and local districts will fail to meet the NCLB goal by 2014 and therefore be subject to restructuring, including being closed. In preparing for the coming ESEA reauthorization, a new ?reform consensus? has been forged, led by the nation?s governors and chief state school officers. The proposals of this consensus present only incremental changes in accountability and testing. They mainly include ?growth models? that measure individual student growth, differentiated consequences for varying degrees of failure to achieve mandated adequate yearly progress, performance assessments that measure and support higher order thinking skills, and the use of multiple measures in accountability that recognize that students, schools and districts show their ?true? performance in a variety of ways and should be evaluated accordingly. Lacking this alternative vision and democratic trust, the dominant ESEA reform consensus would simply give states more flexibility, while leaving the fundamental regime in tact; this will merely replace one tyrant with fifty. The cumbersome weight of its accountability system ? ponderous, slow-moving masses of data that hang over schools like a heavy omnipresence in the sky ‑ is an anachronism. The reformers are on the wrong side of today?s digital divide of lightening quick information and action and of bottom-up empowerment. Instead, they reflect the hegemonic persuasion in American culture for technical engineering and abstract system building, for software and hardware solutions, and a deepening distrust in human judgment and democracy. Increasingly, education is bathed in the black ink of data.

The idea of balance promotes rethinking accountability in fundamental ways. The creation of district and classroom data supports the conception of community-based accountability, which is an ongoing engagement of a school community, broadly defined, using a rich variety of data to evaluate schools and to proactively support and continuously improve them. This is in contrast to the present accountability system that imposes restructuring after long neglect. A two-tiered system of state- and community-based accountability enables reframing the current use of state testing data in the accountability system. State tests can serve the more limited but valid purpose as a ?first glance? identifier of local districts and schools that require further inspection to determine if in need of improvement. State testing can be incorporated in a proactive technical assistance orientation, where states work in partnership with districts to provide support as needed in a more timely manner. As in Europe, more fine-grained on-site analyses of these schools identified by state tests as not meeting state benchmarks could then be carried out, using the full variety of evidence to yield the most accurate and comprehensive evaluation. And we can even exceed the European model by taking advantage of our uniquely American advantage of citizen volunteerism and community engagement. Community Boards of Review, representative of all local stakeholders in education, would conduct their work freely and openly to evaluate schools, though with technical assistance and evaluative criteria from the state or district.

Research by the OECD attributes higher performance by nations in PISA in mathematics and science not only to more balanced assessment systems but also to a culture of strong, ongoing support for teachers and collaborative work structures. Over the last two decades, there has been a growing body of research in labor and economic policy that demonstrates the importance of employee participation and representation in decision-making for greater productivity, flexibility, and innovation in the 21st century ?knowledge economy? The support in this research for more democratic ways of organizing work to promote learning and leadership resonates with current education ideas of teacher leadership, professional learning communities, and whole school change. Fostering the spread of high performance work organizations can best support full development and utilization of human resources. The ?flat world? discovered recently by Thomas Friedman, where educated individuals are free to communicate, connect, collaborate, and create at anytime and from anywhere in an increasingly interdependent and diverse world, makes even more imperative the movement to more democratic ways of organizing work (The World is Flat, 2005).

Within the framework of balanced accountability and assessment, high performance schools can be the pioneers of high performance work organizations in their broader communities. In this way, educators can work with active citizens and lead not only in the transformation of their schools but also in that of their communities. By calling forth the strengths in education, we can reinvigorate our democracy and capitalism too.

There is a spirit abroad in public education today, one that promises to prepare children for a century of unprecedented creativity, innovation, and collaboration and thereby envisions broadly shared prosperity within and across nations. It is a spirit across Europe and Asia that exemplifies the powerful interdependence of education and democracy, of learning and leading. It is a pragmatic commitment to quality teaching for every student, a commitment backed by an impressive national investment in the education, support, and ongoing training of teachers. World class schools have world class leaders and teachers. And they teach their children 21st century skills such as those measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): the ability to think creatively and critically, to collaborate, to communicate well, and to know how to learn.

