Originally published in Kappan.
The U.S. Department of Energy may have slipped his mind, but Texas Gov. Rick Perry remembered during his debate debacle last fall that he would close the U.S. Department of Education if elected president. He had some help. Every 2012 Republican presidential candidate has railed against federal influence in the nation’s public schools, as have most other Republican presidential hopefuls since the department’s founding in 1980. Given the nation’s long tradition of local control of school policies, the department has been an easy target for Republican politicians playing to the anti-Washington inclinations of small-government conservatives. Ronald Reagan spent more than two years advocating the new department’s abolition after he won the White House, even as a commission created by his education secretary was drafting a national school reform manifesto.
But today’s Republican critiques of the federal role in education are not merely the predictable by-products of a presidential campaign. They’re part of a backlash from many points on the political spectrum against the emergence over the past three decades of national demands on local school systems.
It would be unfortunate if these critics prevailed at this important juncture in American education history. With the nation’s pursuit of equal educational opportunity far from fulfilled and workers increasingly facing global competition for their jobs, there’s a compelling case for defining public education’s aspirations nationally rather than locally.
The tradition of local control runs deep. The U.S. Constitution left authority over education in the hands of the states under the 10th Amendment, and the states passed that power to local school boards. For much of the nation’s history, local boards were solely responsible for school funding, standards, instruction, and results. They presided over an education enterprise that stressed low-level academics and vocational training for most students.
But faith in local school boards began to erode when the Reagan Administration’s reform commission and other influential voices in the early 1980s called on public schools to deliver a much more demanding education to a much wider range of students. Many local school systems failed to deliver, responding, for example, to calls for a stronger high school core curriculum with a myriad of watered-down courses like “Fundamentals of General Science” and “Informal Geometry.” Students earned science credits for classes in commercial food preparation and auto body repair.
As a result, we’ve spent three decades shifting strategic decision making in public education from the local to the national levels. Organizations of governors and state education officials, Republican and Democrat presidents, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and a host of convening organizations replaced local hegemony with more centralized standards, assessments, and accountability requirements — an evolution chronicled by education writer Robert Rothman in a new book, Something in Common (Harvard Education Press, 2011).
The logic of this transformation in American education is clear and compelling: National problems require national solutions. As commentator Matt Miller wrote in The Atlantic in 2008 about relying on local school boards to meet today’s educational challenges: “It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories.”
There have been mistakes along the way. The federal No Child Left Behind Act required states to set high standards, measure student performance, and hold schools accountable for results. But NCLB unintentionally gave states a strong incentive to lower rather than raise standards — by demanding that they judge schools on the percentage of students who met the standards and demanding that all groups of students clear the state hurdles by 2014 — and a number of states did just that.
But now the entire policy infrastructure constructed to promote a national vision of excellence and equity in public education is in danger of being swept away. Presidential politics, Tea Party libertarianism, a new balance of power in the Congress, and intense lobbying from state and local policy makers with large numbers of schools foundering under NCLB have combined to threaten the nascent national consensus on standards, assessments, and accountability.
Much of the pushback has been focused on the long-delayed Congressional reauthorization of NCLB. The Republican preference, reflected in legislation proposed last fall by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a former U.S. Secretary of Education, would be to dilute NCLB’s accountability demands rather than fix its flaws, leaving states to continue setting their own academic standards, giving them more flexibility on the amount of testing they do, and establishing their own passing scores while eliminating student performance targets.
Tom Harkin of Iowa, the Democratic leader on NCLB in the Senate in his role as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, last fall co-sponsored an NCLB reauthorization bill with the ranking Republican on the committee, Mike Enzi of Nebraska, that would retain NCLB’s annual testing and subgroup reporting requirements, but shift more authority over standards, testing, and accountability — including sanctions and performance targets — to the states.
But reauthorization legislation isn’t likely to get through Congress until after the 2012 elections. That leaves the Obama Administration with authority to reshape NCLB through regulations in control of the school governance debate during 2012; and the administration has sought to use its regulatory powers to protect and even extend the nascent national vision of quality public education.
There’s a compelling case for defining public education’s aspirations nationally rather than locally.
It has offered states a deal: waiving their obligations to comply with some of NCLB’s more onerous (and impractical) demands, including the law’s requirements that states judge schools’ performance by how many students achieve state standards each year, that students achieve state standards by 2014, and that every school failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress face prescribed sanctions. In return, states must agree to a number of standards and accountability measures.
They must measure student achievement as frequently as now required by NCLB, but with higher standards and tougher tests. They must continue to report the performance of different groups of students, eventually measuring schools on how much students progress in a year rather than how many of them hit a state standard. (This shift levels the playing field for schools and makes universal accountability far fairer and much more politically palatable). And states must fix their worst schools while establishing meaningful awards for high achievers as a way of making accountability less punitive. In effect, the Administration has sought to preserve NCLB’s core strengths while making the law more workable.
At the same time, the Obama Administration has used its signature Race to the Top competition to promote the voluntary national Common Core State Standards in reading and math along with complementary national tests being readied over the next several years by two consortia of states with federal funding. The bulk of the states already have sought waivers.
The White House and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who called the Harkin NCLB bill a “retreat from reform” last fall, are betting heavily (more info about the service that is preferred for it) that requiring states to publicize schools’ annual performance and the threat of severe sanctions for the lowest performers will be sufficient to spur an A-game from every school in the absence of NCLB’s more widespread sanctions. It’s a practical solution to the politically untenable problem of having 80% of the nation’s public schools labeled failures under NCLB.
The Obama strategy also puts tremendous pressure on the new voluntary national tests to ensure that states implement common core standards with fidelity. Schools tend to teach what’s tested, and while most states have signed up with one or both of the consortia building the new tests and the tests are supposed to be aligned with the standards, there’s no way of knowing whether states will actually administer the tests — which are likely to be more expensive than current standardized tests — or where they’ll set passing scores.
One thing is certain: The tests are likely to be tougher than the NCLB tests they’re replacing and students’ scores are likely to be lower. So, the only way to avoid a repeat of the NCLB debacle of low standards and vast numbers of schools labeled failures is to rate schools to a significant degree on the basis of students’ annual academic growth. That way schools get credit for educating their students, regardless of where students start on the achievement curve.
Conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats, and organizations representing local educators are likely to throw up their hands and argue that school reform can’t possibly come only from the outside, via external standards and accountability. They’re right. Local educators and school boards have to buy into reform if it’s to be successful, since they’re the ones implementing it.
But that’s a lot different than expecting 13,600 local school systems to build an internationally competitive system of public education without national direction. “Local control” may be an expedient political slogan, but decades of evidence suggest it won’t get us where we need to go in public education. We’re in a new era. We need a new model.