Rationalamerican: Nationalized Schools?

All available topics:

Nationalized Schools?

Last edited September, 2006, Last reviewed September 2007

Our federal government is creeping into our schools not on little cat feet, but on the heavy pounding feet of a stampeding elephant. Worse yet, there are several unsavory characters sitting astride this elephant getting an unobstructed ride into the classrooms of our children. Left unchecked, this stampede could well create a defacto nationalized and centralized school system with a bland, ineffectual curriculum designed more to please political interests than to truly educate. The insidious process is well underway and it is already affecting the current generation.

So why should you care? Let’s connect some of the dots.

Public education predates our Constitution. American colonies required some form of public schools by law, but left the fulfillment of the law to a loose and decentralized arrangement of one room schools paid for in part by tuition and in part by public funds. When the American Constitution was created, education remained the dominion of the individual states. The Tenth Amendment left all powers not enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution to the people or the states. In time, though, the federal intrusion into education became a reality. In the late 1800s the precursor to the federal Department of Education was created. Congressional acts followed which expanded the federal role, including the Second Morril Act and the Smith Hughes Act. The latter addressed vocational education. By the era of World War Two, the Lanham Act and the “GI Bill” made the federal role one of a financer and, by the 50’s, a paranoid attempt to catch up with the Soviets led to the National Defense Education Act. In 1965 the biggest federal intrusion yet came in the form of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which set in stone the considerable influence of federal law on education policy.

In the 1980’s, though President Ronald Reagan had promised to eliminate the Department of Education, it was eventually elevated to cabinet level instead. By the time the bipartisan No Child Left Behind law was enacted, federal spending on education had increased dramatically and the role of the federal government extended through all areas of policy including curriculum, administration, and funding. Public education is no longer the domain of the states or of the people, but a monstrosity ruled by the federal government, by state governments leashed to the hand of the feds and by a few corporate and political interests taking advantage of the disarray.

Today, as a practical matter, professional educators and administrators kowtow to the wants of federal and state government bureaucrats and elected officials who likely know very little about what it takes to educate an individual child. Public school principals, superintendents and business administrators spend untold hours filing obscure but required reports which very often bear no association with the education of children. Teachers spend weeks prepping students for high-stakes federally mandated tests and some are pressured to use subtle or not so subtle means to cheat the scores higher. Federal money does flow to the states and to schools, but the amount is laughable compared to the investment in effort. If a state such as Utah or Vermont flirts with the idea of refusing federal money, the other states resign to being collared and leashed to the federal hand. After all, the feds collect the money anyway and the states are not in a position to fund educational mandates themselves.

Yet, the federal intrusion into education is not over. In fact, an August 2006 report by a federal panel recommended new forays into higher education. States should now measure the progress of universities and colleges with the same sorts of standardized tests now required by the feds in the K-12 arena, according to the report. Another recommendation was to create a national database of students so that universities and colleges could be held accountable for the final success of students. The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities called that idea “chilling”. Most ironic in the report are the ideas for controlling the cost of higher education. It is ironic because federal student aid and grants have been, in large part, responsible for the increase in tuition costs. As any economist will tell you, one reason for price inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods. By making loans and grants available to so many students who would not otherwise qualify for aid in the private sector, the federal government has created a much larger pool of money for universities and colleges. Naturally, institutions of higher education will charge what this expanded market will bear. If these loans and grants were to dry up overnight, the price of higher education would drop like a rock. Fewer students would have the advantage of a college degree, it is true, but the rate of successful graduation of these students on the federal dime shows that many don’t belong there anyway. The panel’s recommendation to solve the issue of rising tuition, by the way, is to increase the rate of federal Pell grants to students.

The federal role in public education is now firmly established and growing. Riding on the NCLB elephant are some unsavory characters that are using the federal government to increase their own presence in public schools. Some of these characters are the corporate entities who serve to administer the workings of federal law. The companies such as Harcourt, CTB-McGraw Hill, Riverside, Pearson and ETS who create, sell and score the standardized tests required under federal law stand to share up to five billion dollars over the next few years, according to the GAO (Government Accounting Office). More importantly, these companies are working in outright secrecy with virtually no input or oversight by parents or professional educators ultimately responsible for actual learning in classrooms. National news reports over the past year show that these companies are straining under the load of creating new tests and making serious and repeated scoring errors on existing tests all while raking in record amounts of profit. Yet, it gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective).

