In February 2009, newly appointed secretary of education Arne Duncan removed an enduring image of the Bush administration's push for education reform: the little red schoolhouses stationed outside the Department of Education. Former U.S. secretary of education Roderick Paige had described the schoolhouses as "a symbol that every child must be taught and every child must learn." Others have used the red schoolhouse to represent an idyllic vision of local control, back-to-basics instruction, and rugged individualism. Still others see it as a symbol of community involvement and the cradle of progressive education. In Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press, 2009), Jonathan Zimmerman documents how educators and policymakers continue to invoke the red schoolhouse as a talisman on all sides of heated education debates.

As the Obama administration readies for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, pushes for national standards, and implements the Race to the Top Fund, is it time to reconsider which vestiges of the red schoolhouse model we should maintain and which we should discard? More broadly, as the march toward increased federal involvement proceeds and the latest generation of reforms takes root, does a cultural attachment to the red schoolhouse prevent us from rethinking how we organize and govern public schools? Please join Jonathan Zimmerman, Education Sector cofounder and publisher Andrew J. Rotherham; Brown University professor Carl F. Kaestle, and Levy Economics Institute of Bard College professor Ellen Condliffe Lagemann as they discuss these and other questions. AEI research fellow Andrew Kelly will moderate.