Shouldn't we expect students to learn the same math no matter where they live?
The other day, I heard Congressman John Shadegg, a Republican from Arizona, talking about education on C-SP AN. Congressman Shadegg was solidly on the side of local control of education. He condemned big government as bad -- in education as elsewhere -- and said he believes that power over education should be taken out of the hands of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and returned to state and local governments. Shadegg was especially concerned about the control that he said the federal government exercises over school finances: "I'd like to see much more of the education dollars in America controlled by parents and by teachers and by local schools boards."
People hearing this condemnation of big government's power over education, and perhaps applauding it, might be surprised to find out how little control the federal government now has - or has ever had -- over local schools and how little money it spends for education. Our education system has always been locally controlled. In recent years, many states, dissatisfied with student achievement, have taken a bigger role in matters like curriculum and assessments, but almost all the responsibility for local schools remains in the hands of locally elected school boards.
These boards hire (and fire) teachers and administrators and set district policies pertaining to everything from promotion and discipline to who runs the cafeteria and who services the school bus fleet. In many places, they also control the selection of textbooks and curriculum and assessments. In other words, if local control is what we want, we've got it. And if local control were going to give us a world-class education system, we'd have one by now.
Exactly what kind of power does the federal government have over education? It provides just under 6 percent of the money spent by local schools (this is down from 10 percent several years ago). And its involvement is almost entirely limited to programs for special populations, like children from very poor families, who are assisted under Title I, and students with disabilities. The interests of these youngsters were being neglected by local school districts -- and undoubtedly still would be if Congress had not passed laws to protect them.
There have been complaints about the intrusiveness of federal guidelines for schools accepting federal money. (Imagine the complaints if there had been no accountability over the way tax dollars were being spent.) But the trend is toward relaxing guidelines so that the schools can use federal money in ways that work for them. In any case, federal guidelines, whether relaxed or rigid, make no difference to the vast majority of U.S. students, who spend their days in classrooms over which the federal government exercises no control whatever.
If we already have a system in which people at the local level are calling the shots, why aren't our schools better? Advocates of local control maintain that a system of 15,000 school boards allows flexibility, responsiveness, and grass-roots involvement. That sounds very good in principle. What our system -- or, rather, non-system -- means in practice is that teachers meeting their classes at the beginning of the year have no idea what students who are new to their school learned last year. And since very few school boards require any uniformity of content grade by grade, teachers may not even be certain what returning students covered the previous year. So they must typically spend several weeks covering material that students need to know if everyone is to start at the same point. This wasted class time helps explain why students in Japan and Germany or France often achieve at much higher levels than American youngsters.
Our non-system also makes what children learn a function of where they live. At the education summit last spring, the President and a number of businessmen and governors asked whether it is right that the kind of math that students are taught depends on whether they go to school in California or Ohio or North Dakota. Can we afford, as a nation, to let localities decide what their students will learn when this means that some of our children will be educated much better than others? Shouldn't we expect students to know the same math and be able to read and write at the same levels no matter where they live?
Those who are pushing of local control are pushing for the status quo - and that's not good enough. Many things are best done locally. Local school boards should be able to hire their employees and set salaries and make all kinds of decisions about the day-to-day running of their schools. But deciding on what students learn and how they should be assessed is not one of these things. For that, we need national -- not federal -- standards and assessments. It's time to put the long history of local control, which has resulted in fragmented curriculums and poor student achievement, behind us, and move on.