Refer to description

The public school system in the United States is composed of more than 13,000 school districts, serving an

Issues & Controversies Last Updated: July 13, 2017

National Debate Topic 2017–18: Education Reform: Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its funding and/or regulation of elementary and/or secondary education in the United States.

Introduction

SUPPORTERS ARGUE Federal involvement in education is necessary to ensure that all children receive the education they deserve. The U.S. government should increase education funding, shore up its support for public schools, and impose regulations that protect the right of all children to quality education.

OPPONENTS ARGUE Federal involvement in education has stymied innovation, burdened states with rules and regulations, and deprived parents and local school boards of authority over their children's schooling. It is time to transfer power back to state and local governments.

estimated 50 million students. The U.S. school system is, for the most part, decentralized, with local and state governments responsible for funding schools and making educational decisions. Over the past half-century, however, a series of laws and educational reforms have given the federal government a greater role in education.

The federal education budget constitutes only a small portion of education spending in the United States. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education had a budget of $69.4 billion, while the education budget for the New York City public school system alone—the nation's largest—was $29.2 billion. The United States does, however, spend more money overall per student than most other developed countries. In 2012, the United States spent 6.4 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the total output of goods and services a nation produces during a given period of time—on education, ranking it among the world’s highest spenders by GDP percentage. Yet students in the United States lag behind many of their global counterparts in educational achievement. On the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment, a test given every three years to 15-year-olds throughout the world to measure reading, math, and science abilities, American students ranked below average in math and about average in reading and science.

Education policy debates over the last several decades have focused largely on whether and how much the federal government should be involved in making, enforcing, and funding education policy across the country. Some argue that state and local governments are best equipped to identify and meet students' needs, and they insist that any national one-size-fits-all approach to education policy is bound to fail. Others argue that all levels of government should roll back involvement in education, and that genuine competition between private and public schools would improve education in the United States.

Supporters of government involvement, however, maintain that federal intervention helps ensure that children from all backgrounds receive a good education. The quality of education is unequal throughout the country, they contend, and the federal government can help improve educational achievement nationwide by providing financial incentives and enforcing educational standards.

President Donald Trump (R) has painted a dire picture of U.S. public schools, and he has argued that competition between private and public schools is key to improving education in the United States. In his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, President Trump described the American education system as one that is "flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge." In March 2017, Trump proposed cutting the U.S. Department of Education budget and redirecting billions of federal dollars toward helping students from low-income families afford tuition at private schools. Supporters of his proposals applaud the move to downsize the Education Department, but critics argue that federal cessation of control over education would leave the most disadvantaged students at risk of being overlooked.

Should the federal government substantially increase its funding and regulation of elementary and secondary education in the United States?

Supporters of federal involvement in education argue that, for the past half-century, the U.S. government has served as a crucial guardian of the rights of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Federal involvement, they insist, is necessary to ensure that all students have equal opportunities for a great education and that state and local government policies meet the needs of the most vulnerable children. In order to achieve these goals and raise standards, they argue, the U.S. government must increase education spending and regulation.

Opponents of federal involvement in education argue that the drafters of the U.S. Constitution intended for education policy to be left to local governments and parents. The best education reform plans have been crafted and implemented on the state and community levels, they claim, while directives written by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., have only burdened schools with excessive regulations and stifled innovation. Increasing the

federal education budget, they argue, will not improve educational achievement in the United States.

The Rise of Public Education in the United States

Public schools in the United States are governed primarily on the local and state levels—a contrast from most other Western countries, in which schools are nationally controlled. The roots of this system date back to the colonial period, when communities were often too small and far apart to make collaboration possible. Each town thus tended to maintain its own school system.

In 1647, Massachusetts, then an English colony, passed the School Act, which required every community with at least 50 families to "appoint one within their town to teach all such children…to write and read." Towns with 100 families or more were required to create a grammar school to "instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university." These schools tended to emphasize the study of classical languages, philosophy, and religion.

During the 18th century, many towns throughout the colonies established academies—schools that tended to stress vocational learning. In addition to acquiring basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic, students could take subjects tailored to specific jobs, such as accounting or navigation. Academies and grammar schools were more similar to today's private high schools than they were to modern public schools. Students at most of these institutions paid tuition fees to enroll, and educational opportunities for children from poor families were therefore limited after the elementary grades.

In 1783, the United States won its independence from Great Britain. The U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788, made no mention of education. The Tenth Amendment declared that any powers not specifically delegated to the U.S. government in the Constitution would be "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." By implication, then, responsibility for schooling was left to state and local governments.

In the early 1800s, schools continued to be governed by their surrounding communities. Virtually all schools— elementary and secondary alike—continued to charge tuition fees, and parents could choose whether or not to send their children to school.

In 1837, Massachusetts lawmaker Horace Mann became the state’s education secretary, the first such position in the country. Mann began to advocate for a system of free public schools open to all children, regardless of economic background. He believed that society would benefit if every young person received a well-rounded education. "If we do not prepare children to become good citizens," Mann warned, "if we do not enrich their minds with knowledge...then our republic must go down to destruction."

As education secretary, Mann worked to develop a network of “common schools,” or publicly funded schools open to all children and staffed by professional teachers, across the state. In 1852, Massachusetts passed a law requiring all children between the ages of 8 and 14 to attend school for at least 12 weeks every year. Over the next several decades, more states would follow Massachusetts in enacting compulsory attendance laws. Additionally, state restrictions on child labor began to allow more children to attend school.

The federal government introduced its first policies pertaining to public education in the 1860s. As the Civil War (1861–65) was coming to a close, Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency to assist freed slaves. Prior to the war, no southern state had a public school system open to all children, and one of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s main goals was to build schools. The philosophy behind the agency's education initiatives would influence public policy long after the dissolution of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1872. As education scholars Adam Nelson and Elliot Weinbaum wrote in a report for the New York State Archives in 2009:

The Freedmen's Bureau initiated three areas of federal aid to education that would last into the

twentieth century: (1) offering federal aid to raise the educational level of the most disadvantaged members of society, (2) promoting economic (or "manpower") development through the expansion of access to learning, and (3) assimilating new citizens into American society for purposes of productive labor as well as social harmony.

In 1867, Congress created the U.S. Bureau of Education to collect statistics about schools in order to help states improve their education systems. Critics voiced concerns that the new agency would usurp local control of schools, and the following year Congress shrank the bureau and reduced its power.

By 1890, school systems operated by local and state governments—rather than those run by churches, charities, or private institutions—enrolled the vast majority of students in the United States. In the early 1900s, nearly all children attended elementary school, though most dropped out after eighth grade to work.

A massive wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries prompted a renewed focus on public education as some reformers promoted increased vocational training to prepare the children of immgrants for specific jobs or professions. Partly in response to this push, along with demands for greater industrial production prompted by World War I (1914–18), Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917. The law directed federal aid to agricultural and other vocational education. After the war, the federal government allocated small grants for educating and retraining disabled veterans.

Reformers also saw the need for secondary, or high school, education to help students gain the knowledge and skills necessary to find jobs in the evolving U.S. economy. In 1900, only 6 percent of Americans had graduated from high school. By 1945, this figure had risen to more than 15 percent and would continue to rise throughout the century. Today, almost 90 percent of Americans have high school diplomas or high school equivalency certificates.

