Commentary by James Shott
Among the many hot topics since Donald Trump won election as
the 45th President of the United States is America’s education
system. Once at the top of the nations of the world in educating its young,
America has lost ground.
Jon Guttman, Research Director of the
World History Group, wrote in 2012 that “[a]s recently as 20 years ago, the
United States was ranked No.1 in high school and college education,” and that
“[i]n 2009, the United States was ranked 18th out of 36 industrialized
nations.” He attributes that decline to “complacency and inefficiency,
reflective of lower priorities in education, and inconsistencies among the
various school systems.”
In 2010 at a Paris meeting of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), President Barack
Obama’s first Secretary of Education, Arne
Duncan, who served from 2009 through 2015, said this:
“Before the 1960s, almost all policymaking and education funding was a state and local responsibility. In the mid-1960s, the federal role expanded to include enforcing civil rights laws to ensure that poor, minority, and disabled students, as well as English language learners, had access to a high-quality education.
“Before the 1960s, almost all policymaking and education funding was a state and local responsibility. In the mid-1960s, the federal role expanded to include enforcing civil rights laws to ensure that poor, minority, and disabled students, as well as English language learners, had access to a high-quality education.
“As the federal role in education grew,” Duncan said, “so
did the bureaucracy,” adding that the U.S. Department of Education often “operated
more like a compliance machine, instead of an engine of innovation,” and that it
concerned itself with the details of formula funding, and not with educational
outcomes or equity.
He went on to say that the United States needed
to challenge the status quo, and to close the achievement and opportunity gaps.
Five years later, the U.S. still lagged behind many other countries.
The findings in the 2015 Program International
Student Assessment (PISA), described by CNN as “a benchmark of education
systems conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of the world's richest
economies,” finds the U.S. education system improved since the last assessment
in 2012 in the areas of science, math and reading.
However, that improvement leaves American
students ranked behind the students of 24 other countries, among the 72 participating
nations. Teens in Singapore, Japan and Estonia led the more than half a million
15-year-olds in the 2015 assessment, the primary focus of which was science,
with math as the primary focus in 2012.
President Jimmy Carter signed the
federal Department of Education into law in 1979, and since it became active
the following year, American education has gotten worse, as measured by
these international assessments. Marginal or negative performance is
not unusual for federal agencies, however. President-Elect Donald Trump,
like Ronald Reagan before him, has called for abolishing the Department of
Education, citing the need to cut spending.
Looking back to the formative years of the republic, we find
the Founders established only four cabinet level activities: foreign relations
through the State Department; national defense through the Department of War
(now Defense); taxation and spending through the Department of the Treasury;
and enforcement of federal law through the Attorney General (now the Department
of Justice).
The increase of federal agencies has no doubt produced some benefits,
but does their performance justify the costs incurred? They have produced huge growth in government control
of our lives, and enormous expense. Today there are nearly four times as many
cabinet level agencies as the Founders thought necessary.
The federal education effort has many sins on its list, but
the primary sin is the shifting of control of local schools to Washington by dangling
federal dollars in front of state school officials, which they can earn in
return for giving up some degree of control over their schools. Federal
influences also contribute to the infestation of standardized testing, which in
moderation can provide benefits, but when a typical student
takes 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-kindergarten classes and
12th grade, that is over the edge. Eighth-graders, it is said, spend an average
of 25.3 hours on standardized testing.
Trump has named Betsy DeVos to become education secretary.
Her bio explains that in education she “has been a pioneer
in fighting to remove barriers, to enact change and to create environments
where people have the opportunity to thrive,” and that her political efforts
are focused on advancing educational choices. She currently chairs the American
Federation for Children.
Like all of Trump’s cabinet selections
so far, DeVos is seen as unqualified, criticized for her lack of experience in education
and for pushing to “give families taxpayer money in the form of vouchers to
attend private and parochial schools, pressed to expand publicly funded but
privately run charter schools, and trying to strip teacher unions of their
influence,” according to an unflattering story in The New York Times.
Perhaps the contrary is true, however.
Given the lackluster performance of the Department of Education when run by apparently
qualified people, someone with other strengths just might be able to turn the
department into a positive influence on what is broadly considered a mediocre
education system.
Schools are best operated by those
closest to the students, so returning control to states and localities will be
a good first step.
Cross-posted from Observations
