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By ‘No Federal Control’ We Mean ‘Yes, Federal Control’
People are starting to fight back against the sneaky push for nationalized curricula, and folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are revealing their true colors in response.
Yesterday, Fordham President Chester Finn and Executive VP Michael Petrilli responded to the national standards “counter-manifesto” released on Monday, and they were none too happy with its signatories, accusing them of peddling “half truths, mischaracterizations, and straw men.” What seemed to aggravate them most of all was the assertion that “common” standards would lead to de facto federal curricula, something they say neither they nor their national-standards loving friends — including the Obama administration — want.
At this point, who’s buying this? True, it’s possible that Fordham and friends might really not want a federal curriculum — I can’t read minds – but the federal government through Race to the Top has already bribed states into adopting the Common Core standards; Washington is paying for the development of national tests; and the Obama administration’s “blueprint” for reauthorizing No Child Left Behind would make national standards the law’s accountability backbone. So even if you don’t want this to lead to a federal curriculum, that is exactly what you are going to get. If the feds use money taken from taxpayers to force states to adopt national standards and tests, and if Washington rewards or punishes states based on those tests, then you have a federal curriculum. I mean, if it walks like a duck…
The good news in Fordham’s response, perhaps, is that they appear to have responded to my challenge to loudly renounce any federal funding for national standards and related material if they really want this to be voluntary. Unfortunately, they’ve responded with a resounding “no”: Finn and Petrilli write that “we have no particular concern with the federal government…helping to pay” for the creation of curricular guides and other material and activities to go with national standards.
This happiness to keep the feds paying pretty much puts the final rip in the tissue-thin “voluntarism” ruse. But if you’re not satisfied with my analysis, try this post over at Jay Greene’s blog, in which Jay reproduces a terrific fill-in-the-blanks analysis of Fordham’s tricky prose by Charles Miller, former chair of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and a very astute observer of education politics. Let’s just say, he writes what I suspect everyone who is familiar with the federal government — and Fordham – is thinking.
Say It, Joel, Say It!
By almost all indications, former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein knows first-hand the pernicious power of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs in government schooling. He knows how political control of schools is skewed mightily to the side of teachers’ unions, administrators’ associations, and all of the other power brokers representing the adults whose livelihoods come from the schools, to the huge detriment of the students, parents, and taxpayers the schools are supposed to serve. As he bleakly describes public schooling reality in a new Atlantic piece:
To comprehend the depth of the problem, consider one episode that still shocks me. Starting in 2006, under federal law, the State of New York was required to test students in grades three through eight annually in math and English. The results of those tests would enable us, for the first time, to analyze year-to-year student progress and tie it to individual teacher performance—a metric known in the field as “teacher value-added.” In essence, you hold constant other factors—where the students start from the prior year, demographics, class size, teacher length of service, and so on—and, based on test results, seek to isolate the individual teacher’s contribution to a student’s progress. Some teachers, for example, move their class forward on average a quarter-year more than expected; others, a quarter-year less. Value-added isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s surely worth considering as part of an overall teacher evaluation.
After we developed data from this metric, we decided to factor them into the granting of tenure, an award that is made after three years and that provides virtual lifetime job security. Under state law at the time, we were free to use these data. But after the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, objected, I proposed that the City use value-added numbers only for the top and bottom 20 percent of teachers: the top 20 percent would get positive credit; the bottom would lose credit. And even then, principals would take value-added data into account only as part of a much larger, comprehensive tenure review. Even with these limitations, the UFT said “No way,” and headed to Albany to set up a legislative roadblock.
Seemingly overnight, a budget amendment barring the use of test data in tenure decisions materialized in the heavily Democratic State Assembly. Joe Bruno, then the Republican majority leader in the State Senate, assured me that this amendment would not pass: he controlled the majority and would make sure that it remained united in opposition. Fast-forward a few weeks: the next call I got from Senator Bruno was to say, apologetically, that several of his Republican colleagues had caved to the teachers union, which had threatened reprisals in the next election if they didn’t get on board.
As a result, even when making a lifetime tenure commitment, under New York law you could not consider a teacher’s impact on student learning. That Kafkaesque outcome demonstrates precisely the way the system is run: for the adults. The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially.