After World War II (1939–45), the U.S. population surged and millions of Americans moved to the suburbs, straining the resources of local school districts. To help expand schools or build new ones, many called for greater federal funding for education. Others, however, warned that such funding could lead to increased federal involvement and the loss of local control. "Unless we are careful," General Dwight Eisenhower said in 1949, four years before he became president, "even the great and necessary educational processes in our country will become yet another vehicle by which the believers in paternalism, if not outright socialism, will gain still additional power for the central government."

Debates over educational policy grew in the postwar years, when the world’s two superpowers—the capitalist and democratic United States and the communist and authoritarian Soviet Union—became embroiled in the Cold War, a struggle for economic, military, and scientific supremacy that would dominate geopolitics for the next half- century. Cold War tensions fueled increased federal involvement in education as many called for more rigorous academic standards to help the country compete with the Soviet Union. These criticisms grew in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Many viewed the failure of the United States to reach outer space before its rival a national embarrassment, and some blamed schools for not adequately educating students. In 1958, Congress passed the National Education Defense Act, directing federal funding toward math, science, and foreign language programs in higher education. The country’s "most fundamental challenge lies in the field of education," Vice President Richard Nixon (R) wrote in an essay that year. "Our military and economic strength can be no greater than our educational system."

Education Policy Shaped by Civil Rights Movement

As Cold War challenges spurred increased funding for education, racial tensions also prompted greater federal

involvement. Throughout much of the nation’s early history, schools in the South and many other parts of the country were segregated by race (as were trains, restaurants, bathrooms, and other public institutions). In the 1890s, a black man named Homer Plessy, who had been forced to leave a "whites only" car on a train in New Orleans, sued the state of Louisiana, arguing that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all people "equal protection of the laws." In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument, ruling 7–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was constitutional as long as facilities for each race were equivalent. The case established a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal."

In reality, however, these "separate" facilities were seldom "equal." Black public schools during the era of segregation rarely received the funding and resources that their white counterparts did, and black children often attended inferior and inadequate schools. Among the chief goals of the burgeoning civil rights movement were to end segregation and obtain equal rights for all Americans, especially in the field of education.

The civil rights movement’s first major achievement came in 1954, when the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court ruled unanimously that segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. "We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Court's opinion. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Many political leaders in the South denounced the ruling, framing their resistance to racial integration as a matter of states' rights. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, for example, declared in 1957 that he would not "force…people to integrate against their will. I believe in the democratic processes and principles of government wherein the people determine the problems on a local level, which is their right." In defiance of an order from a federal judge, Governor Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to block nine African-American students from enrolling at an all-white high school in Little Rock. Later that month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R, 1953–61) sent federal troops to enforce the judge’s order and protect the students seeking to integrate the school.

Despite the Brown decision, students of minority descent continued to struggle to obtain the same educational opportunities as their white counterparts. In many parts of the country, blacks and whites lived in separate neighborhoods, and by the early 1960s, a decade after Brown, the vast majority of black students still attended all-black or nearly all-black schools. Discriminatory federal housing policies had contributed to driving down property values in neighborhoods where African Americans lived and helped precipitate an exodus of white families to the suburbs, where higher property values yielded more revenue for schools. Some civil rights activists called on the federal government to intervene to rectify inequality in education, and efforts to increase federal involvement in schools dovetailed with the struggle for racial equality during the civil rights movement.

The federal government responded to these calls and expanded its influence in public education during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson (D, 1963–69). A former educator who had taught at a segregated school for Mexican Americans in the 1920s, President Johnson pushed for greater educational opportunities for historically marginalized students and used education reform as part of his far-reaching "War on Poverty," a broad federal initiative to improve American society and reduce income inequality. Before Johnson's presidency, federal funding constituted only a tiny percentage of local school budgets and came mostly in the form of vocational education grants, aid for school districts responsible for educating the children of personnel on U.S. military bases, and other small initiatives. Johnson promoted much more substantial funding, frequently clashing in the process with Republicans and southern Democrats who opposed federal involvement in education.

In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a landmark statute outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, including in schools. The following year, Congress passed the

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the most significant national education legislation in U.S. history. The law, Johnson said during the signing ceremony, represented "a major new commitment of the federal government to quality and equality in the schooling that we offer our young people."

Title I of the ESEA authorized the federal government to provide grants to school districts to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. States were meant to distribute the funding to schools and districts with higher percentages of students from low-income families. The funds, however, did not always reach the neediest students. "State departments of education, notoriously weak and often poorly staffed," historian William Reese wrote in his 2005 book, America's Public Schools, "could not easily monitor local spending."

Some argued that states should be able to decide on their own how to allocate federal funds. In 1967, Representative Albert Quie (R, Minnesota) proposed an amendment to transform Title I funding into block grants, which state authorities could allocate as they pleased. Civil rights groups lobbied against the amendment, warning that it would not guarantee that federal funding went to the students most in need of it. Congress rejected the amendment, though in ensuing decades conservatives would increasingly promote block grants as a way to transfer more power back to the states.

During the 1960s and 1970s, many continued to advocate reforms that would create equal educational opportunities for all. In 1966, African-American students in Detroit went on strike to protest the city's inadequate schools. Two years later, Mexican-American students in Texas went on strike to demand bilingual education. Congress responded to such demands in 1968 with the Bilingual Education Act, which amended the ESEA to allocate federal funds to educate students for whom English was a second language. Calls for equal educational opportunities for women, meanwhile, led to the passage of Title IX in 1972, which forbade the federal government from awarding federal grants to programs that discriminated on the basis of gender.

The federal government used the Civil Rights Act and Title I funds to pressure schools to integrate and improve. By the 1970s, almost all schools in the United States had officially been desegregated. De facto segregation persisted, however, perpetuated by years of racial separation in residential areas, living patterns that affected school funding. As more affluent whites left urban areas, for example, many inner cities lost business and revenue, thus reducing money for schools. To keep whites from moving out, some cities re-zoned school districts to keep certain schools predominantly white. Such practices prompted legal challenges, and a series of court rulings required cities to adopt methods to integrate public schools. One of the most controversial methods became known as "busing"—assigning and transporting children by bus to schools that might not be the closest to them in the interest of promoting integration.

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that federal judges had the authority to impose remedies, including busing, to overcome segregation. This ruling led to a proliferation of busing orders. Controversies over busing policies garnered national attention, with many conservatives criticizing them for forcing students to travel long distances simply to integrate schools. In 1972, President Richard Nixon (R, 1969–74) referred to busing as "a classic case of the remedy for one evil creating another evil."

The practice of busing proved particularly controversial in Detroit, Michigan, where the exodus of white and middle-class residents to the suburbs had left mostly-black schools struggling to function on a depleted tax base. In 1972, in response to a lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a federal judge ordered that busing be employed not just within city limits, but between the city and the suburbs. The order sparked a fierce backlash from suburban parents, and challenges to the policy reached the Supreme Court in 1974. In a 5–4 decision in Milliken v. Bradley, the Court struck down Detroit's busing plan as

"wholly impermissible." State officials and suburban districts were not responsible for segregation in the city, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, and desegregation under Brown, he noted, did not require "any particular racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'"

Critics of Milliken argued that state policies across the nation had exacerbated the urban education crisis, and that no meaningful desegregation could occur with policies that only affected schools within city lines. "Our Nation, I fear, will be ill-served by the Court's refusal to remedy separate and unequal education," Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in a dissenting opinion, "for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together."

