When the State Board of Education brought Colorado into the Common Core Standards fold by the narrowest of margins on Monday, it represented the triumph of reason over ideological pressure. And I’m not speaking from an ideological perspective here. Commentators on the left and right have been hurling invective at the common core movement since its inception. Others on the left and right have voiced support.

Yes, this is one of those weird education issues that makes for strange bedfellows. Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, a widely respected conservative voice on education reform, is a big supporter, though not without reservations. So is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

So who opposes having states voluntarily craft a set of academic standards in math and language arts, designed, as Education Week put it, to “attempt to address the uneven patchwork of standards that results in differing expectations among schools, districts, and states and leaves many students unprepared for work or college?”

To begin with, many doctrinaire conservatives oppose the common core. Why? Because some, at least, see the big bad bear of federal intervention lurking behind every tree. The federal government mucks up everything it touches. Local control is a hallowed American concept when it comes to education. This is first skidding step on the slippery slope toward socialism  - and ineptly managed socialism at that. Or so their thinking goes.

Professor Jay P. Greene, a professor at the University of Arkansas, has this to say about the standards from a conservative dissenter’s perspective:

“Just because the education bureaucracies in a bunch of red states have signed up for national standards doesn’t mean that the idea has conservative support.  It just means that their budgets are really tight and they want to be in the running for federal Race to the Top dollars as well as gobs of Gates “planning” grant dollars.  The fact that there has not been more active conservative opposition can mostly be explained by the speed with which this is being crammed through in the midst of a severe state budgetary crisis.

But conservatives who favor decentralization, choice, and competition should take heart. Many of those states will change their minds if they don’t get federal dollars to stay on board.  And the grand national coalition for these standards will probably fall apart as the airy-fairy standards are converted into actual practice in the form of national assessments.

We’ll see how well the Linda Darling-Hammond led national assessment, which I can only imagine involves the testing of drum-circle collaboration, suits conservatives… who so far have supported this enterprise.”

On the left, people say the common core represent just a new iteration of the test-crazy culture they believe has brought public education to its knees. On his popular blog, Chicago-area teacher Fred Klonsky quotes bombastic iconoclast Alfie Kohn on the common core:

“The top-down, test-driven, corporate-styled “accountability” movement — featuring prescriptive state standards — has already done incalculable damage to our children’s classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Just ask a teacher. It’s no coincidence that the most enthusiastic proponents of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, etc., tend to be those who know the least about how kids learn. And now they’re telling us that a single group of people should shape the goals and curriculum of every public school in the country.”

So here are some more measured voices from both sides. First Weingarten, not always a paragon of moderation:

“These standards should affect teaching and learning in classrooms across the country. They are essential building blocks for a better education system—not a new educational fad—and they can help prepare all children, regardless of where they live, for success in college, careers and life.

Those who wrote the standards understood this, and met repeatedly with front-line educators, including AFT members from across the country, who helped turn these concepts into a reality that can make a difference in children’s lives.

Establishing these standards is a critical first step, and now the real work begins. We need to use these standards as the foundation for better schools, but we must do more—as the countries we compete with do.”

And finally, a lengthy excerpt from Finn. One might expect him to be skeptical-bordering-on-cynical about this enterprise. But he puts the issue of common standards in common-sense language:

“But good grief, folks, do you really want to preserve the meager academic expectations, crummy tests, and weak-kneed accountability arrangements that currently drive—or fail to drive—K-12 education across most of this broad land? Are you so risk averse and change resistant as to see no merit in trying to do this differently in the future?

It’s true, as multiple bloggers have noted, that I spent part of 1997 itemizing the flaws in Bill Clinton’s plan for the federal government to create and administer a national testing system. And like practically everybody else (save for the progressive educators who drafted them), I didn’t like much about the federally-induced “national standards” that had emerged during the Bush I administration earlier that decade.

But many things have changed in thirteen years. Four deserve to be noted.