And this was no isolated incident for Klein. Indeed, in his Atlantic treatise he goes on to give many more miserable anecdotes of hopelessness from his tenure in the Big Apple, and eventually identifies the problem right at its core:
National Curriculum Battle Joined
Remember several weeks ago, when the Albert Shanker Institute released a manifesto calling for the creation of detailed curriculum guides to go with the national standards and tests being pushed and pulled through the back doors of states across the country? Apparently, that was the last straw for a lot of education analysts and policymakers, especially folks like Williamson Evers of the Hoover Institution (and Bush II Education Department); one-time Fordham Institute state-standards evaluator Sandra Stotsky; and Foundation for Education Choice senior fellow Greg Forster. Those three, along with a few others, organized a counter-manifesto being released today, a 100-plus signatory reply which, according to the group’s press release, declares that:
- These efforts are against federal law and undermine the constitutional balance between national and state authority.
- The evidence doesn’t show a need for national curriculum or a national test for all students.
- U.S. Department of Education is basing its initiative on inadequate content standards.
- There is no research-based consensus on what is the best curricular approach to each subject.
- There is not even consensus on whether a single “best curricular approach” for all students exists.
These points certainly sum up many of the major problems with the national standards drive, a drive that has been shrouded in half-truths about “voluntary” standards adoption; shorthand pleas for federal coercion; and what appears to be a camel’s-nose-under-the-tent strategy to ultimately impose a detailed, de facto federal curriculum. There is more to the problem than the summary points above cover — for instance, the Constitution gives the federal government no authority whatsoever to meddle in school curricula — but for a consensus-driven document, this new and desperately needed cannon blast against national standards is very welcome.
For a great explanation of why the anti-manifesto ringleaders did what they did, check out Greg Forster’s entry on the Witherspoon Institute’s blog. He hits lots of important points — especially that nationalizing curricula is a surefire way to fuel all-encompassing social strife — and I would quibble with only one thing:
My own view is that the root of the problem is the government monopoly on schools. Governmental monopolization of the education of children guarantees that all our religious and moral differences will be constantly politicized. School choice, in addition to delivering better academic performance, seems to me to be the only way to end the scorpions-in-a-bottle cultural dynamic and create space for shared citizenship across diverse religious and moral views.
But that’s an argument for another day.
Here’s where I think Greg is incorrect: Choice is not an argument for another day. It is the argument for this day.
Until all parents have real, full choice they will have no option but to demand that higher levels of government force intractable lower levels to provide good education. It won’t work — thanks to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs all levels of government are dominated by teachers’ unions and administrators’ associations that will never let tough accountability and high standards rein – but it is all that parents can do absent the ability to take their children, and tax dollars, somewhere else. That means choice is essential right now, because it is the only way to take power away from special-interest dominated government and give it to the people the schools are supposed to serve. In other words, it is the only option that will actually work, obliterating the special-interest hammerlock, imposing accountability to customers, and when coupled with freedom for educators unleashing competition, specialization, innovation, and constant upward pressure on standards. In other words, it will do all those things that national standardizers emptily and illogically promise that their reform will do, and much, much more.
Hazy-Eyed Hunter Prepares to Fire on For-Profits
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education sent proposed — and highly controversial — “gainful employment” regulations to the Office of Management and Budget for review, the first step in the process of officially publishing them. The regulations — assuming they haven’t changed drastically from previous proposed versions — would limit the ability of students in vocational postsecondary programs to access federal financial aid if those programs produce debt burdens the regs deem too high, or salaries they deem too low. The exact details on what constitutes ”too high” and “too low” should be revealed soon.
The big problem with this is that it is aimed at easily abused for-profit schools while leaving the rest of waste-drenched higher education untouched. But another problem, the very real risk of bureaucratic bungling, also looms large. Indeed, a story out just today from California notes that the state greatly overestimated how much it would save by cutting Cal Grant eligibility for students at schools that showed up on a recent U.S. Department of Education list of institutions with high three-year loan default rates. The problem: The Education Department had accidentally calculated three-year-and-three-month rates, significantly overstating defaults. In fairness to the Department, it did say the list was unofficial, so California officials also bear a lot of the blame; but it sure doesn’t bode well that the Department would publish something so flawed.
There is a much more effective, and less dangerous, way to hold schools accountable than to have the federal government set blanket, hyper-politicized rules and try to enforce them. It is to have customers consume higher education using their own money rather than having Washington send tens-of-billions of inflation-fueling, extravagance-enabling dollars to students and schools every year. The problem is, that would just make it too hard to buy votes by falsely promising great education for all.
