Strange bedfellows

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visits King Middle School tomorrow, he can claim credit to being part of the team that got some of the fiercest fiscal conservatives in Maine to defend President Obama. How did he do this? Am I about to write what I think I am - that the Maine Heritage Policy Center is right about something?

In the wake of Maine's dismal Race to the Top performance, Mr. Duncan is, among other things, cheering teachers up and trying to convince them that the Obama administration does not have it in for them. If he has it in for anyone, it is for those in positions of power and influence who continually seek to protect their institutional interest at the expense of our public school students.

That he's speaking at King Middle School, a school that has allied with Expeditionary Learning, my old employer, to produce amazing results, is gratifying. What is not gratifying is that the folks who are lining up to bask in the light of the Secretary, Expeditionary Learning, and the teachers and students who call King home are many of the folks who - sorry to say it it - have advocated against the very changes that would make schools like King more likely to grow and thrive.

An editorial in Sunday's Portland Press Herald, made a crucial point: "While Maine's ideas for what state education officials wanted to do got decent marks (although they were was critiqued for not being ambitious enough) the state's plan was savaged by the scorers for the lack of commitment to the vision among the people who would be needed to carry it out." As I've written elsewhere, Maine's attempt was not about ensuring that what we know works elsewhere can be adapted to work in Maine - innovative, autonomous small schools; partnerships (with teeth) with non-profit replication models like Expeditionary Learning Schools; genuine accountability for schools, parents and teachers - but instead was about landing the money.

There is nothing surprising about the PPH taking a position critical of Maine's education establishment. More surprising though, is this guest editorial by Steve Bowen in the Bangor Daily News. While it makes the many of the same points, it does do in a way that is an explicit endorsement of the Obama administration's school reform strategy. Why is that a big deal? Because Steve Bowen works for the Maine Heritage Policy Center, which advocates against just about everything Obama under the guise of what they might call fiscal conservatism, but smacks much of right-wing demagoguery to folks like me.

And that's where the "folks like me" come in...they call pro gay marriage, pro universal health care, pro environment people like us socialists, while we are convinced that they, and the Fox News "logic" that fuels most of their work, is both wrong and scary. And while of course neither camp falls into such neat divisions - I am pro-enterprise (with a conscience) and Steve is passionately advocating for public schools that work for everyone - it is still rare that our camps agree so whole-heartedly. So as you're reading, listening, and forming opinions for the upcoming elections, what strategy do you think is more likely to bear fruit - the one the "socialists," the libertarians, and the Obama administration agree on, or the one that...umm...got us 33rd place in a race to what, had we won, would have been a pretty dubious "top" anyway.