Growing Federal Involvement Sparks Backlash, School Choice Movement in Late 20th Century

Despite disputes over busing and desegregation, federal education spending rose in the late 20th century. In 1974, Congress passed a series of amendments to the ESEA increasing spending by 23 percent. The amendments directed federal aid to "compensatory" initiatives for schools in low-income areas, including funding for programs to prevent students from dropping out of school, programs for gifted children, and programs for non-English- speaking students. The amendments also increased aid for education for students with physical or mental disabilities. In 1975, President Gerald Ford (R, 1974–77) signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, later known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law required public schools to ensure that students with disabilities receive a "free and appropriate education" and allocated federal assistance to help schools cover special education costs.

While campaigning for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter (D, 1977–81) won the backing of various education associations by promising to create a cabinet-level education department. President Carter fulfilled this pledge in 1979 by signing the Department of Education Organization Act, which established the U.S. Department of Education. Previously, federal education officials had worked under the auspices of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. "Instead of simulating needed debate of educational issues, the Federal Government has confused its role of junior partner in American education with that of silent partner," President Carter said when signing the law. "The time has passed when the Federal Government can afford to give second-level, part-time attention to its responsibilities in American education."

The flurry of legislation and initiatives designed to redress inequality in education throughout the 1960s and 1970s prompted a conservative political backlash. "Conservatives maintain that the harm to public education has been so great that the attempt to integrate the nation's schools has been a tragic failure," education scholar James Anderson wrote in School: The Story of American Public Education, in 2001. "From this viewpoint, the crusade for equal educational opportunity is defined as a burden, a social policy to force into schools preconceived notions about racial and general equality at the expense of academic excellence."

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran against Carter for president, denouncing excessive government intervention and calling for the abolition of the recently created Education Department. Reagan won easily, and although he never eliminated the department, he did sign the Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) in 1981, which significantly cut educational funding and reduced federal oversight. "After decades of steadily expanding federal aid to schools, the ECIA marked a sudden federal retreat," Nelson and Weinbaum wrote in their 2009 report. "Unlike the original ESEA [passed in 1965], which federal officials had used, in part, to promote civil rights and desegregation, the ECIA pulled back from these priorities and insisted that local officials were best suited to solve 'local' problems."

Chapter 2 of the ECIA transformed some educational grants into block grants, giving states more flexibility over how they spent federal education funds. To determine how much each state would receive under Chapter 2, the

law created a formula based on how many students were "high-cost"—those needing English as a Second Language courses, disability programs, or other initiatives. States would then distribute the funds to whichever districts they deemed appropriate. While supporters argued that the new system gave state and local governments more freedom in allocating federal money, critics contended that states sometimes shortchanged high-cost students and directed much of the money toward wealthier, suburban school districts that had greater political influence.

Other developments during the Reagan administration, however, laid the groundwork for increased federal involvement in education over the next several decades. In 1983, a presidential commission consisting of educators, corporate leaders, and civil servants released "A Nation at Risk," a report on the state of education in the United States. American students, the report found, were falling behind their international counterparts. Citing declines in academic achievement and test scores, "A Nation at Risk" stated that "more and more young people emerge from high school ready neither for college nor for work." As a consequence, the report concluded, "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people."

The commission that published "A Nation at Risk" recommended longer school days and academic years, higher standards for graduation, and greater emphasis on computer science. The report also called for increased testing of students to measure skills and learning. "Standardized tests of achievement should be administered at major transition points from one level of schooling to another, and particularly from high school to college," the report suggested. "These tests should be administered as part of a nationwide (but not federal) system of state and local standardized tests."

Acknowledging the concerns raised by the report, President Reagan urged reducing the federal role in education and increasing the role of parents and communities. "[O]ur educational system is in the grip of a crisis caused by low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources, and a failure to…strive for excellence," he said following the report's release. "Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control." In a speech given two months after the report was published, Reagan cited a litany of criticisms voiced by conservatives on federal education policy over the past few decades:

[W]ith Federal aid came Federal control, the growing demand for reports and detailed applications for all the various categories of aid the Federal Government eventually offered. Over the same period, the schools were charged by the Federal courts with leading in the correcting of long- standing injustices in our society—racial segregation, sex discrimination, lack of opportunity for the handicapped. Perhaps there was simply too much to do in too little time, even for the most dedicated teachers and administrators. But there's no question that somewhere along the line many schools lost sight of their main purpose. Giving our students the quality teaching they need and deserve took a back seat to other objectives.

Despite the dire warnings given in “A Nation at Risk,” President Reagan continued to emphasize a hands-off approach to federal education policy. His vice president and eventual successor, George H. W. Bush (R, 1989–93), however, supported solutions that were more national in scope. In 1989, President Bush, who vowed to be remembered as the "education president," convened all 50 governors nationwide to discuss the state of education in the United States. "There are real problems right now in our educational system, but there is no one Federal solution," he said at the conference. "The Federal Government, of course, has a very important role to play."

Conference attendees set six goals for education in the United States. These goals, laid out by President Bush during his State of the Union address in January 1990, were that every child be prepared to start school with the basic skills they need to learn; that the high school graduation rate reach 90 percent by 2000 (about 79 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had graduated high school at the time); that student performance be

assessed during the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades; that U.S. students rank first internationally in math and science by 2000; that every adult eventually be a "skilled, literate worker and citizen"; and that every school be drug-free and "offer the kind of disciplined environment that makes it possible for our kids to learn."

To fulfill these goals, President Bush proposed America 2000, a plan to create national guidelines for education standards and institute voluntary national standardized testing in English, math, science, history, and geography for students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. America 2000 would also have required districts to submit report cards for how schools were performing, as well as provided federal grants for the creation of hundreds of "New American Schools" to encourage them to experiment with innovative ideas. Critics of America 2000, however, argued that Bush's vision was vague, and claimed that the president had not proposed increasing the nation's education budget enough to adequately pursue it. In 1992, Democrats in the Senate defeated a bill that would have enacted America 2000. "If President Bush wants to be the education President, he has to do more than talk about it," Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D, Massachusetts) said of the bill. "We cannot expect to compete in tomorrow's global economy when today's students are already far behind those of other nations."

Many conservatives, meanwhile, had begun to endorse voucher programs, an idea first advanced by economist Milton Friedman in his 1955 essay, "The Role of Government in Education." Allowing—and encouraging—parents to choose which school to send their children to, Friedman claimed, would force schools to improve as they competed with each other for students. The government should help fund schools, he wrote, but not run them. It should do this by giving parents tuition vouchers to enable them to enroll their children in any school, private or public, sectarian or nonsectarian, that they pleased, as long as the schools "met certain minimum standards." This "free market" approach appealed to many conservatives and would become a central issue in the education reform debate in the late 20th and 21st centuries.

Supporters of the voucher system, often part of a broader movement espousing "school choice," argue that providing parents greater options benefits children from less wealthy families. For most of American history, they note, only families that could afford private schools were able to choose which schools their children would attend. Opponents, however, argue that voucher systems reduce money for public schools, making it harder for them to meet the needs of students and improve education.

