[Note from Laurie Rogers: On March 28, 2012, the Spokane College Women's Association (SCWA) hosted Jennifer Marshall, from the Heritage Foundation, who spoke on education reform. Jennifer gave me permission to republish her remarks. Since Jennifer's presentation was nearly an hour, I excerpted her remarks for this blog post. You can read the entire transcript of her March 28 remarks at this link.]
By Jennifer Marshall
... I want to begin by thinking through what education is all about and then talk about why we’re getting it wrong in the policy world and what we can do about that. … Too many times in policy in America we start out with assumptions that are wrong about the nature of a problem and then we go about slap-dash trying to fix it with the wrong type of solutions, which can end up simply making the problem worse and failing to resolve it. ...
Well, not surprisingly, because of the misdiagnosis of that problem, the so-called solutions have done very little to nothing to solve, and in some cases, have actually hurt the problem. We’re ending up with inter-generational poverty, where poverty gets handed down and dependency on government gets handed down from generation to generation. ...
Education deals ... with the whole person. It’s not … just about handing down information. It is about training a child to love what is good, telling them to understand what is wrong and differentiate right from wrong, good and bad, putting affection in their heart for the things that bring flourishing in our society and in each life. It is ideally education that will help answer the fundamental questions, the most important questions about the nature and purpose of a person’s own life, so helping a student answer who they are, where they’re going, what this life is about. Education should help a child answer that and point them to the authorities in their lives who can help them find those answers and spend a lifetime pursuing them. Education isn’t just about making a living. It’s about making a life. ...
Now, because education is about the whole person, that means it must respect the child in the context of relationships that precede the school … The school needs to respect relationships in the family that precede a child’s coming into the school, and that, too often, is not happening today. We take a child out of context, create a wall really between the educational process and parents’ authority and do damage to a child’s understanding of her place in the world beginning with family and moving on through religious congregations and community to the wider circles of our civic life together. … Those prior relationships are foundational and fundamental and should shape the way that we interact and understand the state’s relationship to us. It’s from those relationships that we get our own understanding of individual rights, individual liberty, and, therefore, the freedom that we enjoy here in this nation. …
This is not a value-neutral enterprise. Education will impart certain values to students. Therefore, we’ve got to be very concerned with what those values are and whether they’re the kinds of values that will maintain the principles on which this country was built, or whether they will be ones that will be eroding it ...
That means that parents … need to be afforded the authority to make judgments about what is going to be best for the education, not just the schooling, but the education of a child. We need to liberate parents to make those decisions. …
Systemic reform, the philosophy that was brought to Washington during the Clinton era, was the idea that education policy in Washington needs to deal with the whole school and leave no area of education off limits to the federal policy makers. Great. And so what we ended up with was Washington trying to act more and more like a school board, remotely trying to deal with thousands of different school districts all with different needs and different student populations, but trying to do this kind of systemic policy making. Well, sadly … it hasn’t worked.
This brought us to the presidency of George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind. … No Child Left Behind was a regrettable further concentration of power in Washington. What it did was to say systemic reform was built around the idea that if you just get states to set standards and align tests to them, then everything else will fall into place. The Clinton era ESEA didn’t have any teeth. Well, No Child Left Behind said systemic reform is the way to go and we’ll add teeth. …
Well, that brings us to today and what the Obama administration is doing. We share this much in common with the Obama administration, we are both not fans of No Child Left Behind, but we part ways after that. The Obama administration would like to fix the situation and fix education policy by creating a set of national standards and national tests to go with them. This has been watched as The Common Core initiative and it’s been portrayed to be a state-led initiative. Well, really it’s been led by associations of states that are not your elected officials, the Council of Chief State Schools Officers and The National Governors Association, and with lots of encouragement and even accelerating funding from Washington from the Department of Education. Specifically, the Obama administration has incentivized adoption of The Common Core initiative, that is, it has gotten states to adopt these national standards through the Race to the Top Initiative.
We have two criticisms of Race to the Top. Number one, it’s a run around Congress. It’s an end-run around Congress. Most administrations that have aggressive, new education policy know that they’ve got to get it through Congress and they work hard to do that and that is what the legislative sausage making is all about. …
What Race to the Top did was to offer 4.35 billion dollars, again, not much in the vast scheme of the whole education bureaucracy … but they have had a grant competition of ... Race to the Top. They have awarded twelve states part of that 4.35 billion dollars. They have made sure that all awards would go to those states that had adopted The Common Core.
