One of the more annoying verbal tics of some residents of our nation’s capital is the reference to most of America as “flyover country.” For many of them (and their coastal compatriots), most of the United States is just an inconveniently placed stretch of farmland that adds a few hours to their plane trips from Washington to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Well, to those poor D.C. education experts who share a reflexive nervousness when it comes to the nation’s heartland, the joke is on you. Flyover country just became the locus of education power in this country.
With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, states will no longer have to follow federally prescribed accountability systems or federally directed school improvement programs. While they will still have to test students and make those scores public, what they do with those scores will be up to them. Many of the other federal programs that have proliferated over the last several decades have been consolidated, granting states wider latitude in how they spend federal dollars than they have seen in recent memory.
The upshot for the vast industry of District-based K-12 education pundits and advocates is that if they want to actually affect policy, they’re going to have to pack up a U-haul and head to Boise and Jefferson City and Santa Fe. They won’t just be able to fly in to testify on some bill, or write a white paper on state policy from a thousand miles away. They’ll have to invest their time and energy from the moment bills start to be discussed, through the time they become law, through the time they are implemented and through the time they are challenged, revised and reworked. It’s a long, hard slog, and it will have to be made in places far less glamorous than they are used to.
As a bit of a heads up, in this part of America, public policy gets discussed differently than in Washington. Breakfasts aren’t catered, unless you count the waitress at the Denny’s that plays host to monthly community activist meetings. If you want to hold a public event, you better be ready to set up your own chairs. There are no fleets of interns to fill the rows in under-attended events, and no trade press outfits catering to the exact people who will be interested in what you have to say. Almost everyone that you meet with has a job that has nothing to do with politics (or education), and if you want to convince them to support your vision, you will have to win them over one by one. And unlike most young D.C. climbers, a lot of the folks that you meet will not have had a pleasant time in school or met with a great deal of success and will have extremely different views about what needs to be done. You will argue with them in the parking lot of a Perkins.
It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens to education people in the District over the next several years. Will they become equally passionate about financial regulation, foreign policy or some other field that can keep them near D.C.’s center of gravity? Will they use their blogs and white papers to lambaste the Midwestern hoi polloi? Or, will they roll up their sleeves, swallow their pride and head out into the towns and hollers that actually make this country run and try and use their knowledge and expertise to help.
Guess only time will tell.
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