EDLL

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.