A Message From The Ivory Tower’s Friendly Neighborhood ‘Reactionary’
There is a reason “ivory tower” has a negative connotation, evoking images of effete snobs walled away in ivory opulence as they look down on the commoners and demand outsized respect. The image, unfortunately, is occasionally accurate for individual academics, and almost always so for the whole of academia, which is funded by massive subsidies taken from taxpayers, but walled off by claims that no price can or should ever be affixed to the “public good” it produces. Add to this its professorial residents often demanding limitless freedom — and job security – to say whatever they want about such evil pursuits as “big business” that generate the tax dollars that keep the tower cushy and its jobs secure, and disdain for the tower is well deserved.
The distasteful side of academia is on display in an article by journalism professor Robert Jensen, in which he responds to a recent Texas Public Policy Foundation conference that he attended, and in which I participated. And by “I,” I mean Neal McCluskey, a “reactionary” ideologue suffering from “libertarian fantasies,” to use the good professor’s insightful and even-handed characterization of me and my positions. He also throws in a guaranteed lefty applause line about the free market causing the recent economic downturn — who the heck are Fannie and Freddie? — and in so doing displays why many people see academia not as a haven for objective truth-seekers, but a castle for axe-grinders who want to place themselves high above the people and institutions they just don’t like.
This would perhaps be palatable if our betters sought to fund their lofty positions through the voluntary contributions of others. But many don’t. No, they insist that they should be able to do and say whatever they want using money extracted from taxpayers — including taxpayers they plan to rhetorically assault — whether those taxpayers like it or not. In an equal society — which so many of them, including Prof. Jensen, say they’re defending – they insist that they should be most equal of all.
Perhaps the most ironic part of Prof. Jensen’s commentary is that in his apparent haste to ignore my message and demean the messenger, he missed that he and I are likely in agreement about whether No Child Left Behind-esque rules and regulations should be applied to colleges and universities. It seems he just infers that my arguing that ending subsidies is the key to meaningful accountability means that I support such efforts as those being pitched by TPPF to impose transparency and accountability on public Texas colleges. I offered no such support, and though I would like to see TPPFs proposals tried in some schools, I would never demand that they be imposed by government. Unfortunately, it appears Prof. Jensen just didn’t do due journalistic diligence by researching what I’ve written on these topics before branding me a bad guy, including taking in my opposition to standardized testing proposals that emanated from the Spellings Commission, or, for that matter, reading my writings on NCLB.
In the end, all I want is for professors to be on the same starting level as the average person: having to get the voluntary support of others to do their vaunted work. But too many academics, like Prof. Jensen, don’t seem to care for that deal. They want to take your money whether you like it or not, lest they lose the ability to tell you how terrible you are.
He Should Have Stuck with the Birth Certificate
I couldn’t help but notice that in his remarks to the press about releasing his birth ceritifcate, President Obama reiterated his conviction that Washington needs to ”invest in education.”
He should have stuck with the birth certificate issue. Unlike his belief in the power of dumping dollars on “education,” he actually has some decent evidence of his natural born U.S. citizenship.
Tight on Standards, Loose Grip on Reality
As promised (actually, a week later than promised) I have read the Fordham Institute “Briefing Book” for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act. As expected, it’s big on trumpeting national standards, and squishy on almost everything else. Perhaps most aggravating, though, is how loose it is in characterizing the views of those of us at the Cato Institute, who apparently are part of the big group of education analysts who love the idea of Washington lavishing money on education but are, presumably, too blinkered to want to get results for it:
The local controllers. These folks, led by conservative and libertarian think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, want Uncle Sam, for the most part, to butt out of education policy—but to keep sending money. They see NCLB as an aberrant overreach, an unprecedented (and perhaps unconstitutional) foray into the states’ domain. Many within this faction also favor reform, particularly greater parental choice of schools, but at day’s end their federal policy position resembles that of the system defenders. They want to keep federal dollars flowing, albeit at a much more modest rate than those on the left; but they want to remove the accountability that currently accompanies these monies. They have given up on Uncle Sam as an agent for positive change, period. And they have enormous confidence that communities, states, and parents, unfettered from and unpestered by Washington, will do right by children.
Where, exactly, has someone from Cato written that Uncle Sam should keep dropping ducats on education? Certainly not here, where I call for complete elimination of federal involvement in education save civil rights enforcement, and a return of all federal education funds to taxpayers. You won’t find it here, where Chris Edwards calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and zeroing out all its spending. And you won’t discover it here, where Andrew Coulson and I propose that “NCLB not be reauthorized and that the federal government return to its constitutional bounds by ending its involvement in elementary and secondary education.”
