The first concerns the question of where the locus of authority should be in school reform—no small issue for a room full of policymakers from different levels of government.

The No Child Left Behind Act and the educational standards movement of which it is part presupposes a need for greater centralization in determining what students should know and in ensuring that educators teach students what they need to know.

Declarations by policymakers on both sides of the political aisle notwithstanding, NCLB is a repudiation of the nation's long tradition of local authority in public education. The law reflects the changing mission that the nation has assigned public education. In an industrial economy, the advocates of change in public education have argued, it was fine that public schools taught relatively few students to use their heads and most students to use their hands. But in today's knowledge economy, where most people need to use their minds well to earn their way into the middle class, public education had to set its sights higher; it has to try to teach a far wider range of students to the standards it had traditionally reserved for the gifted and the privileged.

This was the core message of the influential 1983 federal report "A Nation at Risk," a report released, not coincidently, not that long after the nation had come through the crucible of the civil rights movement committed to including students of color, English language learners, and the disabled in its educational equation. Making good on this ambitious new vision of public education has been the driving force of school reform for two and a half decades. And reformers, including the authors of NCLB, have been moved by a belief—and a good deal of evidence—that many local schools and school systems lack the conviction or the capacity (or both) to promote high standards for all students.

So they have sought to force local educators to do so through state and federal edicts.

But such steps have been strongly opposed by defenders of the nation's long tradition of local control in public education. In the same way that only a staunch anti-Communist like Richard Nixon could have garnered political backing for a more open relationship with China, only a conservative Republican president like George W. Bush enjoying tremendous good will within a Republican-controlled Congress could have won the votes of the many Washington-wary conservatives required to pass NCLB in 2001.

Now, five years after NCLB's signing, a draft of a new revision of the law released in September by the House Education and Labor Committee reflects our collective schizophrenia about the appropriate locus of control in public education. In the wake of the states' tendency to set their academic standards low under NCLB, the draft proposes to give states financial incentives to benchmark their standards against national and international norms, to further centralize public education's expectations. There are three bills pending in Congress that would create voluntary national standards. And the Council of Chief State School Officers, the organization that represents the states' top education officials, also supports national standards.

At the same time, the draft would cede local school systems far more freedom than NCLB currently does to use locally developed methods of measuring school performance—a step that would decentralize decision-making in public education.

I think we will eventually draft voluntary national standards and assessments that states would be free to use if they chose (and there will be pressure from the business leaders, thought-leaders, and the press to do so). The ineffectiveness and inefficiency of many state standards under NCLB, and of many local standards in the pre-NCLB era, make the logic of national standards and tests nearly irresistible.

A second tension within the reform debate is over which students should be the focus of reform.

NCLB, the latest incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, is focused on helping disadvantaged students achieve to higher standards via the setting of statewide standards for all students, requiring schools to report how various groups of traditionally underserved students perform against those standards, and holding educators accountable for their students’ results.

But by requiring states to set a single statewide passing grade for each test, the law has incentivized states to set standards low, for fear that many schools won't meet the standards. In so doing, some argue, NCLB has created a glass ceiling for higher achieving students. State tests pegged to relatively low standards don't let them show what they can do. And the law gives educators incentives, at least, for a number of years, to focus on kids who need some but not a lot of help in reaching state standards. Getting those kids over the bar is the most efficient way for schools to make "adequate yearly progress" under the law. To be a bit blunt about it, NCLB, some have argued, has co-opted the entire educational system on behalf of low-achieving students.

In response to a growing frustration with this fact, there has been a movement to change the ways schools are judged under NCLB, to give them credit for improving and incentives to improve the performance of students all along the achievement continuum. The House Education and Labor Committee draft NCLB reauthorization blueprint would make this change in the law.

The COMPETE Act that President Bush signed into law this summer encourages this effort by promoting the supply of well-trained teachers and advanced courses in math, science, technology, and engineering subjects.

But as states introduce new science tests under NCLB at three grade levels this year, there may be pressure to keep standards low in science as well as reading and math.

There is a third fundamental tension in school reform between regulatory and market-based or entrepreneurial reform strategies.

