School Leaders Testify on the Burden of Federal Intervention
Rachel Sheffield – At a House hearing on the burden of federal intervention into American schools last Tuesday, Representative Mike Kelly (R–PA) referred to federal officials as “the people that are … making the rules but have never played the game.”
Washington has continued to send burdensome mandates and regulations to local schools, Kelly noted, yet politicians are not the ones who have to deal with the consequences.
Kelly and other members of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education heard testimony from three school administrators who do have to face the consequences of federal overregulation—and from Heritage Director of Domestic Policy Jennifer Marshall.
As Marshall testified, since the federal government got into the business of regulating schools in the 1960s, the number of federal education programs has increased massively, bringing with them increasingly complex compliance burdens and red tape for schools to handle. Instead of using resources to focus on students, schools are forced to throw time, money, and manpower toward Washington’s demands. She noted:
“The proliferation of federal programs and the ever-increasing prescription of federally driven systemic reform distract school-level personnel and local and state leaders from serving their primary customers: students, parents, and taxpayers.”
Likewise, Robert Grimesey, superintendent of Orange County (Virginia) Public Schools, noted that the “culture of compliance” created by federal regulation “makes federal compliance an end in itself.” As a result, “it becomes very difficult to maintain … focus on the achievement and welfare of our children.”
It’s no surprise, then, that while federal education spending has tripled over the last four decades, student achievement and graduation rates have flatlined.
James Willcox, chief executive officer of Aspire Public Schools, gave an example of what he referred to as “overly burdensome” regulation. He noted that for schools “to qualify for or renew Title I funding requires copious amounts of paperwork,” requiring each employee to “fill out a personnel activity sheet each month.” Additionally, they must “outline their salary for that month and describe how much of that is from Title I.” On top of that, “each staff member and his/her principal have to sign these forms on a monthly basis.” They are also asked to submit two 30-page reports annually and carry out a “rigorous … auditing process.”
Beyond this, No Child Left Behind has “cost states an additional 7 million hours in paperwork at a cost of $141 million,” Marshall noted.
As Kelly succinctly concluded:
“We have overregulated and overburdened you so much with unneeded information and continue to do it. … My personal opinion is you need to have less government telling you what the rules should be: they don’t know, they’ve never done it.”
Instead of saddling states and districts with more federal regulations and red tape, the federal government needs to get out of the way of what works in schools. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with an education system that caters to Washington bureaucrats more than to parents and taxpayers.
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Comments
From my perspective as a state school board member, I want to express my agreement with the author. We need less, not more, federal control so why in the world would we want to cede control over all the major decisions in education to the feds via the Common Core State Standards Initiative? (Those who really understand it are calling it “NCLB on steroids.”) I can’t help but wonder if Rep. Kelly was thinking of NCEE’s Marc Tucker and Bill Gates when he spoke of people who have never played the game making the rules. It’s scary to realize what a huge role those two and Lou Gerstner of ACHIEVE have had in bringing new life to Hillary and Tucker’s old plans for “education reform.” Giving Tucker control over a new GED is the last straw.
It frustrates me that people such as Rep. Mike Kelly could testify at this Congressional hearing regarding burdensome paperwork mandated by the feds and not even mention the “elephant in the room — the Common Core Standards/Race to the Top.”
CCS/RTTT is a total federal mandate over every public school in states that adopt the CCS; but this time, the federal mandate will include a national database that will require schools to report every scintilla of intrusive information through interoperable, digitized standards set by the federal government.
Every formative (i.e., benchmarked, periodic) assessment that classroom teachers give to their students throughout the entire school year will have to be sent to the national database.
Of course, all summative assessments will have to be submitted to the national database so that individual teachers and states can be compared with one another. Can you imagine the amount of demographic and intrusive personal information the feds will require for this? Furthermore, who at the federal level is going to guard that personal and intrusive information? You can bet that hordes of “researchers” will want to get their hands on all that personal information to bring data mining to a new height!
I can see it all now: Because of the heavy and intrusive requirements placed on classroom teachers as only the federal government can dream up, teachers will be stuck behind their computers reporting all of this to the national database rather than actively teaching their students.
Who in this Congressional hearing had the knowledge and the courage to address the real problems behind CCS/RTTT head on?
What a refreshing article! When I was in school it was reading, writing, arithmetic, history and geography! We were not taught all the “social changing” garbage in the schools today. It seems our children are being indoctrinated into being good little one world citizens. They are not taught abstract thinking and just to do what everyone else does. No child left is lowering the standards so that those that do not want to make the effort to excel can feel good about themselves. What a total disaster! Oh and by the way, before the feds instituted the school lunch programs we had great food (not all this boxed processed garbage). We had PE and there were hardly any fat kids. The federal government needs to get OUT of our schools and let the communities, parents and teachers decide what is best!
From the peanut gallery: I totally agree with Betty Peters and Dixie. It’s all about US allowing government schools to brainwash the precious minds of our children and grandchildren into believing that God is really the State…just as Hitler did and communist countries do today. Wake up Parents!
Anyone involved in such abuse of power, is guilty before God (whether they believe in God or not).
I wonder how many states have truly studied if money can be saved by kicking the Feds and their onerous regulations out of their schools. Get back to basics, and let the kids who want to excel get to it. Someone mentioned the school food – this could be a huge cost savings. Let the kids on public assistance pack lunches along with everyone else. Why should states spend even more on redundant food programs for underprivileged kids? My mom packed lunches for 4 kids every day until we were old enough to do it ourselves. When I was in high school we had 2 class tracks: one for the kids who learned faster, and one for those who needed a little more help. It was totally unnoticed by us skulls of mush that we were divided up in that way, and it seemed to work out quite well.
Finally. We are looking at the burdens placed on schools by federal regulations and requirements. Thank you for this piece.
However, there is a huge gap in this story. It is amazing! An entire article about the over – regulation of public education without mention of special education. That arena alone takes up hours and hours of paperwork–drives teachers out of classrooms, and incubates litigation and the threat of litigation. As well, special education costs our schools some 20-40% of their budgets–yet we don’t know how much specifically goes to paperwork and regulatory compliance!
How about finally adding this arena to the mix.
[...] http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/thinks_tanks/151930.html [...]
Why not dictionary-based pronunciation and vocabulary tests? So far everyone I’ve polled agrees with the assdertion that Egyptian rioters and Japanese refugees interviewed on TV speak clearer, better articulated American English than many of our own college students. Phonetics, anyone?