Higher Standards: We’d Love to But...

Federal education politics have been peculiar during the past twelve years. There was a sudden and unexpected consensus- congressmen and presidents held that students in America’s public schools were learning less than they should. Moreover, the left and the right agreed that the proper policy response to this public problem was to raise education standards. Accordingly, recent years brought five major federal policy initiatives to raise education standards: America 2000, Goals 2000, the 1994 Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Voluntary National Tests (VNT’s), and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB). Yet, for all the effort the policies have failed. America 2000 and VNT’s did not pass Congress; and Goals 2000, the 1994 Reauthorization of the ESEA, and NCLB have had negligible effects on standards. Research Question: Why have the efforts to make federal policy to raise education standards failed? Hypothesis: National politicians do not object to standards per se. In fact, they avidly support standards. However, a deep-rooted political division has confounded the efforts to create effective national standards policy. The sources of the present political divide in federal education politics are twofold. First, the tradition of local control of schooling limited the politically feasible extents of raising educational standards through federal policy. In short, conservatives have denied the federal government direct means for raising standards, forcing policymakers to use indirect and ineffective approaches. Second, liberals believe that academic under-achievement is largely a function of school funding. They have, therefore, refused to accept higher standards without federal action to equalize school funding and resources. Doing this though, would not only be expensive, but it would also be a dramatic invasion of local control, which, as noted above, conservatives stand firmly against. Source Materials: This paper draws on a larger study that utilized primary source documents, including transcripts of congressional hearings on education bills and floor debates, the presidential platforms of the major parties, and interviews with policymakers. These were supplemented with secondary sources (newspapers, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, texts, etc.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]