First, and most important, U.S. education has made only the slimmest achievement gains—none of these at the high-school level—and graduation rates have stayed limp, as more and more countries surpass us on more and more measures on this fast-flattening and ever-more-competitive planet.

Second, despite multiple rounds of asking (and Uncle Sam bribing) states to come up with rigorous academic standards on their own, few have done so. Those few are swell, but most are simply dismal—a “C” average on the latest Fordham ratings. And they’re ridiculously uneven from place to place. Modern countries don’t do this to their kids.

Third, much as I wish otherwise, conservatives’ preferred alternative education-reform strategies haven’t gained the traction or scale that advocates (myself included) hoped for, nor have they delivered reliably better academic results. Yes, the principle has largely been accepted that kids need not necessarily attend the district school in their neighborhood. Yet you can count the voucher programs on your fingers. And charter-school enrollments, while respectably up, don’t amount to more than 3 percent of all kids. The parent marketplace isn’t causing bad schools to close… One can keep beating this drum—and you’ll find more and more people snapping their fingers in time with the beat—but, mostly for political reasons that aren’t going away, it hasn’t produced a lot of marching.

Fourth, the main sources of resistance to change in American education aren’t conservatives (hard as some of the latter are trying!). They’re education interest groups, starting but not ending with the teacher unions. They still wield much clout—see previous point—but they’re weaker today than at any time in my memory, no doubt because they’re beset on more issues on more fronts by more forces. To give credit where it’s due, a contributor has been the unexpected emergence of the Obama administration as a source of reform pressure and the schism that’s emerged within the Democratic Party over education issues. (This is also the main reason that today there’s no serious GOP education platform. Except for vouchers, just about all the traditional “conservative” education enthusiasms have gone mainstream.)”

Reasonable people from the left and right are moving toward the center on education reform issues. And when it comes to education, as things fall apart, perhaps the center can and will hold. We can only hope.

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I will be traveling for the next 12 days, part of a delegation from Denver invited on an “intercultural dialogue trip” to Turkey. We’ll be visiting schools and universities throughout the country as well as newspaper offices, religious centers and people’s homes. Since the focus is not solely or even primarily education-related, I’ve set up a separate, personal blog. If you’re interested, you can follow it here.

Meanwhile, let’s play a science fiction game. Imagine that the act of traveling somewhere far away and culturally distinct alters not only your perspective but also realities on the ground at your place of origin. What if I were to return June 12 to find Colorado’s educational landscape changed in significant ways? What would I hope those changes would look like? (fade to blur)

When I return to work Monday, June 14, here is what I find.

1.    Denver Public Schools has gotten serious about autonomy. Instead of paying lip-service to freeing schools from district bureaucratic entanglements, DPS has given a dozen of its schools the kind of freedom normally reserved for charter schools. At the same time, the district has said an emphatic ‘no’ to a dozen other schools that sought autonomy but lacked the visionary leadership to succeed.

DPS Assistant Superintendent Kristin Waters made a strong case last week on the Education News Colorado blog for allowing equity concerns to override autonomy in cases where autonomy threatened equity. So let’s imagine DPS has hit upon an elegant solution: Only schools with strong leadership and poverty levels above the district mean would be granted autonomy. If equity means unequal resources for unequal needs, then DPS finally started walking its talk in this regard.

2.    Leadership at the Colorado Education Association has had an epiphany and realized that for teaching to be considered a profession, teachers had to be treated like professionals – by school districts and unions alike. Across Colorado, massive collective bargaining agreements detailing working conditions to absurd levels of detail have been replaced by thin contracts dealing with pay, benefits, due process and other essential elements of professional employment. All the extraneous garbage is gone.

3.    Speaking of equity, schools across Colorado now operate on different calendars. Schools with sub-par achievement and/or large numbers of low-income students now have school years 210 days long. To pay for this, schools in affluent areas have shorter years, and families fill the gap through self-funded experiential learning opportunities, for which students get credit.

