Mitt Romney’s school reform agenda rides the pendulum of change, carrying poor and disadvantaged students with it.  His proposal that students be equipped with a “backpack” of federal dollars to carry to the school of their choice shows how students of every new administration are the pawns of bureaucrats, who propose changes to get elected.

In the free market of schools students are movable pieces, representing federal dollars.  Grover Whitehurst, a Romney education adviser, says,

If you connected state funding with federal funding, then you’re talking about a backpack with enough money in it to really empower choice. . . . The idea would be the federal Title I funds would allow states that want to move in this direction to do so, and if they did so, all of a sudden it’s a game changer.

The metaphors of “backpacks” and “games” reveal so much about how politicians approach school reform.  The backpack represents the student as a unit of income for the school. There is no provision for what the student needs in that metaphor. Students with learning challenges need small classes, specialists who decrease the student-to-teacher ratio, programs in the arts and occupations that employ their strengths, professional development for their teachers to develop literacy across the curriculum, and paraprofessionals and volunteers to staff after-school programs.  In other words, schools need more and varied personnel, the single most-expensive budget item for schools, private or public.

In the past federal dollars have often made these programs possible, but in the current era of savage cost-cutting, what will happen to these federal dollars?  Oops, sorry, you’ll have to do more with less next year. But you’ll survive on American ingenuity and hard work.  Schools can do more with smaller backpacks.

Even more heartless is the metaphor of the “game changer.”  If a school principal says a new reading program is a “game-changer,” then we appreciate that some thought has gone into how reading instruction can be improved in her school. When a political adviser says a a voucher program is a “game changer,” we understand that “reform” means changing what has been unsuccessful in the last administration.  Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Education has traditionally been a “game” for politicians.  They believe somehow if you change the rules something good will happen.  Test and punish. Eliminate the Department of Education. Dismantle affirmative action. Invent a “race” and make your own rules.  None of this deals directly with the challenges of students lost in school bureaucracy.  But it represents “change” and that’s how candidates get elected: propose a new “game.”

A better metaphor would be to change the professional culture.  While politicians have complained that our schools do not compete with Finland, South Korea and Singapore, no one has suggested that we improve the status and conditions of teaching to emulate the teaching culture in those countries.   Because that would cost something. Linda Darling-Hammond outlines what meaningful change in the teaching profession would look like in The Flat World and Education.

• universal high-quality teacher education
• mentoring for all beginners from expert teachers
• Ongoing professional learning, embedded in 15 to 25 hours per week
• leadership development that engages expert teachers
• equitable, competitive salaries  (198)

Most of these reforms would require major budget shifts at every level of government, and they would require more resources.  You don’t change a culture by moving the game pieces around. You invest in the members of that culture.

But since no one wants to hear that we need more resources in a decade of want, we will hear about “game changing.”  Moving students like pieces on the chess board. Moving schools out of neighborhoods. Moving teachers who can’t cut it to the unemployment line.  As they say in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.”

So for the next six months we will hear talk about backpacks and games, instead of slow, but relentless cultural reform.  We will hear about the magic of the free market, instead of the common sense of professional development.  We will hear about “change,” meaning moving the game pieces, instead of “reform,” which means investing in individual teachers and students.  We will hear about “races,” which are always predicated on more losers than winners.

These cheerful metaphors of American “can-do” will get someone elected. But they will not change the quality of public education.