In the eighties, Republicans talked of abolishing the federal
Department of Education. In the nineties, they blocked President
Clinton’s quest for national education standards. Former Reagan
education secretary William Bennett even dubbed America’s bloated
school monopolies “the Blob.”
But with the election of George W. Bush and the passage of his
No Child Left Behind law in 2002, the “party of limited government”
apparently decided to stop worrying and love the Blob. And its
appetite for federal control over the classroom continues to grow.
A chorus of Republicans — including Bennett himself, in a recent
Washington Post op/ed — is now calling for a national
system of education standards and testing.
Republican standard-bearers are clearly well intentioned, but
the notion that we can best pursue educational excellence by
federal edict is shortsighted, unconstitutional, inconsistent with
conservative principles, and, most importantly, mistaken.
Some of the opposition to federal standards under President
Clinton may have stemmed from partisan politics, but much was due
to the content of the standards themselves. People often favor
federal curricula and testing in the abstract, but when the
National History Standards Project released its recommendations in
1995, the perceived bias and omissions of its proposed standards
caused an uproar. So negative was the public reaction that the
Senate voted 99 to 1 to condemn the proposal. And those were
voluntary standards.
Now in control of the House, Senate, and White House, many
Republicans are acting as though their hold on power will last
forever. But once the current federal government usurps the right
to institute national standards, every future government will have
the opportunity to massage or mangle them.
And the word “usurp” is appropriate here. Bennett and former
Bush education secretary Roderick Paige recently conceded that the
Constitution does not mention education, and so, by the 10th
Amendment, reserves power over schooling to the states or the
people. But they went on to deride adherence to that Amendment as
“a naive commitment to states’ rights.” Would this rather
controversial bit of constitutional interpretation be part of
Republicans’ national standard for U.S. history and government
classes?
The very idea that government standards are the key to
educational improvement runs counter to the conservative principles
of individual liberty and the superiority of voluntary market
action over coercive central planning. Conservatives often tout the
merits of free markets, but their uniform standards and tests would
further homogenize American education, precluding the
specialization and division of labor upon which markets depend.
Federal standards would also exacerbate the existing cultural
conflict over what is taught in our schools, as different political
and religious factions fought to influence their content. Just
imagine the debate over science standards for the teaching of human
origins.
Of course, if there were evidence that imposing government
standards were the best way to improve education, Americans might
want to amend the Constitution, forsake market principles, suffer
more school wars, and cross their fingers that subsequent
administrations wouldn’t botch the standards. But that’s a
gedankenexperiment we needn’t gedenk about.
By Bennett and Paige’s own admission, “most states have deployed
mediocre standards.” This, counter-intuitively, is their chief
reason for seeking federal ones. We’ve generally gotten it wrong so
far, so let’s try again at the federal level and hope we do better?
But while there is at least some check on bad state policies
(states with the worst schools may drive away residents and
businesses), there is no such check on bad federal policies — get
it wrong nationally and you get it wrong for everyone,
everywhere.
Most importantly, standards advocates have yet to present a
decisive empirical case that national curricula or testing would
raise achievement, let alone that they would raise it more than
free market policies. Nor have they proven that any gains in the
subjects tested would be worth the costs in added cultural conflict
and diminished educational diversity, or the almost inevitable
marginalization of subjects left off the tests.
There is, by contrast, much evidence that competition and
parental choice improve achievement, reduce costs, minimize social
conflict, and make schools more responsive to families.
So instead of asking schools to slip out of NCLB’s handcuffs and
into a new and more restrictive federal straitjacket, conservatives
— and indeed liberals and moderates — should take the opposite
tack: ask their state representatives to free educators from red
tape, and empower all parents to choose the best schools for their
children, public or private. That was the wisdom of the earlier
conservative position on education, and surely it beats embracing
the Blob.
