Kumbaya? Or "Overton Window"? - The New Ed Policy Meme

So now that the Dems won the election and the Bushies lost the DoE (if that's true), there's a new meme in town. Goodbye, "Klein, Rhee, and Duncan are Reformers" and "Darling-Hammond is a Traditionalist." Hello, Kumbaya: "Both Sides are Right" now.

Maybe this is sincere, and something to celebrate. And maybe it's not.

Warm Fuzzies for All?

A quick taste of it in Education Week's coverage of a gala honoring Linda Darling-Hammond for her work on the Obama team. Among the speakers to praise her? Joel Klein. EdWeek's Kumbaya quote:

Klein's appearance WAS a bit of a surprise, given the supposed "split" among Democrats in the education-policy community. During the vetting of potential education secretary candidates, Klein, a signer of the Education Equality Project manifesto, was viewed as belonging to a group that supported stronger accountability for teachers and administrators. Alternatively, a second coalition, "Broader Bolder," argued that districts needed more support for wraparound services in public schools and that schools alone shouldn't be held responsible for closing achievement gaps. Darling-Hammond was viewed as belonging to the latter group.

But Klein debunked this supposed split as a media fabrication. "They say there's one camp here and another camp here," he said. "Well let me tell you, in education sometimes people don't even agree with what they [themselves] are saying."

Darling-Hammond has long said that skin color, zip code, and family income should not determine the quality of a child's education, Klein noted. Working together under Barack Obama, leaders can finally deliver the promises of Brown v. Board of Education for the nation's urban schoolchildren, he concluded.

We see more sudden warm fuzzies replacing the last month's Daggers for Darling-Hammond campaign in this post from the Democrats for Education Reform (who are more aligned with Klein than with Darling-Hammond, from what I can see):

I think a new education politics would, first and foremost, require all sides to recognize the validity of each other's thinking and appreciate the goals they are seeking to achieve. Michelle Rhee is not the avatar of racist white developers who want to turn D.C. into a yuppie playground, and the unions are not corrupt, anti-student teachers' clubs. At the same time, we need some humility. Each side has to recognize their own limitations: Reformers from Rhee's circle are too often coming from the outside, and they have little insight into what it takes to make a classroom work. But unions and teachers have to recognize that, at the same time, they themselves are biased toward protecting their own jobs, even at the expense of students, and even if they believe they have students' best interests in mind.

As a result, each side would have to concede certain policy principles. While teacher accountability is a vital element of reform, for example, it is vital to recognize that teachers are also workers, parents, and taxpayers, not automatons who can be expected to sacrifice everything to student achievement. Nor should we expect them to build lasting relationships with their students if they are spending all their time worried about their job security. While some aspects of teacher tenure and job protections should be relaxed, making them at-will employees is asking too much.

On the flip side, teachers need to recognize that they are not just another class of workers, and that they cannot always make the same demands that, say, teamsters do. Districts need the flexibility to demand a little extra from them, even if it means longer hours.

Or Overton Window?

Source: Corrente Wire

The "Overton Window" defined:

The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Joe Overton, who developed the model. It describes a "window" in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue. . . .

Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable.

Delivering rhetoric to define the window provides a plan of action to make more acceptable to the public some ideas by priming them with other ideas allowed to remain unacceptable, but which make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison. (Source, with more here.)

Josh Trevino of RedState.com, and a self-described (and surely tongue-in-cheek?) member of a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" Michigan think-tank, gave a lesson on the Overton Window to DailyKos a couple years ago,

The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse. The steps an idea takes to full legitimacy are roughly as follows:

--Unthinkable
--Radical
--Acceptable
--Sensible
--Popular
--Policy

Trevino continues by giving an example concerning, serendipitously enough, education policy:

Let's say, for example, that you want to make education as free and choice-based as it can possibly be. Let's start by developing a continuum of educational states, from the desired extreme of total freedom, to the undesirable extreme of total statism. It might look something like this:

--No government involvement in education.
--All schools private with government regulation.
--Voucher system with public schools.
--Tuition tax credit with public schools.
--Homeschooling legal.
--Private schools restricted.
--Homeschooling illegal.
--Private schools illegal.
--Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.

Giving the above as a theoretically full Left-Right spectrum (which is problematically linear instead of planar, I know), he goes on:

Now, back when Joe Overton drew up this notional list (which is meant to be illustrative, so don't get hung up on its particular accuracy), the range of actual, reasonable possibilities as perceived by the general public in Overton's state of Michigan were the items bolded below:

--------------------------
--No government involvement in education.
--All schools private with government regulation.
--Voucher system with public schools.
--Tuition tax credit with public schools.
--Homeschooling legal.

--Private schools restricted.
--Homeschooling illegal.

--Private schools illegal.
--Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
-----------------------------

The bolded items, representing the politically possible amongst all conceivable options, are the Overton window. The idea is to shift that window in the preferred direction. In Michigan today, the Overton window looks substantively different:

---------------------------
No government involvement in education.
All schools private with government regulation.

--Voucher system with public schools.
--Tuition tax credit with public schools.
--Homeschooling legal.
--Private schools restricted.

Homeschooling illegal.
Private schools illegal.
Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.

And Now, Two Years Later....

Is it me, or does the Kumbaya moment seem more like a celebration of the success of the Overton's Window gambit? It's early days yet, and I want to give Duncan/Obama the benefit of the doubt of not being Duncan/Daley, but still, that window in that wall sure seems to have moved a lot in two years.

And while I'm all for give and take on all sides, it seems like the public side has been doing more of the giving, and the private side more of the taking, in the education policy world.