Consider the plans of the College Board, makers of the SAT test. The College Board is a $530 million dollar entity with a leader who earns total compensation north of $700,000. Sensing a decline in their business due to competition of the ACT test, the College Board is now pushing products deep into the lower grades of public schools, including new testing products and even standardized curriculum as early as sixth grade. They are helping to open pilot schools which utilize their testing products. With support from high level politicians and from corporate foundations, the College Board is hoping to make huge inroads into public schools and secure a bigger piece of the funding pie. Like many corporate entities large and small, the College Board is riding the federal elephant directly into public school classrooms.

Corporations are not the only riders on this elephant. Religious leaders who wish to embed their version of the world in public school curriculum are riders too. True, the courts have prevented many (though not all) of the most egregious violations of the separation of church and state from occurring over the long term. Yet, it isn’t just about prayer in schools or “under God” in the pledge. In places like Kansas, Georgia and Pennsylvania, religious advocates for creationism or “intelligent design” have made inroads into local and state politics and even successfully introduced their anti-science curriculum as actual science in some classrooms. Their ultimate aim, however, is national and federal in scope. By inserting their sleeper cells into positions of elected power, their strategy is to eventually become a federal majority strong enough to impose their Christian vision on education and other areas. With an ever increasing federal role in education, such a strategy might be easier to implement than one might at first believe.

So, with the federal elephant and associated riders shoving their way into public school classrooms, who or what stand in the way of a defacto nationalized school system? Two notable stakeholders missing from the party are parents and professional educators. The worst of lower income urban parents and the worst of high income suburban parents share one thing: they are not paying attention. One group perhaps lacks the knowledge required to challenge the federal occupation of schools, the other group apparently lacks the will. Sadly, the rank and file of parents may even believe it is no longer their place to question the direction of public education. Professional educators are also strangely silent, leaving weakened and infertile union organizations to mumble ineffective protests. Taxpayers in general, who are quick to complain about rising taxes related to school expenditures, are not much interested in anything related to policy or direction. They simply implore politicians to come up with a fix, and that simply encourages more intrusion by non-educator public officials.

We are heading quickly toward either a fascist or socialist model. Crazy hyperbole? In a fascist state, private ownership of property is retained, but centralized government control of that property gives the government total control over its use. That may not be so different from a public school system “owned” by the taxpayers and parents who pay for it but controlled entirely by the centralized authority of the federal government. In a socialist model the only difference is that the central authority retains the ownership of the property too. Hyperbole or not, the fact is that our schools are becoming ever more centralized, ever more standardized and homogenized by the mandates handed down by federal authorities or state authorities leashed to the feds. A defacto nationalized public school system could be less than a generation off if left unchecked. That means that by the time children in elementary school today reach college, they may be subjected to a standardized education dictated from above, tracked in a national database for comparison to the other numbers, put into debt by forces beyond their control, and graduated without any of the authentic skills and knowledge needed to live a productive life except test-taking skills beyond compare. In the school models of now defunct fascist and socialist states the actual intent was to inculcate in students obedience and belief in propaganda as dictated from above. In the American federal model, there is no actual intent—only a pathetic lack of action by those who should and could make a difference, allowing political interests, profiteers and ignorant do-gooders to ride the elephant right through the hallways.

What can stop the federal juggernaut? Democracy still works, though it takes time. Meanwhile, parents and professional educators can engage in an examination of policy, attend school board meetings, support educational foundations and parent-teacher organizations, and wrestle back what local control is still possible. Federal mandates cannot be ignored, but they need not be embraced either. By insisting on what autonomy can still be had and by using the voting booth for longer term change, stakeholders still interested in an America of educated and worthy citizens can bring about positive evolution.

To cite this article:

Painter, John. Nationalized Schools?. (September 2006). Retrieved month x, 2xxx, from

<http://rationalamerican.com/education>