A healthy look at education reform

The second-graders swarmed the park, running and tripping their way through three-legged races, face painting and tire swinging. Tasty Otter Pops capped the end-of-the-year class picnic.

An innocuous but perfect end to a school year that included some of the biggest moments in the history of public education. First up, the nearly $100 billion in federal stimulus funds. A close second was Washington state's education-reform law that promises to dictate — and hopefully improve — everything from school-staffing ratios to the quality of academic programs.

A similar stage is set at the national level where Congress will soon take up the 7-year-old federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Debates about education reform mirror ongoing ones about health care. Both systems are measured against other countries in ways fair and unfair. Talk about wasteful spending runs the danger of turning into a distracting search for waste. Waste is inevitable in humongous bureaucracies like public schools or hospitals, but it isn't sufficient in either situation to resolve budget challenges.

Education is science-based like medicine. Both rely on real outcomes to determine if something works or doesn't. A sense of figuring out what is working and spreading the success drives President Obama's carrot-stick approach on education reform. Basically, he's saying, "here's what the White House thinks will work and here's a mix of federal laws and a $4.35 billion fund to get states on board."

There is no shortage of experts or moneyed opinions about the direction our schools should take. Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, are longtime champions of revamping public education — particularly high schools. Add to the debate another ex-Microsoftie, Scott Oki, whose book, "Outrageous Learning," envisions a handcrafted education for each child.

In the middle are parents worrying that heightened academics are pushing children too hard. Rebellion is cloaked in trends such as unschooling and homework bans. These movements threaten to ignore an underpinning of education reform: hard-won brain research showing young minds capable of taking in far more than previously thought.

Childhoods aren't the only things people worry about getting lost in the push for education reform. An important study about arts in education challenges the widely held notion that the arts are being leached from our educational system. The National Assessment of Educational Progress study found the same level of arts offerings in schools as there was 11 years ago. If anything, the study found after querying 18,000 parents, kids are not experiencing art outside of school. Only a third of parents in the study with 5- to 17-year-olds said their children had attended a music, theater or dance performance outside school.

There's a lesson in all of this and it is that things aren't as bad as our fears would have us believe. Most days we know this. I knew it at the school picnic when my son found a stone shaped like an ancient Indian arrowhead. Like a freshly minted archaeologist, he fired off questions while cupping it in his hands. Had a Native American tribe lived in this park? Where were they now? Why did they leave behind such an important tool?

He scampered off in search of more "artifacts," before I could launch into a lecture on native tribes in the Northwest. Not that I would have anyway.

As we push and prod our educational bureaucracy into wholesale change, it is important to know our children are thriving. In the 21st century, it is time to update and reform an outdated system but a day in the park helps shape our perspective as we do so.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com