President-elect Obama just announced Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools chief, as his secretary of education. In doing so he suggested that pragmatism, not ideology, will be his guiding principle in navigating the wars inside the Democratic Party over how to improve schools. “Let’s not be clouded by ideology,” he said, praising Duncan’s “deep pragmatism.”

Obama reiterated his support for innovations like merit pay for teachers and charter schools, yet also indicated he may sympathize with the incrementalists in the disrupter-versus-incrementalist debate that George Miller, the chair of the House’s education committee, laid out recently. “We’re not going to transform the schools overnight,” he said.

As Elizabeth wrote yesterday, the next place to watch is the sub-cabinet positions. Will Duncan be advised by reformer-favorites Jon Schnur and Andrew Rotherham, selections that would please current Department of Education officials? Will he be advised instead by Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford professor feared by reformers? Alternatively, could both sides of the debate get top spots, guaranteeing internal struggles that go on during the administration? “The battle that’s played out the last few weeks doesn’t just end now with this announcement,” a source who’s been involved in the war so far just told me. “I don’t see Randi just rolling over right now.”

The stakes are the future of the No Child Left Behind law, testing, and what kind of teacher-training changes the federal government encourages.

We are getting closer, but I do not think we are there yet. I define “there” as the moment at which you the readers have delivered me a single adjective that I can slap before “reformer” without feeling a twinge of remorse.

So, please send more entries! As you brainstorm adjectives, the best of the suggestions so far, which I’ve compiled below and which include superstar entrants including Joel Klein and Diane Ravitch, may help.

One set of suggestions included value judgments: A supporter said the “reformers” label is just fine, arguing that not all plans to improve public schools are equal, and so the best should be labeled reform while the others should… not be. Opponents came up with scathing descriptions like “teacher-bashers” and a reference to an Upper East Side bakery:

Up until the 1980’s there was a bakery on E. 86 Street in the old Yorktown/Germantown neighborhood. It was called the Kleine Kondeteri and they created light as air german confections. Maybe we should call them Klein and Co Bakery…light and airy, with the substance of a cloud.

Chancellor Joel Klein e-mailed to say he likes David Brooks’ description, “thoroughly modern do-gooders.” Klein also suggested another title: “the accountability and equity crowd.”

Diane Ravitch wrote to say the divide occurs along a liberal/conservative fault line:

the Klein group (including Schnur, Rotherham) are conservative reformers. They follow the business model of choice, accountability, deregulation, competition. Their ideas were born in the Reagan administration and nurtured at Heritage Foundation.

The BBA group are liberal reformers, who believe that we should make sure that kids and families have adequate social services, as well as a strong curriculum, effective instruction, dedicated teachers, good facilities, etc. This is the LBJ tradition.

Sarah Reckhow, a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, argued that the movement is defined by a “negative view of politics.” Reckhow pointed to Clay Risen’s Atlantic Monthly profile of Michelle Rhee, which lays out “two visions of big-city management” (Rhee and our gang subscribe to no. 2):

In one, city politics is a vibrant, messy, democratic exercise, in which both the process and the results have value. In the other, city politics is only a prelude, the way to install a technocratic elite that can carry out reforms in relative isolation from the give-and-take of city life.

Risen’s article is full of other useful descriptions of Rhee that also work for the larger movement: “a data-focused decision maker, less interested in politics as usual than a politics of results”; someone who sees herself “not as a politician but as a technocrat; a decider, not a negotiator”; an “obsessive e-mailer” with Wendy Kopp-like “zeal” for “message delivery.”

Keep the ideas coming!