All the buzz this weekend about the report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce will probably damp down fairly quickly, for a few reasons:
- It’s so mind-bogglingly “new” and “fresh” that it has the same title as what produced America’s Choice with “New” in front of it.
- It’s so mind-bogglingly “new” and “fresh” that the thing that interests Eduwonk Andy Rotherham is that it doesn’t call for new funding.
- There’s a huge inertia in the system that tends to bury redesign efforts (see Tyack and Cuban’s Tinkering toward Utopia).
- The Democrats’ political motivations will still drive things in very different directions.
- It’s being released close to the weekend in the middle of December.
- To read the whole thing, you have to pay for it.
That’s right: the well-funded National Center on Education and the Economy only has the executive summary online, and you have to pay $20 for the whole thing. In an age when everyone and her or his brother release PDF reports for the whole world to download and read, Marc Tucker is using a very old technique to push a radical redesign. My prediction: no one outside the Beltway and a few dozen people will read the report in full unless it’s available for free.
In other words, Tucker is Scrooging his own commission’s work.