Vantage Point: Federal Issues Council defends local control in Washington

Chances that the 110th Congress will reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act are dim and getting dimmer, members of CSBA’s Federal Issues Council learned during the annual trip to Washington, D.C., last month. That’s not too surprising during this election year, but it is a shame.

It’s a shame that local educators throughout the country are being kept in suspense about the direction that federal education policy will take. It’s a shame that so much of what happens in California’s classrooms depends on what takes place in Washington, and it’s a shame that it could be two or three years before Congress acts on NCLB, leaving the bad elements of that landmark legislation in place along with the good elements that CSBA and other friends of public schools embrace. It seems some elected officials and national organizations are too busy talking about national standards and testing and international benchmarking to bother to fix the law that’s already on the books.

Those are cookie-cutter approaches to student achievement. We don’t need cookie cutters, the hard-working folks who attended FIC told every Washington insider we encountered. We need to make sense of the jigsaw puzzle that is public education—a local enterprise with unavoidable state involvement and the heavy hand of the federal government banging on the table. Instead of waiting for the federal government to decide what role it should play in public education, we must take the lead in determining what shape that role should take.

Local school board members are a vital piece of the larger picture of public education system, but other pieces of the puzzle come from Washington. The U.S. government pays for 5 percent of the puzzle pieces but demands 100 percent of the say in dictating what the final picture should look like. That’s why we go there.

In 20 meetings over three hectic days, CSBA’s Federal Issues Council met with members of the Bush administration, the state’s congressional delegation and important groups representing education, business and public health interests in the nation’s capital. We discussed the intersection of state and local governance interests with the executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education. We talked with experts from the Center for Applied Linguistics about how to educate English language learners and with senior staffers for Pre-K Now about the importance of early childhood education. We conferred with representatives of the National Governors Association and with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s consultant on education policy in Washington.

It’s all part of a continuous process of studying the part that each level of government—local, state and federal—as well as the private sector and public-interest groups can play in completing the picture of what student achievement and school success ought to look like. We’ll do our utmost to make sure that the final picture in the education mosaic that emerges is one that CSBA can embrace.