The voucher argument has found supporters and opponents across the political spectrum, including on both sides of the debate over the U.S. government's role in education. Some supporters of federal involvement, for example, support the idea of federally instituted school choice programs, while other supporters of federal involvement argue that all public education funds should go to public schools. Similarly, some skeptics of federal involvement nevertheless call for creating federal incentives for states to adopt school choice programs, while other critics oppose the exertion of federal influence to affect states' education policy.

In the 1990s, the voucher system began garnering greater support from various constituencies, including some African-American groups frustrated with the declining quality of many urban public schools. In 1990, Wisconsin became the first state to implement such a system, granting hundreds of students from low-income families in Milwaukee vouchers to attend private schools, as long as those schools had no religious affiliation.

President Bush supported vouchers. In 1992, he proposed a $500 million federal program to give tuition vouchers worth $1,000 to low- and middle-income families to use at private schools, including those with religious affiliations. "For too long, we've shielded schools from competition, [and] allowed our schools a damaging monopoly power over our children," he said. "It is time we began thinking of a system of public education in which many providers offer a marketplace of opportunities…. A revolution is under way in Milwaukee and across this country, a revolution to make American schools the best in the world." Supporters of Bush's proposal argued that

competition from private schools would force public schools to improve.

Critics, however, argued that under the proposal private schools would be able to accept public funds but, unlike public schools, would not have to accept all students. This would leave public schools with more challenging student populations, they argued, and fewer funds with which to educate them.

Opponents also argued that families should not be able to use public funds to pay for religious schools. Directing public education funds toward schools operated by religious institutions, they maintained, violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that Congress can "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Others, however, claimed that, because it is parents—not the government—that would be making the decision to send their children to attend religious schools, using vouchers to fund such institutions is constitutional.

President Bush lost his 1992 reelection bid to Bill Clinton (D, 1993–2001), who as governor of Arkansas had participated in Bush's national education conference in 1990. As a candidate for president, Clinton had proposed increasing federal education spending and establishing national exam standards, and he had opposed Bush's voucher plan. Allowing taxpayer money to be directed toward private schools, Clinton argued, would deprive public institutions of badly needed funding. "Now is not the time to further diminish the financial resources of schools when budgets are being slashed by states all across America," Clinton said in 1992, and "when the federal government has restricted its commitment to education."

After becoming president in 1993, Clinton promoted policies that would increase federal funding to public schools. In 1994, for example, he signed the Improving America's Schools Act, which included federal support for a variety of education-related initiatives, such as the Century Community Learning Center Program, which provided funding for after-school programs.

President Clinton also, however, endorsed some of his predecessor's proposals. The Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed by Clinton in 1994, embraced the six education goals laid out by President Bush, along with two more: that teachers "have access to programs for the continued improvement of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century," and that all schools "promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children."

Goals 2000 allocated $400 million to be awarded to states that created initiatives to fulfill the plan's aims. "The core of Goals 2000 was a grant program" that "recognized, and supported, the systemic reform efforts that many states had under way," Nelson and Weinbaum wrote. "Any state that was basically adhering to the idea of standards-based, systemic reform and had a planning process to support that effort could get funding under Goals 2000."

To provide states a model for developing their own standards under Goals 2000, the Clinton administration appointed a council to develop national curriculum guidelines. The guidelines created for math and science drew support, but those proposed for history and social studies proved controversial. In an effort to be more inclusive, the guidelines recommended greater study of long-marginalized groups and individuals. "We want [students] to exercise their own judgment in reading conflicting views of any piece of history and understand that there are multiple perspectives on any particular historical era, movement, event, for that matter," Gary Nash, a historian who helped write the guidelines, stated during an appearance on Good Morning America in 1994. "We want this to be a democratic history, where it is a history for the people, of the people, and by the people."

Critics, however, charged that the guidelines went overboard and neglected to cover important figures and major

historical events. "Imagine an outline for the teaching of American history in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president," Lynne Cheney, former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1994. "Or in which the foundings of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are considered noteworthy events, but the first gathering of the U.S. Congress is not." The guidelines, Cheney concluded, painted a "grim and gloomy" portrait of American history. Such criticisms reverberated across the political spectrum. In 1995, the Senate voted 99–1 in favor of a nonbinding resolution condemning the standards. The council in charge of writing the standards eventually revised the guidelines.

Despite the controversy, President Clinton continued to push Goals 2000 and the use of standardized tests to evaluate student performance. "Every state should adopt high national standards," he said in his State of the Union address in 1997. "Every state should test every fourth-grader in reading and every eighth-grader in math to make sure these standards are met." Later that year, President Clinton urged Congress to pass legislation establishing voluntary national tests in reading and mathematics for fourth- and eighth-grade students. Fearing that such tests would pave the way for federal involvement in shaping school curricula, however, Republicans in Congress defeated the proposal.

Despite President Clinton's opposition to vouchers, meanwhile, experiments in school choice continued on the state and local levels. In 1996, Cleveland, Ohio, became the first city to allow parents to use vouchers to pay tuition at religious schools. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that Cleveland's plan was valid and did not violate the Constitution. "The Ohio program is entirely neutral with respect to religion," Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the Court's majority opinion. "It provides benefits directly to a wide spectrum of individuals, defined only by financial need and residence in a particular school district. It permits such individuals to exercise genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious."

As support for voucher programs was gaining momentum, some began to advocate a new type of alternative school—the charter school. In 1988, education professor Ray Budde and American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker separately proposed a plan in which a group of educators and others could apply to their local or state governments for charters to establish autonomous schools that would experiment with new teaching ideas. In exchange for meeting certain minimum standards, these charter schools, if approved, would receive public funds.

In 1991, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law allowing charter schools. Over the next decade, more than 1,500 charter schools were founded nationwide. These schools were run by various entities, including community organizations and private businesses. Some were also run by local jurisdictions themselves. Rather than be assigned charter schools, students have to choose to attend them, and many charters compete for students by offering specialized programs in arts, science, or other areas. Some emphasize certain subjects, like theater, while others, founded by immigrant or ethnic groups, focus on curricula geared to certain cultures, such as Greek or Native American.

Charter schools gained broad support across the political spectrum, and by 2010, about 1.5 million students were enrolled in them nationwide. But they also came under criticism. Some educators, including Shanker himself, feared that private corporations would begin running them as for-profit enterprises. This, they believed, could lead companies to prioritize profits over providing a proper education. Teachers' unions also opposed charter schools because they tended to offer teachers fewer protections and benefits. "Charter operators wanted to be able to hire and fire teachers at will," historian Diane Ravitch explained in School: The Story of American Public Education in 2001, "to set their own salary schedule, to reward teachers according to their performance, to control working conditions, and to require long working hours."

As states were experimenting with vouchers and charter schools, some reformers urged creating a national set of educational standards—benchmarks, such as being able to pass basic tests, that students must meet before advancing to the next grade. While most schools have educational standards of some kind, the development and breadth of these standards have proven controversial. Some argue that the standards should be under local or state control, with each district in charge of its own methods of testing students and measuring their achievement. Others believe that uniform national standards are necessary to prevent particular regions or districts from developing inadequate standards and having students graduate unprepared for college or a career. Whether the standards are local or national in origin, many believe that teachers and schools should be held accountable for test results. If students perform poorly, they suggest, teachers should be demoted or fired and schools closed or taken over by the state. If they perform well, teachers should be rewarded with higher pay. Critics point out, however, that many factors contribute to student performance, and to punish or reward teachers on such criteria, they argue, is misguided and unfair.