Yet in America this spirit is only felt in isolated schools and local school districts. Despite the compelling international research base, there is a failure of imagination in America that preempts acting on this research and these concrete international examples on a palpale scale. The national debate over education suffers from an intellectual exhaustion of ideas. We are at a crossroads of two paths where one path is to continue with the present regime of testing and accountability, to do the decades of basic research and elaboration of the data infrastructure that its logic entails. The other is the path inspired by the spirit abroad. This essay defies the conventional wisdom by not constructing a straw man of standardized testing and accountability as our great folly. As tempting as that may be, that would be like what the Dutch call, ?kicking down an open door.? For the problem lies not in the admittedly excessive focus on testing and accountability. Nor does it lie in education. It is rather a far more deeply rooted problem in our culture, one that limits our very way of seeing and greatly circumscribes and diminishes the possibilities of American education and democracy. It is a profound distrust in democracy, an imbalance in our culture of preference for technical authority over human judgment, of elite decision-making over democratic. This cultural problem belies a general crisis in democracy that underlies the reality of the ?absent public,? the persistent problem in politics and in education reform in particular where the ?people? are left out.

In preparing for the coming Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) reauthorization, a new ?reform consensus? has been forged, led by the nation?s governors and chief state school officers. These proposals mainly include ?growth models? that measure individual student growth, differentiated consequences for varying degrees of failure with respect to adequate yearly progress, performance assessments that measure higher order thinking skills, and the use of multiple measures in accountability. The crisis in American education, however, runs far deeper than the reach of this reform consensus. It fails to resonate with the social and economic changes engulfing local communities and the schools in them. Over the past few decades we have continued to create wealth but not a fair distribution of that wealth and income. Income inequality is at its highest since the 1920s. This pervasive crisis is seen in the secular decline in America?s preeminent global economic strength following WWII. The decline is due not only to the greater competition in world markets but also to our failure to replace the traditional organization of work, with its top-down industrial Fordist model, that served us well in the last century. The mass production model and its downward flow of decision-making and elaboration of work into simpler tasks was a management system that required only an educated elite of managers who supervised the work of relatively uneducated employees. Beginning in the 1970s but taking off in the 1990s, the ?third industrial revolution,? driven by leaps in technology, communications, and universal education, is ushering in a ?knowledge economy? for the 21st century. It is a new world where we compete on ideas, innovation, and creativity. Regrettably, American firms are failing to invest in new democratic ways of organizing work that optimize the talents of employees, preferring the short-term gains of outsourcing and downsizing. Belying the same lack of democratic faith, the reform consensus would simply give states more flexibility, while leaving the fundamental regime in tact, will merely replace one tyrant with fifty. The cumbersome weight of its top-down accountability system ? ponderous, slow-moving, inertial masses of data that hang over schools like a heavy omnipresence in the sky ‑ is an anachronism. Increasingly, education is bathed in the black ink of data.

To achieve the 21st century?s promise of broadly shared prosperity, we must educate our children to their full potential and enable them to be life-long learners. But the news is even better. We cannot compete on sheer numbers of educated workers alone, including engineers and scientists; for our numbers will always be overwhelmed by the those of other nations such as China and India who can work for lower wages. Instead, we must also make our workplaces more democratic and less hierarchical, more collaborative and agile. Called ?high performance work organization? (HPWO), these kinds of organizations fully empower employees to continue to learn and to work together. In brief, we can only compete on the basis of democracy and education woven together. This is the alternative vision by which we can regain both wealth and rising incomes for all. We need to rediscover that democracy is our greatest competitive advantage. And educators can and should lead the way.

To restore balance both in education and democracy requires a cultural transformation from the ?bottom-up.? It starts with diverse individuals conversing and sharing ideas face-to-face, gradually growing into a larger community of engaged individuals, one of collective effervescence that leads to meaningful and sustainable change. An engaged public can join school leaders, teachers, and students in the practical work of improving American schools by following the spirit abroad. This spirit requires a national framework of balanced accountability and assessment, respectful of the different purposes, authorities and information needs across the national, state, and local levels of the education system. As shown by research by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this type of balance characterizes world-class education systems. A balanced system is primarily centered on the classroom and the practice of formative assessment. This is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning toward achievement of intended outcomes. The promise of formative assessment is to maximize student motivation, self-efficacy, and academic achievement gains, especially for low-performing students, as shown in decades of research. Evidence gathered from across the globe reveals effect sizes of a half to one and a half standard deviations (a range roughly about 20 to 50 percentile points).

Research by the OECD attributes higher performance by nations to a culture of strong, ongoing support for teachers and collaborative work structures. This resonates with the concept of ?high performance work organization? and current education ideas of teacher leadership, professional learning communities, and comprehensive whole school change. High performance schools can be the pioneers of high performance work organizations in their broader communities. In this way, educators can lead not only in the transformation of their schools but also in that of their communities. By calling forth the strengths in education, we can reinvigorate our democracy and capitalism too.