Mehta Writes on Federal Involvement in Ed Week

Last week I was in D.C. for a conference hosted by Rick Hess and AEI that aimed to derive lessons from 50 years of federal government involvement in schooling. The adjective in the title is "sobering" (sobering lessons), and the tone of the conference was fairly bleak. Speaker after speaker, from the left as well as the right, talked about the inability of the federal government to generate on the ground improvement in schooling. You can read an overview and links to the papers here.

As a contrarian, I started to note the examples that contradicted the thesis, and found that the speakers had actually offered a fairly lengthy list of things the federal government could do well amidst their overall pessimism. Here's a scorecard...

For full post, visit the Futures of School Reform Group on edweek.org.