Sadly, reporting the truth doesn’t appear to be as important to Fordham as producing a strawman — some group that’s portrayed as totally irrational, allowing Fordham to show how ”realistic” they are by coming up with relatively reasonable sounding policy proposals. It’s a grating, superficial tactic employed by Fordham that Jay Greene and his gang have long harped on.
The funny thing is, in the end there isn’t anything particularly realistic about Fordham’s proposal. Basically, Fordham would have the federal government force all states to adopt the Common Core standards — while adding science and history standards — to get back money that came from their citizens to begin with, or adopt standards that some state-federal hybrid panel of “experts” deemed “just as rigorous as the Common Core.” This would somehow prevent “an unwarranted intrusion by the federal government in state matters.” Because, of course, it is much less intrusive to have an option of having some federally mandated Frankenstein’s panel tell you if the standards you came up with are as good as the federal standards, or just having the feds set one standard.
Then there’s Fordham’s accountability — er, “transparency” — proposal, which would force states to annually spit out “reams” of data on outcomes “sliced and diced in every way imaginable.” Once the tons of data confetti are dumped, Fordham would rely on public pressure from seeing the mess to force reform. And how would the public force said reform? Don’t worry about it — “realism” dictates that all we need are national curriculum standards, testing, and data, data, data!
So, sadly, Fordham’s “realism” fails where it always seems to fail: In ignoring actual reality. Thanks to the phenomenon of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs that is a basic part of representative government, the people who benefit most directly from specific government policies will be most heavily involved in the politics behind those policies, and will bend them to serve themselves, not the “public good.” In the case of education, the people employed by the schools — the teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, etc. — have the most power, and will gut anything used to hold them accountable, just as they have for decades. And there is nothing — nothing — in the Fordham proposal that will keep this from happening again, no matter how centralized the standards or humongous the data dumps. Indeed, centralized standards provide one-stop shopping for special interests!
Only one thing breaks the concentrated benefits, diffuse costs conundrum, and it is taking government out of the equation and forcing educators to earn the money of customers. But for Fordham and others who, ultimately, seem to want to dictate what every child must learn, that is a bit of realism much too far.
Will Indiana School Choice Infringe Upon Liberty?
There’s more bad news about the school choice bill awaiting Gov. Mitch Daniels’ signature in Indiana. Yesterday, Adam Schaeffer wrote about its possible negative fiscal impact if coupled with the state’s tax credit program. Perhaps just as concerning is the law’s requirement that private schools prove that they are sufficiently “American” to participate in the program. This interview with State Sen. Carlin Yoder (R), one of the bill’s sponsors, captures the sentiment behind the requirement:
Perhaps the problem here is that, in all of the education policy community’s obsession with test scores and dollars, we’ve lost sight of what school choice should ultimately be about: freedom. It should be about creating an education system that allows people to choose for themselves what values they will embrace and how they will live, not one that allows the state to dictate — either through hard compulsion or soft bribery — those things. Giving the state that power, though the state might employ it only rarely or gently, is still ultimately giving the state authority over our thoughts and expressions, and that is the basis for, potentially, a most thorough of tyrannies.
There is great irony in this aspect of Indiana’s soon-to-be law, which would curb the ability of educators to freely teach as they please, and of parents and students to freely seek out the education they want. As Sen. Yoder says, to “make sure the students appreciate our great history in the U.S.,” the law would curb that thing that has made it great: individual liberty.
Of course, the very understandable fear animating this is that unless taught the importance of freedom as children, adults will sacrifice liberty. But government coercion to prevent that, even if well intentioned, doesn’t appear to produce the desired results — liberty is sacrificed without even getting the hoped for ends.
According to a recent summary of research compiled by University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf on the transmission of “civic values” such as political tolerance, civic knowledge, and even proclivity to perform community service, private-school students come out on top. Why? Most likely because in public schooling people holding lots of different opinions on what constitutes proper “American” values are forced to pay for a single system of government schools, and hence to fight over what the system teaches. All too often the road to peace is to teach, well, nothing, or close to it, in order to anger as few people as possible. Private schools, in contrast, tend to hold set, coherent values parents agree to when choosing them, and it appears that if uncoerced, people will choose to have their children educated to be good citizens.
School choice must be about freedom — the ultimate American value — not, as Indiana is on the verge of doing, undermining liberty in the name of protecting it.
