Vantage Point: Toward a proper federal role in education 

As we grapple with how to best use federal stimulus funds during this budget catastrophe, this is a good time to weigh in on the role of the federal government in education.

During CSBA’s recent Federal Issues Council trip to Washington, D.C., David Shreve of the National Conference of State Legislatures suggested a good first principle for federal education policy: above all, do no harm. Given our experience with No Child Left Behind, that would be a refreshing change.

California, with the most diverse student population in the country, is an excellent example of why prepackaged solutions from Washington don’t work. School reform must be measured against improvements in student learning and outcomes, not against compliance with flavor-of-the-month solutions that pander more to politics than to student needs. Only partnerships between policymakers, administrators and teachers, given adequate time and resources, can build local capacity to meet the challenges of our students. Imposing an off-the-shelf framework might help some schools but won’t by itself address the more complicated issues of teacher effectiveness, student and family engagement, appropriate curricula, and assessments that guide instruction rather than penalizing schools. To be effective, the “how” of school improvement must be left to the local level.

The new administration in Washington has signaled its interest in equal opportunity by addressing the needs of underperforming students and schools, but the solutions proposed to date are more of the same top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches we are all too familiar with. Rather than address the complicated, nuanced issue of building local capacity to respond to local needs, the administration suggests national standards, more charter schools, pay-for-performance teacher compensation, tinkering with data systems, and a model of school reform based on Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s experience in Chicago. Washington is demanding that we buy its solutions, not asking to partner with us.

But Washington is too far away from local classrooms and lacks the capacity, will and expertise to design the various reform and capacity-building efforts needed to significantly improve student achievement. Since the federal government’s primary interest in education is to support equal opportunity, I suggest five ways this can be done:

1. Identify broad principles—such as those attached to the federal stimulus funding—to guide state and local efforts to improve student learning.
2. Increase state and local capacity to close achievement gaps through the support of targeted, fully supported programs and systemic change rather than through short-term fixes.
3. Partner with states to develop meaningful accountability tools to assess the programs the federal government funds.
4. Facilitate partnerships with other agencies, or at least get out of the way. The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (www.boldapproach.org), which CSBA supports and to which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a signatory, provides guidance on a national level.
5. Support effective educational innovation that improves student learning.

These approaches by the federal government would support a culture of equity and school improvement in which states and local educational agencies could craft the programs and interventions our students need.