How Washington Has Affected K-12 Education In Recent Decades

From the Marshall Memo #434

“Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms,” says Fordham Institute honcho Chester Finn Jr. in this helpful history lesson in Education Week. “What he’s best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).” 

Finn believes that in each of the last seven decades, Washington (he includes all three branches of government) has had a profound effect on schools. This has happened only when (a) there was a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution; (b) the problem affected the whole country; (c) the problem seemed to be amenable to the tools in the federal toolkit; and (d) the political stars aligned for long enough to make things happen. Here is Finn’s list:

• 1950s – Brown v. Board of Education struck down government-mandated racial segregation in southern schools and Sputnik spurred a ramping-up of science and math education.

• 1960s – Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Economic Opportunity Act expanded federal funding of schools and launched Head Start, the Job Corps, and VISTA. 

• 1970s – The Education for All Handicapped Children Act “righted another historic wrong,” says Finn, “by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a ‘free, appropriate public education’ in the ‘least restrictive environment.’”

• 1980s – The sharply worded A Nation at Risk report shifted the nation’s priority from equity to excellence, boosting standards, tests, and results-based accountability.

• 1990s – The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) became the “first real set of standards by which to determine just ‘how good is good enough’ when it comes to student achievement in various subjects,” says Finn. 

• 2000s – The No Child Left Behind Act, reauthorizing ESEA, declared that every single student should be “proficient” in reading and math, made public the breakdown of achievement by subgroup, and pushed every school to make “adequate yearly progress” or face consequences.

• 2010s – Race to the Top is spurring states and districts to jump through various reform hoops to win federal dollars.

“None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped,” concludes Finn. “All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise – and for the most part a better enterprise – as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.” 

“When Washington Focuses on Schools” by Chester Finn Jr. in Education Week, Apr. 25, 2012 (Vol. 31, #29, p. 40, 35),

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/04/25/29finn_ep.h31.html