Federal Education Policy

Almost no one disagrees that American public primary and secondary education is in trouble. Improving the quality of public education was a priority in the Bush administration, with passage of the unfortunate “No Child Left Behind” act. It remains, at least in rhetoric, a priority in the Obama administration. America spends more per student than almost any nation in the world, yet our primary and secondary students rank on average well below most industrialized nations in the world on a variety of achievement tests and in a variety of subjects.

Of course there are good schools and good teachers, as well as bad schools and bad teachers. But clearly the public system has too many of the latter and too few of the former. Can any federal program really fix this problem?

It seems to me three things indicate that the answer is no.

First, the funding for public education, the control of the curriculum, and control of hiring and firing exists at the state and local level, not at the federal level. The federal government can offer supplemental funds, but under our present system it does not control the main funding for public schools. And state and local school boards completely control the selection of textbooks and specification of the curriculum, as well as teacher certification, training, hiring and firing.

Second, one of the main impediments to solving this problem (but not the only one) is the politically powerful teacher’s unions, which tend to block the sorts of improvements that are needed, like merit pay, school voucher systems, and the like. Both parties are beholden to the teacher’s unions, but especially the Democrats. Teachers’ unions paid $55,794,440 in political donations between 1990 and 2008, 96 percent of it to Democrats. So it will be hard to pass legislation that the unions oppose. If one doubts the political clout of these unions, consider that among the very first acts of President Obama’s new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was to kill the highly-successful Washington DC school voucher program, which the teachers’ unions strongly oppose, and to suppress an internal agency report that clearly demonstrated the success of the voucher program.

Third and finally, despite the rhetoric, parents and voters really aren’t nearly as upset about the quality of our schools as they ought to be, and aren’t pushing their federal representatives (or their state representatives either, for that matter) nearly hard enough for improvements. So long as people’s votes are more swayed by other issues, politicians are not going to spend much real political capital on addressing the problem.

All of which leads me to conclude that despite the eloquent words, the Federal government isn’t going to be very effective at improving the quality of American public education. If anyone is going to drive such improvements, it will have to be done at the state and local levels.