The Fallacy of ‘Local Control’

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Energy may have slipped his mind, but Texas Gov. Rick Perry remembered during his debate debacle last fall that he would close the U.S. Department of Education if elected president. He had some help. Every 2012 Republican presidential candidate has railed against federal influence in the nation's public schools, as have most other Republican presidential hopefuls since the department's founding in 1980. Given the nation's long tradition of local control of school policies, the department has been an easy target for Republican politicians playing to the anti-Washington inclinations of small-government conservatives. Ronald Reagan spent more than two years advocating the new department's abolition after he won the White House, even as a commission created by his education secretary was drafting a national school reform manifesto. But today's Republican critiques of the federal role in education are not merely the predictable by-products of a presidential campaign. They're part of a backlash from many points on the political spectrum against the emergence over the past three decades of national demands on local school systems. It would be unfortunate if these critics prevailed at this important juncture in American education history. With the nation's pursuit of equal educational opportunity far from fulfilled and workers increasingly facing global competition for their jobs, there's a compelling case for defining public education's aspirations nationally rather than locally. The tradition of local control runs deep. The U.S. Constitution left authority over education in the hands of the states under the 10th Amendment, and the states passed that power to local school boards. For much of the nation's history, local boards were solely responsible for school funding, standards, instruction, and results. They presided over an education enterprise that stressed low-level academics and vocational training for most students. But faith in local school boards began to erode when the Reagan Administration's reform commission and other influential voices in the early 1980s called on public schools to deliver a much more demanding education to a much wider range of students. Many local school systems failed to deliver, responding, for example, to calls for a stronger high school core curriculum with a myriad of watered-down courses like Fundamentals of General Science and Informal Geometry. Students earned science credits for classes in commercial food preparation and auto body repair. As a result, we've spent three decades shifting strategic decision making in public education from the local to the national levels. Organizations of governors and state education officials, Republican and Democrat presidents, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and a host of convening organizations replaced local hegemony with more centralized standards, assessments, and accountability requirements--an evolution chronicled by education writer Robert Rothman in a new book, Something in Common (Harvard Education Press, 2011). The logic of this transformation in American education is clear and compelling: National problems require national solutions. As commentator Matt Miller wrote in The Atlantic in 2008 about relying on local school boards to meet today's educational challenges: It's as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories. Local control threatened There have been mistakes along the way. The federal No Child Left Behind Act required states to set high standards, measure student performance, and hold schools accountable for results. But NCLB unintentionally gave states a strong incentive to lower rather than raise standards--by demanding that they judge schools on the percentage of students who met the standards and demanding that all groups of students clear the state hurdles by 2014--and a number of states did just that. …