No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top Reshape Federal Involvement in Education

In a departure from the conservative ethos that generally favored local control in education, President George W. Bush (R, 2001–09) made education reform one of his major goals and embraced standardized testing as critical to measuring and improving achievement. "Educational excellence for all is a national issue and at this moment is a presidential priority," he said during a press conference three days after his inauguration in January 2001. "Children must be tested every year in reading and math—every single year. Not just in the third grade or the eighth grade, but in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh and eighth grade."

In January 2002, a year into his presidency, Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), marking a significant expansion of federal influence in schools. Many at the time heralded the law as a step forward for education in the United States. "NCLB introduced a new definition of school reform that was applauded by Democrats and Republicans alike," Ravitch, who served as an adviser to President Bush in drafting the law but later opposed it, wrote in her 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. "In this new era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools."

To ensure that no student was "left behind," or shuttled through grades without learning what they should, NCLB required each state to write its own education standards, but refrained from offering national guidelines. The law also mandated that states test all students in math and reading from third to eighth grades and high school students at least once. States were required to make the results of these tests public and ensure that all students were proficient in their standards by the 2013-14 school year. In addition to this aim, states were to set adequate annual progress goals for both schools and "disaggregated" groups of students who had historically faced challenges reaching proficiency, including low-income, minority, and ESL students.

Under NCLB, schools faced penalties for failing to meet these goals. A school that missed its annual target two years in a row had to allow students to transfer to other schools in the same district that were performing better, and schools that missed targets three straight times would have to offer free tutoring. Schools that continued to miss their goals were subject to shutdown, state intervention, transformation into charter schools, staff turnover, and other penalties. States that did not comply with NCLB's requirements also risked losing federal money under Title I.

The effectiveness of NCLB's various enforcement measures proved controversial. "[I]t's unclear that the…main remedies for low-performing schools did much to improve student achievement," Education Week reporter

Alyson Klein wrote in 2015. "In many cases, students did not take advantage of the opportunity to transfer to another school, or get free tutoring.… States also generally shied away from employing dramatic school turnaround strategies for perennially failing schools." Others argued that NCLB was underfunded, leaving schools without the necessary resources to meet the law's demands. By 2006, nearly 30 percent of schools were failing to meet their annual progress goals, and the Education Department was allowing some states to experiment with alternatives that emphasized students' individual growth over proficiency on standardized tests.

The most common criticisms of NCLB, however, targeted the law’s reliance on standardized testing. Critics argued that teachers ended up spending a disproportionate amount of their time "teaching to the test," forcing them to marginalize subjects like science, history, and the arts. Some schools were so desperate to improve test scores that teachers even falsified the results.

Many criticized the state-written education standards under NCLB as too vague or unchallenging, and urged replacing them with national ones. In 2008, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a group consisting of officials from each state's education department, began developing a set of standards that became known as Common Core.

As a candidate for president in 2008, Barack Obama (D, 2009–17) called for increasing federal education spending, arguing that standardized tests needed to be better designed. "Let's finally help our teachers and principals develop a curriculum and assessments that teach our kids to become more than just good test-takers," he said in September 2008. "We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st-century knowledge economy." Shortly after Obama became president in January 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a huge stimulus package intended to reinvigorate the economy. The law provided some $90 billion for school districts to make repairs and prevent teacher layoffs.

In July 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the launch of Race to the Top, a new educational initiative. Under the plan, states would compete for a total of $4.4 billion in federal aid by implementing school reform plans within parameters set by the Education Department. According to the Department's website, Race to the Top promoted:

Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy; Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction; Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.

Race to the Top also encouraged states to allow charter schools. "States that do not have public charter laws or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools will jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top Fund," Secretary Duncan said during a press conference. "To be clear, this administration is not looking to open unregulated and unaccountable schools. We want real autonomy for charters combined with a rigorous authorization process and high performance standards."

In 2010, the group of state officials that had been working to develop education standards released Common Core. Common core consisted of two sets of standards—one covering mathematics and one establishing guidelines for English language arts. Each set of standards contained subsets designed for different age groups, increasing in complexity and rigorousness for students in later grades. The math standards, for example, attempted to instill in students a deeper understanding of how numbers and equations work by emphasizing the use of diagrams and pictures to perform simple additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions. The English standards emphasized "informational" texts, requiring high school students to be able to read and understand critical

documents in U.S. history, such as the Declaration of Independence. While the standards were not mandatory, many states adopted them because they met the Education Department's requirements for funding under Race to the Top.

The Common Core standards drew criticism across the political spectrum. The math standards, for example, introduced new, conceptual approaches to problem-solving unfamiliar to many parents and teachers, provoking widespread frustration. The standards were so detailed and in-depth, some argued, that they constituted a nationally imposed curriculum that deprived local school boards and teachers of control over what to teach in the classroom. Others argued that the standards had been developed without enough consultation with parents and educators. Several Republican-controlled states abandoned Common Core in favor of their own standards, and in 2013 the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution denouncing Common Core.

In 2011, as NCLB's goal of ensuring student proficiency by 2013–14 was nearing, Secretary Duncan warned that the vast majority of schools would fail to meet the benchmark, and he urged legislators to reform the law. Congress could not agree on a new education bill, however, and the Obama administration offered to waive the 2014 deadline for states that adopted certain policies advocated by the Education Department. To obtain these waivers, states were required to emphasize college and career readiness in their standards, create processes for evaluating teachers and holding them accountable for student performance, and develop turnaround plans for the bottom 15 percent of schools.

In December 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), replacing NCLB and granting more authority to states to devise their own plans for identifying and fixing failing schools. Like NCLB, the ESSA required states to develop standards and test students on them. The ESSA, however, discarded NCLB's proficiency targets, allowing states to set their own goals and decide when and how to intervene in failing schools— a significant departure from NCLB's punitive requirements for schools that failed to meet adequate annual progress goals. The ESSA maintained NCLB's testing requirements but allowed schools to include non-academic measures, like student engagement, in performance statistics and deemphasize reading and math test scores. The law also prohibited the education secretary from placing requirements on states' academic standards, a move seen as a rebuke to the Obama administration's use of Race to the Top to pressure states to adopt Common Core.

The ESSA gained support from Republicans who wanted to roll back federal involvement in state educational policy. "It did not abolish the Department of Education (a long-time Republican goal that went into hiding in the 1990s), but it did severely curtail its leverage with states and districts," Arnold Shober, a professor of government, wrote for the Brookings Institution in December 2015. "It did not create vouchers…but it allowed states to experiment with alternate funding systems that might look like public-school choice." Because it did not eliminate federal influence over education, the law was seen as a compromise, and won support from the Obama administration, Democratic legislators, and several teachers' union and education groups.