Many states tried to get on board to get the Race to the Top money. Many spent countless hours. Some of these applications for Race to the Top funding were 1,000 pages long. … Forty states applied. Twelve states received funding. For the price of handing out 12 awards, the Obama administration was able to get more than 40 states on board with the Common Core initiative and waste all those hours on applying for money that most states never got and never will get. That’s the kind of policy making agenda that we’re seeing at the moment. It’s a very concerning one because it continues to centralize education content decisions. We’ve moved from the idea that states would set standards and tests and that the federal government would have oversight over those, to now the federal government is getting involved in setting and establishing the national standards and tests itself. A vast surrender of local education authority that citizens across this nation should be very concerned about. …
Now, we didn’t believe there was any constitutional role for the federal government to be involved in education in the first place, but as a first, baby step towards getting a constitutional restoration of our education policy at the state and local level, we suggested to just pull the federal government back to saying if you’re a 10% stakeholder, you certainly don’t get to call more than 10% of the shots. What that might look like in policy is instead of having dozens of programs that Washington must comply with, your hundreds of pages of policy making and rules and regulations, why don’t you just let states apply once to the federal government for their K-12 money. Make it efficient. Make it short. Make it simple and let them be on the hook for showing progress on their state tests and their accountability systems. … Let them figure out what their state students’ needs are and how they can best meet them. …
Some of you are probably asking the question, “Well, why send the money to Washington in the first place?” Exactly. And that’s what we hoped such a baby step would demonstrate is “Why are we sending this money to Washington?” Because a dollar that leaves Washington is not a dollar that arrives in the classroom. The best we could tell at the time that Pete Hoekstra was looking at this, it was something like 65, 70 cents on the dollar was making it to the local classroom. That’s quite significant attrition for resources getting to local education needs.
One of the costs of federal intervention then, number one – it terribly erodes good governance. Good governance in education would be responding to those who have true authority, parents and to local taxpayers. Instead, federal intervention has enlarged state and local bureaucracy. When the main federal intervention came in 1965 through ESEA, in the five years following that law, state education bureaucracy doubled. It doubled in those five years. Why did that happen? Because those bureaucracies became like parasites to the federal government. They saw that they could get money if they were watching Washington and dancing to Washington’s tune on education policy. Well, you need people to figure out how to do that.
That brings us to the second problem of how Washington erodes good governance when it intervenes in education. That is that it develops this client mentality on the part of states and localities. The client mentality means that state education officials are looking more toward Washington than they are to their true clients. The people that ought to be their true clients are, of course, parents and taxpayers. But they’re not responsive to those true clients, those true customers, because they’re busier trying to figure out how to get those dollars from Washington. Race to the Top is a perfect example of what we mean by that.
Third, Washington’s intervention disrupts the direct accountability that we want to see to parents and taxpayers. By the way, whenever you hear the word accountability thrown around education policy talks today, stop the person who is speaking and say, “What do you mean? Accountability to whom and for what?” Because we’re not for a vague notion of accountability, which usually means accountability to Washington for everything. We are for accountability to parents and local taxpayers for the use of their dollars and for the education of their children. That’s where the accountability should run. So we have a horizontal accountability that needs to be restored in place of this vertical accountability, the responding up the chain of command to Washington. We need to work on restoring horizontal accountability instead.
The other big cost of federal intervention is that it has created a compliance burden that really saps time and money. First, it diminishes funds in the ways I have talked about, diminishing a dollar that leaves Washington coffers, does not mean a dollar in the classroom, and there is a tremendous amount of wasted human capital. …
Well, where do we go from here? First of all, at the federal level we need to get the feds out of the systemic education reform business and we need to make way for state-level systemic reform. What does that mean at the federal level? That means abandoning The Race To The Top, abandoning The Common Core, and sending dollars and decision making back to those closest to the student. …
As far as state systemic reform goes, we’ve got to get incentives right on the school level and that’s going to need to be in three areas: Accountability, choice, and teacher reforms. Now, by accountability measures I mean transparency and accountability that are tailored for parents and taxpayers, not for bureaucrats in Washington. …
Choice is critically important as an accountability mechanism and as a finance reform. We need to think about different kinds of financing than the way that education is happening right now. Money should follow the students. Right now we are more worried about funding buildings and that’s ridiculous. That is why I began with the nature of what education is. If it’s a fundamentally relational endeavor and it’s about the whole child, well the dollars should be following the child, not the system or the school. So, let’s tailor education finance in that direction, which means providing school choice and letting parents decide where their student and the dollars will go. …
In terms of different models for school choice, we’re very excited about all of them. We’re excited about vouchers, tax credits, and one that we’re particularly watching as it develops because it seems very, very promising is the education savings account. Maybe some of you have heard about this, but essentially the state would allow a parent to have the dollars designated for their child’s education in an account and choose where to spend that money, be it a public, charter, private, religious, on-line, home school, hybrid of any of those. That’s the kind of diversity that we need to see. …
I want to close here with my vision of what I hope we’ll see in our lifetimes on education policy, and that is a real menu approach to how education is delivered in America. I named all those ways that education can be delivered, the public, private, on-line, home school, and so on hybrids of those. … It would be great if we stopped someone on the street and the answer was, when asked what education is: That’s the whole portfolio of decisions that I make for my child based on his or her needs right now to make sure that that child is always learning, always progressing, always developing towards their full potential. Learning how to make a life, not just a living. It would be great they could choose from any of the available options and mix and match to put that together in the right educational portfolio for the unique needs of that child as a whole person in the relational context in which they are. That would be the kind of education policy that would be true to the nature of the endeavor. True to the nature of what education is. …
Jennifer Marshall is the Domestic Policy Studies Director for the Heritage Foundation. She is the author of “Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Single Life and the Twenty-First Century.” You can read a complete transcript of Jennifer's March 28, 2012, remarks to the SCWA at this link.
Note from Laurie Rogers: If you would like to submit a guest column on public education, please write to me at wlroge@comcast.net . Please limit columns to about 1,000 words, give or take a few. Columns might be edited for length, content or grammar. You may remain anonymous to the public, however I must know who you are. All decisions on guest columns are the sole right and responsibility of Laurie Rogers.
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