David Driscoll, the celebrated former commissioner of education in Massachusetts, writes that relinquishment of the federal role in K-12 school reform in favor of more state and local control is like “giving the keys back to the drivers who caused the accident in the first place.”1
Is it realistic to expect the 50 states and 15,000 local districts to mend their ways? Chapter 6 pointed out that states and local districts couldn’t be counted on to equalize funding for schools nationwide. There’s also no realistic chance that they will, left to their own devices, pay attention to the letter and spirit of IDEA and not mislabel struggling learners as students with disabilities. Or that they will finally pay more than lip service to the legal justification and evidence-based necessity for RTI.
According to the old saying generally attributed to Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that definition, our nation is insane if after generations of unequal educational opportunity and educationally abused children, we are still willing to trust state and local school systems to reform themselves. Here’s a brief history lesson that proves it.
Local control was a mainstay—if not a secular religion—throughout the evolution of free public schooling in the U.S. As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in a 1974 decision of the Supreme Court: “No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools.”2
But that faith in local control has proven unequal to the task of equal educational opportunity. Few parents (but many grandparents) have experienced what public schools were like in the U.S. prior to the 1950’s. But you have a good historical perspective. You know that separate-but-equal schooling was educationally and morally shameful. Still, it persisted until the U.S. Supreme Court unmasked and invalidated it. The Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling in 1954 marked a turning point. Soon thereafter, the civil rights movement and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society crusade led to Congressional passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which eventually morphed into the No Child Left Behind Act and then the Every Student Succeeds Act. These acts asserted a strong federal role, linked to sizable federal aid to poor schoolchildren in poor communities.
The same quest for equal educational opportunity fueled the enactment by Congress in 1974 of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the original predecessor of IDEA. Its federal mandates sought to guarantee children with disabilities a “free and appropriate education,” and tied federal dollars to compliance with the law.
But there was little payoff on these federal investments. Public schools faltered nationwide. Their failure made us, as cited earlier, “A Nation at Risk,” the famous title of the 1983 landmark report of President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education.
The nation’s risk cried out for national action. Policymakers began to realize that state and local school systems were circumventing federal mandates and inefficiently spending the federal funds. (Political liberals like me bear a heavy share of the fault for this; we were asleep at the switch or afraid to blow the whistle, fearing that the federal aid would be reduced or repealed altogether.) Moreover, state and local officials continued to do too little on their own to confront the decline in student achievement and prepare American children to compete in a global economy. State and local school districts were still going their separate ways, but headed nowhere.
And so, over the 1980s, bipartisan support grew for federal steps to raise academic standards and student performance. That movement culminated in the passage in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB’s enactment was a political miracle. From the start, the bill was widely regarded as the most radical federal assault ever on state and local control. Yet, in a Nixon-goes-to-China moment, President George W. Bush fought for it with the aid of Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy. Confronting Republicans’ abhorrence of a federal role in public schools, President Bush declared educational excellence to be a national issue, and “change will not come by disdaining or dismantling the federal role.”3
The federal role under NCLB was to hold states accountable for student performance. It required states to impose high academic standards and tests, and to break down the results by poverty, race, and students with disabilities. It also sought to compel states to close or turnaround failing schools.
But the backlash came fast and furious. The education establishment feared high standards and rigorous tests would expose how little students were actually learning. Individual states feared that they would look bad compared to other states. Moreover, egged on by educators, parents—particularly those in the upper income ranks—protested that their children were being over-tested and over-pressured. There was some truth to those charges. However, no one in the education establishment pointed out that the feds were not mainly to blame. Under NCLB, states and local school systems had great flexibility to set their own the testing regimens; it was their own poor choices and mismanagement of testing that provoked the furor.
No wonder there was a bipartisan political cave-in. NCLB had weaknesses, like unrealistic goals for student progress. But its fatal flaw was counterintuitive and much deeper: NCLB didn’t give too much power to federal education officials, but too little. It left states and local districts with the discretion to set their own standards and tests, leading to the infamous “race to the bottom” in which states lowered standards and dumbed down tests. To thwart this, U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan cajoled and coerced states to adopt rigorous national (Common Core) standards and tests.
It seemed like a good idea to those of us who support the aims of NCLB. But in retrospect, Duncan’s aggressiveness only added fuel to the political fire. The ferocious counterattack was led, predictably, by conservatives who oppose any federal role. But they were aided and abetted by education progressives and liberal teachers unions who resist accountability in general and testing in particular. The rallying cry was to emasculate NCLB, and even before presidential candidate Donald Trump bashed Common Core and testing, the political die had been cast.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), enacted at the end of President Obama’s tenure with bipartisan backing, embodies this educational realpolitik. It severely reduces the authority of the U.S. education secretary, virtually guaranteeing state and local autonomy over standards, testing and sanctions. Gary Orfield, a preeminent expert on the intersection of civil rights and public school policy, observes that NCLB was “very assertive and interventionist,” while ESSA strips federal funding of its “leverage for any national purpose.”4
William J. Bennett, a conservative bigwig and former U.S. secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, crowed that “for years, states, districts, superintendents and teachers have had their focus distracted and hands tied by burdensome federal regulation. For years they have been asking for relief. Now they have it.”5
But how much good will they do with it? In all likelihood, it will be “deja vu all over again.” History is not on the side of those who put their faith in state and local control. Just as the states’ “race to the bottom” undermined the lofty intent of NCLB, and just as states and local districts did not desegregate or educate students with disabilities prior to national mandates, so they are unlikely to end the educational abuse of struggling learners unless forced to by national law.
Let’s face it: the cherished principle of state and local control over public education still exerts a powerful influence on public sentiment. No matter that it defies logic and common sense. After all, as noted earlier, how does it make common sense or serve the national purpose for state and local school districts to go their own way over what students learn and how to measure whether they have learned it? Are the foundational skills of reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic different in one state than another? Is science different in red states and blue states? (Well at least until the age of Trump, it wasn’t.)
And with particular focus on struggling learners, is there any rhyme or reason why different states should have different definitions of learning disabilities and different percentages of students in special education?
Zealots for state rights are also wrong by posing the issue of local control as an all or nothing proposition. Inequalities nationwide, many of which particularly discriminate against poor and minority children, can be remedied without eliminating much of the role of state and local educators. Federal laws need only set a floor, not a ceiling, for state and local standards, tests and instructional best practices. Compared to how other countries govern schools, the U.S. is an educationally underdeveloped nation. According to the leading international authority on comparisons between U. S. schools and high-performing schools in other countries, other countries have far more centralized governance.6
And let’s not forget that it is not just our national experience with K-12 policy that is so instructive and appalling. Consider the national track record on any basic rights of poor and minority families and children. Think about Social Security. Think about Medicare. Think about Medicaid, Food Stamps and Unemployment Insurance. Think about laws that protect the environment, occupational safety and voting rights. Think about laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual preference, disability and age.
Then try to think of which, if any, of these, did not come about as a result of federal legislation or federal court decisions that overcame the inaction of state and local governments.
This is a short chapter but federal action is a tall order that must be clearly understood and embraced. If the educational abuse of struggling learners is to be stopped, there must be a federal right to an education that will enable struggling learners to succeed. The next chapter lays out various means to bring this about.