In November 2016, the Education Department finalized rules for the enforcement of the ESSA. The measures provided a regulatory framework for states to follow as they developed and implemented their own standards. "These regulations give states the opportunity to work with all of their stakeholders, including parents and educators, to protect all students' right to a high-quality education that prepares them for college and careers, including the most vulnerable students," Secretary of Education John B. King Jr., Duncan’s successor, said when the regulations were released. Republicans in Congress, however, argued that the regulations violated the spirit of the ESSA and flouted the law’s intended limits on federal power. “Here we have a federal agency inserting itself, making law,” Representative Todd Rokita (R, Indiana) claimed in February 2017, “not just interpreting it, but making law.”

President Trump Backs School Choice

During the presidential campaign in 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump emphasized school choice. "There is no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly," he said in a speech in September 2016. "The Democratic Party has trapped millions of African-American and Hispanic youth in failing government schools that deny them the opportunity to join the ladder of American success." He added:

I want every single inner city child in America who is today trapped in a failing school to have the freedom—the civil right—to attend the school of their choice. This includes private schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools which must be included in any definition of school choice.

A proposal on Trump's campaign website called for redirecting $20 billion in federal education funds to "follow" children from low-income families wherever they chose to enroll, whether in public, private, or charter schools. This $20 billion, some speculated, would consist of money cut from Title I grants meant to go to schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students. "Republicans have long wanted to turn this program into a voucher," journalist Libby Nelson wrote in Vox in December 2016. "Instead of money going to schools based on the composition of their student body, Title I would 'follow the child.' Every disadvantaged student a school enrolled would come with a small pile of federal cash to help pay for his or her education." Trump's proposal echoed those of other advocates of free market competition among schools, including President Reagan and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and was sometimes referred to as "Title I portability" or "follow the child" education funding.

Supporters of portability programs argued that wealthy families could already afford to enroll children in private school when local public schools failed to meet their standards and that providing choice to all families would allow low-income families similar options. Critics of Trump's plan, however, argued that it would deprive public schools of much-needed funding while directing public funds to religious private schools.

Many also pointed out that the plan relied on each state allocating its own resources to "follow the child" funding to complement federal grants. "Trump's plan calls for turning education spending into a grant to states," Nelson wrote, "and then using that money to encourage states to pass voucher-friendly laws and kick in money of their own." Critics of the proposal voiced skepticism that states would allocate sufficient funding. Currently, only 13 states have voucher programs. Thirty-eight states, meanwhile, have constitutional amendments prohibiting public funding from going to religious schools, which could complicate the implementation of a nationwide voucher program. Some conservative critics of Trump's proposal, though also advocates of school choice, objected in principle to the strategy of using federal funding as an incentive for states to change their education policies. NCLB and Race to the Top, they argued, had demonstrated the pitfalls of such federal pressure.

Trump has also expressed support for tax credit scholarship programs. First implemented in Arizona in 1997 and adopted by 16 other states over the next two decades, tax credit scholarship programs allow individuals or businesses to recieve tax breaks when they donate to funds that award scholarships for students attending private schools. Unlike voucher programs, which have faced constitutional challenges for directing state funds to religious schools, tax credit scholarship programs skirt such problems. "In a scholarship tax credit program…the money bypasses state coffers altogether," NPR journalist Anya Kamenetz explained in March 2017. "In Florida, corporations or individuals can get a generous, dollar-for-dollar tax break by donating to a private, nonprofit scholarship organization. The money from this fund is in turn awarded to families to pay for tuition at private schools."

In November 2016, shortly after winning the presidential election, Trump released a plan for his first 100 days in

office. The plan included the School Choice and Education Opportunity Act, which, the president-elect said, would redirect "education dollars to give parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter…religious or home school of their choice." In addition, Trump asserted, the plan would bring "education supervision to local communities" and put an end to Common Core, which he had frequently decried during the campaign. Because Common Core was implemented on a state-by-state basis, the standards would have to be repealed on the state- level. The Trump administration could, however, potentially apply federal pressure on states to discard the standards the same way the Obama administration applied pressure for their adoption.

In January 2017, President Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to be secretary of education. Celebrated by some conservatives as an outsider who would scale back federal education policy, DeVos became the most controversial nominee in the department's history. She had never directly worked in or with public schools, but had served on the boards of education reform groups that advocated school choice. In her home state of Michigan, DeVos had pushed for the expansion of charter schools in Detroit and opposed regulations of charter schools. "President-elect Trump and I know it won't be Washington, D.C., that unlocks our nation's potential," she said during her Senate confirmation hearings in January 2017. "The answer is local control and listening to parents, students, and teachers."

DeVos's unorthodox answers to some of the questions posed during confirmation hearings drew considerable media attention. In one contentious exchange, Senator Al Franken (D, Minnesota) asked her for her position on whether student success should be measured by proficiency (mandating standards that all students must reach before advancing through each grade, as NCLB did) or growth (an educational philosophy in which each student is measured on his or her own educational growth, based on certain benchmarks, for each school year). "Around proficiency," DeVos replied, "I would…correlate it to competency and mastery, so that each student is measured according to the advancement that they're making in each subject area." "Well that's growth," Franken corrected. "That's not proficiency." DeVos requested further clarification of the question. "I'm talking about the debate between proficiency and growth," Franken said. "This is a subject that has been debated in the education community for years…. It surprises me that you don't know this issue."

DeVos was also asked about her views on federal enforcement of rules intended to help children with disabilities. Senator Tim Kaine (D, Virginia) asked her whether all schools that receive taxpayer funding—which, as a result of vouchers, includes some private schools—should be required to follow the mandates of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. DeVos replied that it was "an issue best left to the states," implying that state governments could ignore federal law. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D, New Hampshire) asked her a similar question, DeVos stated that she "will be very sensitive to the needs of special needs students and the policies surrounding that."

In February 2017, the Senate confirmed DeVos by a 51–50 vote after Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie- breaking vote in her favor. It marked the first time a vice president had to do so to confirm a cabinet nominee. A few weeks later, Congress passed a bill preventing the federal government from, according to US News & World Report, "dictating prescriptive requirements for how states and school districts measure achievement." The law, signed by President Trump in March, effectively nullified the Obama administration's regulations for implementing the ESSA. On March 12, the Education Department issued shorter, less stringent requirements for states' implementation of the ESSA. "My philosophy is simple," DeVos said in a statement accompanying the release of the rules. "I trust parents, I trust teachers, and I trust local school leaders to do what's right for the children they serve."

President Trump's proposal for the federal budget, meanwhile, also released in March, called for cutting Education Department spending by 13.6 percent, or about $9 billion, while allocating $20 billion to "investments

in public and private school choice." The budget proposal also called for reducing professional development programs for teachers, eliminating the Century Community Learning Center Program, which directed $1 billion to after-school initiatives, and cutting $193 million from various programs seeking to prepare students from low- income families, first-generation immigrant families, and those with disabilities for college.

Supporters Argue: Federal Involvement in Education Helps Students

Supporters of greater federal involvement in education argue that the United States should increase education funding. Such funding, they assert, is crucial to providing a quality education for all children. "[W]e only spend around 2 percent of our federal budget on education each year," Tim King, founder of the charter school chain Urban Prep Academies, wrote in the New York Times in November 2015. "When we invest in education, and do so in an equal way, we are investing in something greater than one subdivision or our side of town; we're investing in a fairer, freer and more functional future."

