American policymakers have a lot of strong feelings about the role of the federal government,
especially when it comes to education.
Rand Paul: The federal government shouldn't be involved at all in education.
Elizabeth Warren: I'm committed to keep fighting for our nation's public schools.
In general, the American right believes that a smaller federal role is “good”,
while the American left generally believes that Washington has a crucial role to play in schooling.
But the truth is that, in education policy, there’s a lot of both good and bad that
has come from federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
It’s time to rethink federal education policy.
President George W. Bush’s K-12 legacy was defined by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.
NCLB radically overhauled Washington’s role in schooling, and led states and school districts
to collect reams of new data on students and teachers.
After Bush left office, President Barack Obama further expanded the federal footprint.
In early 2009, President Obama pushed for a considerable economic “stimulus,” including
$100 billion for education, a portion of which went to create Obama’s signature Race to the Top program.
It pushed states to adopt teacher evaluation systems that gauged teacher “effectiveness”
in large part based on reading and math scores.
It aggressively encouraged states to adopt more “common” standards —meaning, in
practice, the Common Core State Standards and the associated tests.
Some of the consequences that followed from all this were not necessarily what reformers
had intended.
In the early 2000s, polls suggested that Americans thought all 50 states should use the same
standards for reading and math instruction.
Common Core (which did just that) was officially launched in 2009, and—with the Obama administration’s
energetic backing— had been adopted by more than 40 states within a year.
And yet, by 2015, most Americans opposed the Common Core.
The urge federal officials feel to make a difference can get things done…but it can
also rush policies to fit into tight political timelines,
generating lots of problems and popular backlash.
NCLB and Race to the Top delivered some important wins.
Today, the data has improved considerably due to the data collection that NCLB required,
which is why we’re hip deep in sophisticated debates about what kinds of schools and programs
work best for students.
Statewide testing made it possible to link teachers with student outcomes.
When the Obama administration pushed to more meaningfully evaluate teachers, states and
districts started using sophisticated metrics, rubrics, and evaluation tools that hold the
promise of helping researchers and policymakers better understand what distinguishes good
instruction.
Ironically, these tools even made it possible to determine that the new evaluation systems
didn’t actually have an effect on how teachers were evaluated.
On the whole, even as accountability and teacher quality reforms failed to do what they were
intended to do, they may yet have a meaningful, beneficial impact in the years to come.
So what do we make of all this?
First, many of the effects, for good and ill, are very different than what policymakers
initially intended.
Second, the urge to move quickly may ultimately have done more to set back once-promising
reforms than to advance them.
And, third, it’s a reminder that much of the Bush-Obama legacy may ultimately come
down to a revolution in education transparency— which is a far cry from what was once promised,
but a valuable legacy nonetheless.
Learning from the successes and shortcomings of the Bush-Obama era will be crucial to making
savvier school reform choices in the years to come.
To learn more about my take on Bush-Obama school reform, check out the link in the description below.
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