No Profile in Courage Here, Either
Yesterday, speaking at Facebook headquarters, President Obama assessed the guts of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and other congressional Republicans and concluded that their deficit reduction plan isn’t “particularly courageous.” That might be accurate – their plan lacks specificity and could target a lot more for elimination — but it’s pretty rich for the President to throw out such a conclusion. After all, his whole strategy appears to be the bankruptingly lame-but-safe crying of doom for cute kids and other supposedly defenseless people no matter what the size of the proposed cut to a social program or how ineffective the program has been. That, and the constant lamentation that “the rich” – a small and therefore electorally weak group of voters – don’t pay their fair share. (And the constitutionality of federal programs? That doesn’t even get a mention.)
Representative of this cowardly course is the President’s mantra about “investing” more in education-related programs despite blaring evidence that the programs don’t work or, as is the case with federal student aid, actually make the problem they’re supposed to solve much worse. But the President wants votes — like most politicians, he wants lots of people to think he’s giving them great stuff for free – so he’s not doing the mildly courageous thing and telling people “look, these programs don’t work, we have a titanic debt, and I’m going to cut things that might sound good but aren’t.” No, he’s doing things like going to community colleges and, in front of cheering groups of students, talking about mean Republicans and how he wants to protect students just like them by keeping the federal dollars flowing.
That’s no profile in courage, nor is it a responsible way to deal with the federal government’s gigantic problems.
All You Have to Do Is Let Go of the Monopoly
I don’t have to prove my bona fides when it comes to opposing top-down, standards-based education reforms. I’ve been highly critical of the No Child Left Behind Act; very aggressive in attacking the reckless drive for national curriculum standards; and have repeatedly noted the importance of educator autonomy. So when you read the following, keep in mind that it is definitely not coming from a command-and-control aficionado: The weakest position in today’s big education war is the one opposed to both standards-based reforms and school choice. It’s the one enunciated yesterday by the Washington Post’ s Valerie Strauss, but which is most firmly staked out by historian Diane Ravitch. It’s the position that essentially boils down to “don’t touch my local, teacher-dominated monopoly!”
Why is this so weak? Because it gives parents and taxpayers — the people who pay for public education and whom the system is supposed to serve — the fewest avenues to get what they want out of the schools.
Outraged over your neighborhood school because it is dangerous, the staff apathetic, and the building crumbling? Too bad — you get what you’re given and can’t even appeal to a higher level of government. And as we’ve seen in far too many places where the residents aren’t rich enough to exercise choice by buying expensive homes in better districts — the District of Columbia, Compton, Detroit, etc. — Ravitch’s utopian vision of school districts as places where “people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors” is just so much gauzy rhapsodizing. Reality is much harsher.
Of course, there are gigantic, fatal flaws with the standards-and-accountability movement, and people like Ravitch and Strauss have very compelling reasons for concern.
The standards movement, for one thing, is completely reliant on standardized testing. Indeed, it is heading for a single, national test, despite well-established evidence that tests are highly constrained in what they can tell us about learning.
In addition, as Ravitch and others regularly lament, the standards movement seems to be dominated by present and former business leaders who have tended to treat education as just another uniform-widget production problem. But children are not uniform; they are individual human beings with widely varied interests, rates of maturity, educational starting points, and life goals. But that never seems to enter into the standards equation, rendering it wrong from the start. Add to this that standards-based reformers tend to treat the education system as a single entity to be engineered, rather than an industry in which schools are the firms and competition is essential for sustained innovation and improvement, and standards-based reforms are as hopeless as teacher-dominated mini monopolies.
Unfortunately, top-down standardizers seem unlikely to join the fold of the one reform that includes both necessary educator autonomy and powerful accountability to parents: educational freedom. Yes, they often like school choice as long as government dictates what chosen schools teach, but they don’t embrace real freedom. Perhaps, though, the Ravitches and Strausses of the world can be brought on board. They won’t be able to keep the local monopolies they cherish, but they’ll be able to get most of what they want: much less stultifying uniformity; considerably more freedom for teachers; and the flourishing of communities, though communities based on shared norms and values, not mere physical proximity.
The flimsiest position in our great education debate is the one held by opponents of both top-down accountability and educational freedom. But if they’ll remove the rose-tinted glasses through which they see local public schooling, there is an option that should appeal to them, one that injects essential parent power and competition into education while giving educators the professional autonomy they crave. It is school choice — educational freedom — and it is the reform that wins the great education debate.