When states are left to distribute education funding themselves without proper federal regulations, supporters contend, poorer communities tend to receive less money. "[M]any states spend less in school districts that serve low-income students…who need more support to succeed," Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University, wrote in the New York Times in November 2015. "While some students attend spacious, well-outfitted schools with extensive libraries, science labs, computers and small classes, others attend crumbling, overcrowded buildings where they lack access to basic textbooks and trained teachers."

Too often, proponents of federal involvement insist, advocates of local control over education are merely trying to protect richer school districts from having to share resources that could help poorer districts. "Over the years, in many communities, wealthier citizens and government policies have managed to consign low-income students to something akin to a lower caste," educational psychologist David Berliner wrote on the blog Equality Alliance in March 2017. "The wealthy have cordoned off their wealth. They hide behind school district boundaries that they often draw themselves, and when they do so, they proudly use a phrase we all applaud, 'local control!'"

The de-emphasis on federal involvement in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), supporters maintain, jeopardizes students living in disadvantaged and under-resourced areas. "The lesson of the civil rights movement…is that the federal government is the defender of vulnerable children," Liz King, director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told the New York Times in December 2015, "and we are worried that with new state and local authority, vulnerable children are going to be at risk."

Federal involvement, proponents contend, is the only way to ensure that all students across the United States receive adequate education. "The real question is what authority is left to the federal government to intervene should the states in one way or another fall short of what the hopes are?" David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, asked the New York Times in December 2015 after the passage of the ESSA. "We all are concerned that we not go to a place where based on where you happen to be born or which state you're in, you face very, very increasingly different opportunities."

It is foolish and unwise, supporters of federal involvement argue, to shape education policy on the belief that schools can be operated like private companies and forced to improve through free market competition. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's "characterization of public education as an 'industry' is a core tenet of corporate school reformers," Valerie Strauss wrote in the Washington Post in January 2017. "Public school advocates see America's public education system as a civic institution—the country's most important—that can't be run like a business without ensuring that some children will be winners and others will be losers, just like in business."

Redirecting federal money from public to non-public schools through portability programs, proponents charge,

will only weaken the public school system and impede it from fulfilling its mission to give students a quality education. "[T]he Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos scheme to take taxpayer dollars from public schools to fund private school vouchers is misguided and would harm our students," Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the teachers' union the National Education Association, wrote in March 2017. "Vouchers do not work, they undermine accountability to parents and taxpayers, and they have failed to provide opportunity to all of our students."

Supporters insist that the U.S. government must ensure that all students receive an equal education. The promotion of voucher programs, they argue, has caused some students to lose federal protections that often do not cover private schools. Students with disabilities, supporters contend, often attend private schools without realizing that such schools are exempt from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires public schools to accommodate their needs. "[D]istricts are not obligated to provide [children with disabilities] with the same services they would receive in a public setting—even if a child’s private school tuition is taxpayer funded through a voucher," New York Times contributor Dana Goldstein wrote in April 2017. "[T]here is no guarantee that students will receive the same level of disability services in private schools that they were entitled to in public school, a limitation that parents may not fully understand."

The education budget proposed by President Trump and endorsed by Secretary DeVos, supporters of greater federal involvement argue, would gut the public school system and deprive children of vital services. "[T]he Trump-DeVos budget would take an ax to important education programs for students, including eliminating after -school programs, and other student enrichment programs," Garcia explained. "In real life, these cuts mean students are robbed of the tools and supports they need to get ahead."

President Trump’s plan to slash spending for education, advocates of greater federal involvement contend, will primarily affect students in poor communities—those who need assistance most. "[A]bandoning teacher support and development programs, and an ill-advised…scheme to divert resources from our highest need schools would move our country backward," John King, CEO of the nonprofit Education Trust, wrote in March 2017. "They would hurt…the very schools responsible for educating our nation's most vulnerable students. If this proposal were enacted, all students, particularly students of color and low-income students, throughout the entire continuum of our education system would suffer."

Opponents Argue: Federal Involvement in Education Hurts Students

Opponents of greater federal involvement in education argue that it hurts students and that the United States should not increase its funding and regulation of public schools. Spending taxpayer dollars on public schools, they contend, is unlikely to improve educational achievement in the United States. "Real per pupil spending has more than doubled in the past 40 years, but the mathematics and reading scores of 17-year-olds have barely budged," Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution, wrote in the New York Times in March 2015. "We must recognize that more of the same is unlikely to yield better results—and by implication reform through spending is not the way to improvement."

The delegates who drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1787, critics of federal intervention argue, did not intend for the federal government to play a role in schooling. "[I]t is a very significant fact that you can read the Constitution all day long and not find the word 'education' in there," Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, which does not accept federal funding, told Breitbart News in December 2016. "[T]hey did not include it in the Constitution. And that's the reason the federal government doesn't have direct power to just pass a law and tell everybody the things they have to study."

The federal government has long burdened schools with unnecessary regulations, opponents assert, and the time has come to decrease its involvement in the nation’s education system. "The Trump Administration has the

opportunity to…dramatically reduce the intervention of the federal Department of Education into local schools," Lindsey Burke of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation wrote in December 2016. "The Department has been wholly ineffective at improving educational outcomes for students, loading states and local school leaders with a bureaucratic burden that saps time and financial resources."

The failure of the No Child Left Behind Act, critics argue, demonstrated the pitfalls of the federal government setting policy for local schools. "The old approach to education where classrooms are micromanaged by the U.S. Department of Education in Washington is going to be replaced with a new approach that will help ensure every child in every school receives an excellent education," Representative John Kline (R, Minnesota) wrote in 2015 following the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). "No Child Left Behind was based on good intentions, but it was also based on the flawed premise that Washington knows best what students need to excel in school."

New educational approaches and effective reforms, opponents insist, work best when conceived and implemented locally. The ESSA provides "a real opportunity to make sure we're capturing the things that are important, whether it's grit and persistence or school culture or parent engagement, and the only way to do that is to give power back to the states," Andy Smarick, a partner at the nonprofit education consulting group Bellwether Education Partners, told the New York Times in December 2015. "You cannot centrally manage an innovative, creative accountability system from Washington, D.C."

The federal government, critics maintain, should allow education reforms to continue on the local level without interference. "While activists and lobbyists in Washington, D.C., wrangle over the federal education bureaucracy, much of the important action on school choice has been taking place in state capitals," Jonathan Butcher, education policy director of the states’ rights organization the Goldwater Institute, and the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke wrote in National Review in March 2017. "[A]ny new federal program…would run the risk of regulating private schools and complicating existing state-based learning options. The proper role for federal policymakers is to empower states to lead."

President Trump should downscale the Department of Education, opponents contend, and get the federal government to relax its control of the nation’s schools. As Burke and Anne Ryland, a research assistant for education at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in February 2017:

The new Administration, along with Congress, should…advance policies…that would move the decision-making needle back toward the state and local levels and to those closest to the students— their parents—while easing the regulatory burdens currently hampering school systems, freeing schools and teachers to return their focus to educating children.

Opponents of federal regulations argue that current protections for students with disabilities, which exempt private schools, are adequate. Students who use vouchers to attend private schools, National Review contributor Marcus Winters wrote in April 2017, "don't give up their rights under [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] in perpetuity. They can always go back into the public school system and have those rights reinstated. Those who stay in private schools do so presumably because they prefer the services those schools offer."

