Call me cynical, but it was one of those things that would make just about anyone with any knowledge about education policy roll their eyes.
It was 2002, in the midst of the hoopla around the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act. Then-Secretary Rod Paige turned a temporary protective shelter at the entrance of the U.S. Department of Education into a “little red schoolhouse” to symbolize a new day of accountability at the agency.
The structure was “a reminder that we do not serve a faceless bureaucracy or an unchangeable system. We serve an ideal. We serve the ideal of the little red schoolhouse,” he said at an event to promote NCLB.
From an architectural standpoint, putting a bright red, pre-fab garden shed with a cartoonish sign against a gray concrete government building just looked ridiculous.
Given that Paige wasn’t exactly the most personable secretary—he tended to rule with an iron fist and initially had little respect for the civil servants—it wasn’t much of a motivator for employees, either. And then there were the problems with the law itself.
The NCLB schoolhouse finally came down this weekend, according to this article in the Washington Post, and now its demise is as symbolic as the structure itself.
The Obama administration and Secretary Arne Duncan are looking to “rebrand” NCLB, and one of the most obvious changes will be its name. Already, according to the Post, Education Department staff are referring to the law by its original name, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and references to NCLB have been removed from parts of the building.
“It’s like the new Coke. This is a rebranding effort,” Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, told the Post. “The Feng Shui people believe you need to take the roof off buildings to allow bad chi to escape. Let’s hope this helps.”
There’s a lot of work to be done, but this was a good start.
Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor
