The misguided race to federalize education
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan call their $4 billion program of education reform grants the Race to the Top. A more accurate title would be the Race to Washington, because their program culminates a stunning decade in which school policy decisions have been wrested from local and state control to become matters of federal oversight. With the possible exception of Texas – where Gov. Rick Perry is resisting federal education grants with all their strings – no state has been left behind in the race to federalize education.
It’s easy to miss this important power shift because few of us notice, much less worry about, constitutional processes during a crisis. But, as presidential Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” because, he continued, it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before. And that’s precisely what is happening in education as we complete a transfer of money and power to Washington to oversee our schools, in violation of the 10th Amendment, a couple of hundred years of history and common sense.
There is a disturbing pattern of Washington using crises to consolidate power. First we declare war on a problem, which shifts things into crisis mode. Remember the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, the war on terror? Now we have a war on underperforming schools, so naturally Washington needs to step in and nationalize standards and tests.
It started when two former “education governors,” Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, took some of their education ideas to the White House and now, in the name of spending stimulus money and curing the ailing economy, we spend billions in federal grants on schools, all with policy strings attached.
You could call it bribery, offering cash-starved states extra billions if only they would follow federal curricular standards and testing regimes. You could definitely call it unconstitutional, because nothing in the Constitution gives the federal government a role in education, and the 10th Amendment says powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the people and the states. Even the highly elastic commerce clause doesn’t stretch far enough to cover education. To make matters worse, these federal grants are permitted to go directly to school districts, further eroding the role of states.
But beyond the constitutional question, why would we object to shifting educational control from local and state governments to Washington? For one thing, most of the promising experiments in K-12 educational reform – charter schools, parent councils or the creation of regional sub districts – shift power down toward local principals and parents, not up toward a more distant bureaucracy. For another, needing to win over local and state leaders one at a time slows the embrace of policy fads. For example, after the celebration when Sen. Edward Kennedy and Bush joined hands to “leave no child behind,” we were left instead with a problematic testing regime now desperately in need of repair. Further, education experts who have examined federal education standards say they are more lax than the ones most states now employ.
One of the problems with education, health care, federal regulation of banks and executive compensation: It’s an enormous expansion of the federal enterprise. And, like the New Deal enacted in the crisis of the Great Depression, it will never be turned back. The era of big government isn’t over; it’s just beginning.
Comments
Administering public education should be handled at the state and local levels where it belongs, as per our Constitution.
If we were to permit this we would have to accept that public education might look very different in different states and communities, and we would have some egregious midhandling of public education in some locales.
By the same token, we would have some superb schools and school systems, and we would have competition in a real sense. We would have a situation where people would strive to buy a home in a school district that provides the educational programs they value. We might have more meaningful community/teacher partnerships and involvement. We would be more likely to achieve the innovation we hope charter schools will bring. Sadly, they won't because charters are becoming big business, and big businesses are frequently top down organizations that do not value contributions from their workers who are in the trenches. Instead, they become KIPPs and Red Dots, increasingly large businesses that start with a model that worked in a particular community, that is exported to schools in cities and communities around the nation, governed by a CEO and a board. Not the recipe for innovation that is responsive to the particulars found in a given community or neighborhood.
The federal government has no role in education. Laws from IDEA, to NCLB, etc. should be dismantled, brick by brick. I would vote for the president who vows to do this and return the tax revenues to the taxed to be invested in their local communities.
I'd like the authors of this piece to ponder the remarkably effective way the U.S. responded to Sputnik in the late '50s. The federal government swung into action to finance a grassroots teachers' movement to modernize science education, by establishing National Science Foundation grants.
The private sector cannot be counted on to invest in educational innovation, therefore government has to underwrite it. Why not have each state govt. operate its own educational venture capital board? Without an effective R&D arm, public education can only deliver the "same old same old" year after year.
Clearly, innovation is a bottom-up process, so I agree that a top-heavy "reform" process is out of place. But would the authors shut down NSF based on Constitutional principles alone? What's missing in the article is a recognition that educational R&D is a harbinger of future competitiveness. The push should be to make Dept. of Ed.and the states adopt an entrepreneurial, generously-funded infrastructure to support the most innovative educators.
What more important than federal vs. state responsibility is that the job of funding ed R&D being done. Federal activism is one of the checks on state abdication of responsibility. Ponder how the U.S. mobilized after Sputnik, and won the space race and high-tech domination by the 1980s. This would not have been possible without both grass-roots leadership and a strong federal role in science and education.
If a person owns 10 percent of a company, would he have the power to dictate to the rest of the stockholders what the company can or cannot do? The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) contributes only between 8 and 11 percent of total education spending for K-12 schools nationwide, yet it – and Congress – continues to bully states and take away the states’ rights to run their own education programs.
Not only in the NCLB Act, but many lawmakers also regard provisions in the Race to the Top (RTT) regulations as a federal intrusion. Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-PA, said that in allowing states to earn points toward the RTT grant by taking part in the common standards movement, the DOE has “transformed [the common-core effort] from a voluntary, state-based initiative to a set of federal academic standards with corresponding federal tests.” Congress and the Secretary of Education have become the de facto national school board and superintendent. RTT regulations could be the final nail in the Constitutional coffin creating de facto national standards/curriculum and a national test.