Regulations on education infringe on people’s rights, some libertarian critics contend, and give government officials excessive power over school policy. Such regulations "restrict the freedom of parents to make judgments about the best educational programs for their children," former representative Ron Paul (R, Texas) wrote in his book The School Revolution.

Bureaucrats make the rules, and force them on children under the jurisdiction of their parents. This assumes that bureaucrats, who seek to feather their own nests, possess wisdom regarding the

education of children whom they have never seen. More than this, politicians assume that these bureaucrats have better insight into what is good for children in general than parents have for their particular children.

Federal Government Takes Step Back on Education

Despite the uproar over Betsy DeVos's confirmation as secretary of education in early 2017, the policies she implements may receive less attention than other issues. "[T]he changes DeVos will have power to make immediately as education secretary are likely to fly under the radar," journalist Libby Nelson wrote in Vox in February 2017. "Once the spotlight moves…she can change education in America merely by doing less than her predecessors."

President Trump's proposed $9 billion cut to the federal education budget will probably face a fight in Congress, and budgets proposed by presidents rarely pass as suggested. Nevertheless, few experts predict that federal involvement in education will expand under the Trump administration. "With this Republican-led trend in rolling back federal education authority not likely to reverse any time soon," Molly Reynolds and Elizabeth Mann, fellows at the Brookings Institution, wrote in February 2017, "it seems unlikely that either chamber [of Congress] will embrace a sweeping federal law that mandates state-level policy change." How the federal government might promote school choice or other education reform initiatives remains to be seen.

Bibliography

Bauer, Lauren, and Elizabeth Mann. "Repealing ESSA Rule Raises Implementation, Transparency Concerns." Brookings Institution, February 16, 2017, www.brookings.edu.

Bedrick, Jason. "What Trump's First 100 Days Might Mean for Education Policy." CATO Institute, November 10, 2016, www.cato.org.

Burke, Lindsey. "Reducing Federal Intervention in Education and Moving Toward Student-Centered Policies: 10 Steps for the Incoming Administration." Heritage Foundation, December 19, 2016, www.heritage.org.

Carey, Kevin. "Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins." New York Times, February 23, 2017, www.nytimes.com.

Deruy, Emily. "Donald Trump and the Future of Education." Atlantic, November 9, 2016, www.theatlantic.com.

Hanushek, Eric. "Not Enough Value to Justify More of the Same." New York Times, March 26, 2015, www.nytimes.com.

Huetteman, Emmarie, and Motoko Rich. "House Restores Local Education Control in Revising No Child Left Behind." New York Times, December 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com.

Jefferson-Jenkins, Carolyn, and Margaret Hawkins Hill. "Role of Federal Government in Public Education: Historical Perspectives." League of Women Voters, 2011, lwv.org.

Kamenetz, Anya. "Betsy DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary." National Public Radio, February 7, 2017, www.npr.org.

———. "'Tax Credit Scholarships,' Praised by Trump, Turn Profits for Some Donors." National Public Radio, March 7, 2017, www.npr.org.

King, Tim. "To Improve Education, Fund Each Student Equally." New York Times, November 6, 2015, www.nytimes.com.

Klein, Alyson. "No Child Left Behind: An Overview." Education Week, April 10, 2015, www.edweek.org.

———, and Andrew Ujifusa. "Trump Budget Would Make Massive Cuts to Ed. Dept., but Boost School Choice." Education Week, March 16, 2017, www.edweek.org.

Nelson, Adam, and Elliot Weinbaum. "Federal Education Policy and the States, 1945–2009: A Brief Synopsis." States' Impact on Federal Education Policy Project, November 2009, www.nysed.gov.

Nelson, Libby. "Betsy DeVos Can Change Education in America Without Doing a Thing." Vox, February 7, 2017, www.vox.com.

———. "Donald Trump's Huge, Ambitious School Voucher Plan, Explained." Vox, December 2, 2016, www.vox.com.

Peterson, Paul. "Trump's Education Pick: A Win for Public-School Parents." Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2016, www.wsj.com.

Reynolds, Molly, and Elizabeth Mann. "Rifts Among Congressional, State Republicans Over School Choice." Brookings Institution, February 21, 2017, www.brookings.edu.

Ryland, Anne, and Lindsey Burke. "School Rules: Lessons from the ESSA Regulatory Process." Heritage Foundation, February 1, 2017, www.heritage.org.

Severns, Maggie. "House Passes No Child Left Behind Rewrite." Politico, December 2, 2015, www.politico.com.

Shober, Arnold. "ESEA Reauthorization Continues a Long Federal Retreat from American Classrooms." Brookings Institution, December 8, 2015, www.brookings.edu.

Strauss, Valerie. "Trump Opposes Federal Involvement in Education. But Do His Plans Ensure a 'Race to the Bank'?" Washington Post, November 20, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com.

———. "What the Numbers Really Tell Us About America's Public Schools." Washington Post, March 6, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com.

Winters, Marcus. "In Florida, School Performance Has Risen with Vouchers for Disabled Students." National Review, April 24, 2017, www.nationalreview.com.

Zelizer, Julian. "How Education Policy Went Astray." Atlantic, April 10, 2015, www.theatlantic.com.

Additional Sources

Additional information about federal education policy can be found in the following sources:

Mondale, Sarah, and Sarah Patton, eds. School: The Story of American Public Education. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2001.

Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Reese, William. America's Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind.” Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.

Russakoff, Dale. The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools? Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

Contact Information

Information on how to contact organizations that are either mentioned in the discussion of federal education policy or can provide additional information on the subject is listed below:

CATO Institute 1000 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. Washington, D.C. 20001-5403 Telephone: (202) 842-0200 Internet: www.cato.org

Center for Education Policy The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E. Washington, D.C. 20002 Telephone: (202) 546-4400 Internet: www.heritage.org

Florida Education Association 213 South Adams St. Tallahassee, Fla. 32301 Telephone: (850) 201-2800 Internet: feaweb.org

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy 2800 N. Charles St. Baltimore, Md. 21218 Internet: edpolicy.education.jhu.edu

Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights 1620 L Street N.W. Suite 1100 Washington, D.C. 20036 Telephone: (202) 466-3311 Internet: www.civilrights.org

U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Ave. S.W. Washington, D.C. 20202 Telephone: (800) 872-5327

Internet: www.ed.gov

For further information about the ongoing debate over federal education policy, search for the following words and terms in electronic databases and other publications:

Betsy DeVos Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Race to the Top School choice School vouchers Standardized testing Tax credit scholarships Title I funding

Citation Information

" N a t i o n a l D e b a t e T o p i c : E d u c a t i o n : R e s o l v e d : T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s f e d e r a l g o v e r n m e n t s h o u l d s u b s t a n t i a l l y i n c r e a s e i t s f u n d i n g a n d / o r r e g u l a t i o n o f e l e m e n t a r y a n d / o r s e c o n d a r y e d u c a t i o n i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s . " Issues & Controversies, I n f o b a s e L e a r n i n g , 1 3 J u l y 2 0 1 7 , h t t p : / / i c o f . i n f o b a s e l e a r n i n g . c o m / r e c o r d u r l . a s p x ? I D = 1 6 6 2 1 . A c c e s s e d 2 1 J u l y 2 0 1 7 .

Copyright © 2017 Infobase Learning. All Rights Reserved.