Introduction
On November 20, 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama addressed a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire. At the time, he was locked in a three-way battle in the Democratic primary, behind Senator Hillary Clinton and not far ahead of former Senator Jonathan Edwards. The next day, Oprah would announce that she planned to campaign with Obama in three early primary states, a move that was to elevate his campaign to a new level.
But that hadnât happened yet, and candidate Obama was on the stump, talking education. Clinton and Edwards were long known for their connections with teachers unionsâAmerican Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was a key figure in Clintonâs senatorial campaignâand Obama had a chance to strike a different chord. Rather than join the attacks on President Bushâs signature domestic policy achievement, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), by bashing standardized testing, or nipping in the bud nascent efforts to hold teachers accountable based on student test scores, Obama showed nuance:
Statements like this, made in the face of pressures to retreat, convinced many education reformers they had found their candidate. Barack Obama was and is someone who admits the shortcoming of public education. In contrast, many in the education establishment argue that schools work as well as possible given the issues students bring into the classroom. Candidate Obama appeared to reject this, arguing coherently that public education can and should do better. Whatâs more, he was committed to real accountability to force the system to improve.Because I think weâd all agree that the goals of this law [NCLB] were the right ones. Making a promise to educate every child with an excellent teacher is right. Closing the achievement gap that exists in too many cities and rural areas is right. Making sure that necessary resources and qualified teachers are distributed equitably among every city and small town is right. More accountability is right. Higher standards are right. (Obama 2007)
Candidate Obama became President Obama, and as his first term came to a close, two of us published President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political. There, we argued that President Obama was a transformational president regarding education policy. His personal background and willingness to confront longtime democratic allies like teachers unions provided a unique opportunity to push a broad and deep education reform agenda. At the time, he had enacted Race to the Top (which we will describe later) which leveraged a small amount of federal stimulus money in a competitive grant program to incent states to create more charter schools, remove data firewalls to better facilitate teacher and school evaluation, and evaluate teachers in part by student test scores.
Here, we will extend our analyses to cover nearly the rest of the Obama Presidency, and take stock of two developments that only starting when our first volume was publishedâNCLB Waivers and the Common Core. To give away the ending, these initiatives seriously undercut the Presidentâs educational legacy, perhaps less from their substance than from their process. By using executive fiat, not legislative deal making, the President pushed states to adopt reforms that many had neither the capacity nor desire to implement. The Common Core, an initiative whose early backers thought might slowly build support state-by-state over the course of many years was suddenly catapulted onto 45 states and the District of Columbia in all grades Kindergarten to 12, fueling a tremendous backlash and scuttling the standards and related assessments in states across the country. Teacher evaluation systems, required for waiver relief, were imposed before they were ready for primetime. After decrying that evaluation systems only identified 1 % of teachers in states and districts that were clearly failing to educate large swathes of the children they were entrusted with, states created new system that identifiedâŠ.2 % of teachers as ineffective.
In this and the following chapters we will examine the Obama education legacy, keeping in mind several maxims. In particular, education is all for the grown-ups. Second, it is often difficult to take anything in public policy generally or education policy in particular at face value; rather one must measure, and remember that what doesnât get measured doesnât (or at least shouldnât) count. Third, ideas matter; indeed they often matter more than material interests. Finally, history matters. One can scarcely understand a program or institution until one understands how it came to be that way. Accordingly, we must start with the historical groundwork. Much of President Obamaâs education policy emerged as a natural extension of an expanding federal role in education starting around World War II, punctuated by President Johnson with the initial passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and then exemplified by President George W. Bushâs NCLB. Will so great a federal role continue post Obama? That is less certain. The Presidentâs overreach has sparked serious and often bipartisan pushback from Congress members wishing to limit presidential policy-making in education. How did we get here?