‘You’re Crazy’: What Edu-analysts Say to Avoid Reality
Over the last few days the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has been blogging about one of his favorite topics: “tight-loose” coupling of education power. Basically, the federal government should be “tight” on performance requirements and “loose” on how to meet them. I don’t, though, want to get into that right now. Next week, Fordham will be releasing a proposal for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that, Mike promises, will show how to be simultaneously tight and loose, and I’ll have much to say then. But today I want to use a New Republic article by Education Sector’s Kevin Carey, which Petrilli critiques in his tight-loose tipoff, to illustrate what those of us who’d like to actually apply the Constitution to federal education policy are up against: the assumption of craziness.
This paragraph from Carey’ s piece – which cites not one word from the Constitution, nor deals with so much as an ounce of the arguments against federal intervention — pretty much captures the essence of his assault on constitutionalists:
[House Education Committee Chairman John] Kline is, by all accounts, not a crazy person when it comes to education. But he leads a committee whose members include North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who is noted for bizarre statements on the House floor and has publicly asserted that federal funding for education is unconstitutional. (Foxx chairs the subcommittee on higher education.) Other committee members include Tim Walberg of Michigan and Joe Heck of Nevada, both of whom support abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. The larger Republican caucus appears to have little interest in or knowledge of education—the word does not appear in the Republican “Pledge to America.” Caught between rationality and the House Republican caucus, Kline has offered virtually no details of his plan for NCLB, other than support for “innovation” at the state level. This is code for “letting states do whatever they want.”
You see, anyone who believes such things as federal funding for education is unconstitutional is simply crazy. End of story.
How convenient! Rather than dealing with the absence of education in Article I, Section 8, which lays out the federal government’s specific powers, you just dismiss as nuts those who think the Feds should be bound by the document through which their powers come. And don’t worry that the Federalist Papers dismiss the notions that the general welfare, necessary and proper, and taxation clauses actually give the Feds unlimited power — only loons are against federal control. And ignore why the Framers of the Constitution first and foremost feared national concentration of power; that they knew people with access to such power would eventually use it for their own ends, not the vaunted “public good.” Only a kook would think that could actually happen. Finally, ignore what has come of not listening to the crazy people, such as this:
And this.
And even this.
Obviously, you don’t have to be a little touched to see that the case for getting Washington out of our schools is a powerful one. Unfortunately, some people would rather dismiss it as delusional than deal with it on its hugely important merits.
Obey the Constitution
The following is cross-posted from the National Journal’s Education Experts blog. This week’s topic: The Race to the Top program and the FY 2011 budget deal:
Having the advantage of writing this after the CR deal has been made, it appears that Race to the Top will get $700 million but still work through states. So no regional or direct-to-district grants, at least from what I’ve been able to divine.
Unfortunately, the root issue here isn’t Race to the Top — it’s federal involvement in education at all. As long as Washington spends money on education it will call the shots, whether that’s through competitions like Race to the Top, or rules attached to IDEA, or Title I, or student-aid programs. Washington will be the puppet master, and it will waste taxpayer money on programs that do not work.
We know this well from the four, wallet-emptying decades in which we’ve had major federal involvement in education. Yet we are still having the same, misguided arguments: Not whether Washington should be setting education policy at all, but what sort of policy it should set. And the two sides continue to come down, basically, to whether Washington should spend lots of money with copious “accountability,” or spend oodles without as many rules.
Both are wrong. The Founders purposely gave the federal government only specific, enumerated powers, and none of them include the authority to make education policy. And as I have laid out many times, the “general welfare” clause, the “necessary and proper” clause, the taxation clause — none of these gives Washington the authority to do anything in education. Only the 14th Amendment gives it a role in education — to prohibit unequal provision of education by states and districts — as well as Article I, Section 8, which gives the Feds exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia.
Of course, the Founders didn’t give Washington only very limited, specific powers for no reason. They did so because they knew that the strong tendency is for government to be captured by small groups and used not for the public good, but the good of those who wield governmental power. Today, that means politicians often using “the children” as pawns to win political games — spending money to show how much they “care” — while special interests employed by our schools lobby and politick for ever-more dough, weak accountability, and hamstrung competition. And some wonder why federal spending on education has skyrocketed while outcomes have stunk.
We can keep on bickering about Race to the Top and other proposals to twist a few screws on the dilapidated federal machine, or we can get Washington out of education altogether. Both the Constitution and educational success demand we do the latter.
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