Why We Formed the Education Leaders Council

By Lisa Graham Keegan and John Root

Not all educators are alike. More and more of us find ourselves dissenting from the established positions of the past three decades, positions that emphasize more money, complex federal programs, top-down regulations, and policies that defer to the interests of those in charge rather than those they are supposed to benefit--the children.

That widening dissent across the nation gave rise to the Education Leaders Council. Founded last September by 11 senior education officials from Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the ELC, admittedly, is not a typical education group. Organized to foster real education reform by pursuing an agenda that focuses on the needs of children and the rightful demands of parents, we are not obsessed with the goings-on of Washington. Neither are we enamored of its one-size-fits-all strategies for reform, nor confident in its silver-bullet solutions to our schools' problems, no matter how well-meaning those efforts might be. (See Education Week, Sept. 27, 1995.)

We are diverse and decentralized, and we don't agree on everything. But we do share the belief that education initiatives, policies, practices, and standards are strongest when generated from within individual communities and weakest when handed down from on high. We also believe that true education reforms are those that center on the needs and choices of families, empower parents and teachers to work in concert to chart the course of a child's education, increase accountability in America's schools, and restore local control over...