4.    Colorado’s open enrollment law has been amended so that  school districts have the ability to promote socio-economically integrated schools through “controlled choice” assignment programs. This change has reduced achievement gaps by 25 percent and has not caused much-feared white flight.

5.    The state has figured out an assessment system that measures student growth in a manner acceptable to the CEA and other unions. Highly effective teachers earn $120,000 or more. Teaching in Colorado becomes the “hot new profession,” as a Time Magazine cover story puts it.

6.    David Singer’s University Preparatory Charter School has opened and replicated, and, despite its 98 percent free lunch population,  each year outpaces Denver’s Bromwell, Southmoor, Steck and Slavens schools as hands-down the best elementary school network in Denver.

7.     No one in Colorado even knows what the term “direct placement” means. When they hear about it from other states, they respond with “How stupid is that?”

So, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. You’d better get busy: As you can see from the list above, there’s much work to be done before I return.

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Is the bitterness over Colorado’s new teacher effectiveness law subsiding? Hard to say. But over the past week I’ve noticed reasonable people on both sides of the debate yearning to put it behind them and mend fences. And that may be the most encouraging sign to emerge in a while.

Last Thursday I followed State Sen. Mike Johnston, the driving force behind the law, to O’Connell Middle School in a low-income pocket of Lakewood. Teachers, some unhappy with the law and others seeking more information, had gathered in the library to meet with Johnston.

Would the session be a shout-fest? A smack-down? A spirited debate? As it turned out, it was none of the above. It was a reasoned, low-key conversation that ended after 45 minutes with both sides better informed, and with even the most skeptical teachers apparently feeling at least a bit better.

Johnston is 35, and a novice politician, with just one legislative session and no political campaigns behind him. But anyone who doubts his skills, even after he shepherded a highly controversial piece of legislation through to passage, need only watch him interact with a group of potential adversaries.

When it comes to educators, of course, it helps that Johnston was a teacher and principal for many years before becoming a politician. Still, the way he walked into O’Connell and won over those teachers was impressive. He empathized with them but didn’t pander. He talked directly to them instead of assuming the politician’s phony veneer of jocularity or know-it-all-ness.

And it worked. Not because he employed some tactic or trick to win over the teachers, but because he convinced them, or seemed to, that when you get down to the essence of this debate, people on all sides ultimately are after the same thing: Schools that work for the vast majority of kids.

There is wide disagreement about how we get there, or even whether we can get there. All too often it’s the disagreements that take center stage, as firebrands on all sides paint their adversaries as having ill intent. But with rare exceptions, that’s not the case.

It wasn’t just Johnston’s bravura performance that I found encouraging. It was also the response to last week’s “From the editor.” I wrote, after attending an education writers conference, that many of the journalists there were as skeptical of self-described reformers and their perceived arrogance as they were of entrenched interests in school systems and teachers’ unions.

I received about a dozen calls and emails in response to that column. Most were from people with whom I usually differ on education policy issues, and they got in touch because they appreciated what I wrote.

This threw me, because even though I usually come down on the side of those pushing for rapid systemic change, I like to think I’m open-minded. But the people who contacted me did so because they were pleasantly surprised that I had deviated at least this once from what they perceive as the party line.

“You see, we’re not idiots and Neanderthals after all,” one public official said, paraphrasing a line from last week’s column.

I didn’t write the column as an olive branch, but that is how some people took it, and that’s fine. It shows that the disagreements are not necessarily intractable; that people want to find ways to bridge the divide and work together.

Is this possible? Yes, of course. But it won’t be easy. Fundamental change is a threatening phenomenon. People on both sides will make mistakes as we stumble forward. But I’m encouraged that if we make even modest efforts to reach out, as Johnston did, and I suppose as I did, there will be people willing to meet us half-way.

Something probably will happen in the next week or so to wash away this trickle of optimism. But I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.

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