On Tuesday, President-Elect Barack Obama ended weeks of speculation by selecting Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan to be his secretary of education. The conventional wisdom is that Duncan is a “consensus” pick, bridging the Democratic Party’s major divide on education.

The camps on either side of this divide have been described, variously, as the establishment versus the reformers, the incrementalists versus the disrupters or, by some, the true progressives versus closet Republicans. Let us add another set of nomenclature: the System Defenders versus the Army of the Potomac.

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System Defenders — including the teacher unions, other traditional education groups, and their friends on Capitol Hill — believe that the public education system is basically sound but needs additional resources to be more effective. Their view of the federal role resembles the pre-NCLB version with scads of programs and complexities — albeit with a lot more money and a lot less accountability.

Meanwhile, members of the Army of the Potomac — including civil rights groups such as Education Trust, “New Dem” bastions such as Education Sector and the Progressive Policy Institute, and putatively bipartisan initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Commission — hold generally sound instincts about reform. They see unions and school boards as barriers to achievement and equity gains; they favor holding schools to account for their results; they would reward success; and (up to a point) they believe in empowering parents. Their Achilles heel is a near-boundless faith in Washington’s ability to accomplish significant positive change in K-12 education. They downplay the unintended consequences caused by NCLB (and other well-intended federal education laws); indeed, most of them would ratchet up Uncle Sam’s pressure on states and local schools.

These two camps have been wrangling all year, and it’s widely understood that Duncan’s job is to forge a truce by finding compromises and commonalities. (To the right of these contending Democratic factions is where many Republicans find themselves, among what we call Local Controllers. They want Uncle Sam to butt out of education policy — but to keep sending money. In the current political environment, however, Duncan and his boss can mostly ignore them — at least until they need 60 Senate votes.)

How can Obama and Duncan find common ground between the System Defenders on the left and the Army of the Potomac in the center? One of the best ways might be to turn to what we call Reform Realism, which we introduce today in an “Open Letter” to the President-Elect, Secretary-Designate, and the 111th Congress.

Reform Realists share some core assumptions with the Army of the Potomac. We embrace standards, assessment, and accountability; we believe that America’s achievement gaps are morally unacceptable, socially divisive, and politically unsustainable; and we recognize that for America to remain secure and prosperous in a dangerous but shrinking and flattening world, our education system must be far more effective than it is today.

As Arne Duncan has learned in Chicago, federal action too often yields unintended —and unwanted — consequences. Uncle Sam would be wise to adopt medicine’s maxim of “first, do no harm.” His education levers are few and none too powerful and, in the real world, he can do little to coerce states and districts to do things they don’t want to do or are organizationally incapable of doing — much less to do those things well. School reform is a heavy lift and the application of federal carrots and (less commonly) sticks can only go so far.

We favor a targeted, strategic federal role in K-12 education with Washington sticking to important elements that it can do well (and that others do less well) — but leaving the rest to states, communities, educators, and families. In particular, Uncle Sam should:

FOSTER COMMON STANDARDS AND TESTS.
While asking federal officials themselves to set standards and create tests would be perilous, the president could task the governors with agreeing on what students should know in core subjects at key stages of their schooling. Tests and transparency should follow.