NCLB is a regulatory reform strategy. It is coercive. It requires states and schools to do things in the name of higher student achievement that they might not otherwise do, and historically haven’t done.

On the other hand, the choice wing of school reform presupposes a more entrepreneurial model. And indeed a wide range of public and private entrepreneurs have come forward to create the nation's 4,000 charter schools.

But the emergence, in states with largely unregulated charter school markets, of substantial numbers of poor-quality charter schools has prompted a substantial debate within the charter school movement over whether consumer choice is sufficient to produce high-quality schools.

The emerging consensus is No, and charter-school advocacy organizations such as the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools are working hard to build quality assurance into the charter movement. But that, of course, means external oversight that threatens the independence that has drawn many entrepreneurs into charter schooling in the first place. The challenge for policymakers rests in striking the right balance between charter school autonomy and accountability.

This same sort of tension exists in the teacher-quality debate, where the traditional regulatory structure based on teachers acquiring credentials is under pressure from advocates of a more performance-driven system.

Advocates of credential-driven reform believe that quality-control involves setting expectations for entry into teaching and for updating teachers' skills. They believe, that is, that credentials are proxies for quality.

Advocates of performance-driven reform believe in letting more people into the profession and then paying close attention to the quality of their work. This idea is in the ascendancy in reform circles. There is a lot of advocacy today, for example, of performance-based teacher pay.

But, as with the charter school movement, there hasn’t been sufficient attention to the measurement systems needed to ensure a performance-based system in teaching can work effectively. As we heard this morning, teacher evaluation is really weak in most school systems.

But getting these systems right is tricky. Many are calling for teachers to be evaluated on the basis of their students' test scores. But doing that is difficult when, for example, only 28 percent of public school teachers teach students who take statewide standardized tests.

There is, of course, a lot of overlap between this tension between regulatory and entrepreneurial reform models and the question of where the locus of authority should lay in school reform. Regulatory reform implies activist government oversight. The entrepreneurial model relies on consumer choice to motivate school improvement. The uneven performance of the charter school industry, and of the for-profit trade school industry prior to stepped-up regulation of the federal student loan program in the early 1990s, suggests that unregulated education markets don’t serve students, or taxpayers, particularly well.

The challenge of how much to regulate is being resolved in some places through what policymakers call a tight-loose strategy. Policymakers are setting clear performance expectations for providers of new school models—much clearer than existed in the early days of the charter school movement—but are also giving education entrepreneurs freedom to meet those expectations.

So, for example, you see in New York City, the nation's largest school system, the creation of an education enterprise system, where individual schools can opt to gain more control over their budgets, staffing and instruction, in return for hitting clearly defined performance benchmarks—and paying a significant price if they don't.

Some of the best and best-known charter school networks, like KIPP, Achievement First, and Aspire Public Schools, are moving toward this tight-loose balance from the other direction. Initially inclined to turn individual principals loose to be very independent and entrepreneurial, they are imposing more uniformity on the schools in their networks in everything from curriculum to classroom management. Such systemization, they have concluded, is necessary to ensure the quality of their school networks as they scale up.

We are moving, inexorably, to a more diversified, market-driven system of public education, one that expands the definition of who public educators are and what public education is.

There are a million students in charter schools run by universities, museums, Boys and Girls clubs, teacher unions, and a host of other organizations. 

There are 750,000 students supplementing their regular high school educations through statewide virtual schools.

New York City has added nearly 200 new small high school options in recent years and permits every public high school student in the city to attend any high school anywhere in the city's five boroughs, matching students to schools with computer software originally used to match organ donors to recipients.

Increasingly, especially in larger urban school systems, we are moving to what might best be described as an airport authority model of school governance: such authorities don't own and operate planes the way school systems own and operate schools, but rather grant landing rights to a range of airlines that operate their own planes under the airport authority's oversight. School systems in a number of cities are beginning to cast themselves in the same role, overseeing schools run by a range of educational entrepreneurs from both within their systems, and without. Their challenge will be to ensure the educational equivalent of keeping the planes running on time and accident-free.

Thank you.

*Disclosure: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a current funder of Education Sector.