A Short History of American Public Schools: From Informal to Institutional
Like civil service reform, education reform reflects the character of American government, which quite literally bubbled up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the capital (Schultz and Maranto 1998). The first American âpublicâ schools supported by local tax levies, free to local residents, and with academically nonselective admissions were run by the dominant local religious congregation, as was appropriate when churches were the primary local institutions and when learning reading in order to understand the Protestant Bible was a key goal of education (Ravitch 2000; Peterson 2010). Taxpayers paid for and through school committees directly governed the schools in their small communities. As Franciosi (2004) shows, they thus saw the typically one-room public schools as their schools. School teachers were often honored local residents, occupying a position comparable to that of a medium-sized farmer. At the same time, teachers knew that they must please their constituents to keep their positions, and turnover was frequent. Like Ichabod Crane in Washington Irvingâs Legend of Sleepy Hollow, teachers not infrequently wished to marry into land to gain economic security. After the 1840s, such schools were increasingly replaced by what we think of as public schools, schools run by locally elected boards. Though not formally linked to religious sects, schools typically imposed the Protestant King James Bible, even on Catholic children. Indeed until the mid-twentieth century, public schools taught the dominant Protestant faiths and portrayed Catholicism as un-American, which ironically promoted Catholic schools as alternatives. For a time in the late nineteenth century dozens of localities made arrangements to publicly fund Catholic schools, allowing a sort of multiculturalism in competitive educational markets as is today practiced in much of Europe and many Canadian provinces. Increased anti-Catholic bigotry and attendant appeals by Republican politicians like James G. Blaine to win votes based on âthe school issueâ ended these local accommodations by 1900. Pressured by a range of groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Oregon actually outlawed Catholic schools in 1922. In the 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters case the US Supreme Court declared Oregonâs act unconstitutional, ruling the children are not merely creatures of the state (Maranto and van Raemdonck 2015).1
The original, small, community-based public schools were reasonably effective. Even though most students attended school for only a few years and treatment of teachers varied widely, literacy was close to universal among the white, native-born population. Further, schools succeeded in building citizens, making children loyal to America and proud of their nationâs history and institutions. This remarkable success story both reflects attentive parents and considerable standardization among textbook producers, most notably through the famous McGuffyâs readers (Ravitch 2000; Hirsch 1996). Indeed, America was among the first nations to enjoy mass literacy, which fueled economic growth.
Yet moralistic reformers found troubling the local and highly variable character of American schooling, seeking to replace it with a more uniform and bureaucratic system. Massachusettsâ Horace Mann, often considered the founder of the common school, served as the first state commissioner of education in 1837. Shortly before taking the post, Mann declared:
Complaining that his state took more care of its livestock than its children, Mann successfully pushed Massachusetts to pass the first mandatory attendance law and began the state-level funding and regulation of the Bay Stateâs large number of tiny public schools. Thus began the first movement for centralization and standardization of traditionally local American public schools, a tension that has been with us ever since.In this Commonwealth, there are 3,000 public schools, in all of which the rudiments of knowledge are taught. These schools, at the present time, are so many distinct independent communities; each being governed by its own habits, traditions, and local customs. There is no common, superintending power over them; there is no bond of brotherhood or family between them. They are strangers and aliens to each other. As the system is now administered, if any improvement in principles or modes of teaching is discovered by talent or accident, in one school, instead of being published to the world, it dies with the discoverer. No means exist for multiplying new truths, or preserving old ones. (quoted in Cremin 1980, 155)
Mannâs innovations might be understood through the lens of American political culture. Elazar (1971, 103â114) argues that American political culture can be divided into moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic strands. Moralistic political culture, concentrated in New England and the Midwestern and Western regions settled by Yankee and northern European immigrants, stresses that government should serve all equally and that government officials should be motivated by serving the public. As the name implies, government should operate to make society better. The moralistic political culture, at least in the past, tended to support centralization and bureaucratization which in theory promoted equity. In contrast, individualistic political culture, which grew out of the intergroup conflicts for resources characterizing New York and other diverse, middle-Atlantic states, is more pragmatic, seeing government less as an actor promoting social good than as a marketplace in which contending individuals and groups bring (often materialistic) demands. Traditionalistic political culture, reflecting plantation agriculture in the South, shows skepticism of markets and sees government as maintaining traditional person and kin-based communitiesâwhich of course tend to continue elite dominance. It is not surprising that ideas that schooling should be centralized and bureaucratized came from Massachusetts rather than South Carolina. Indeed as we argue below, national government involvement in education policy over the past two decades can be thought of as a moralistic enterprise pushing individualistic and traditionalistic local bureaucracies to change practices which in practice disadvantage the disadvantaged.
Through the late nineteenth century and nearly the entire twentieth century, progressive administrative doctrine pushed for larger schools and school districts. Gradually, though the 1800s small church-based schools were replaced or subsumed by nondenominational (though Protestant), elected school boards. Ungraded and often one-room schools were replaced with larger and more formal organizations. The number of school districts steadily declined through the twentieth century from over 117,000 districts in 1940 to roughly 16,000 in 1980, while their size increased (Kirst 1995; Franciosi 2004).2
Increasingly large schools and school systems found it difficult to represent and maintain close relationships with parents, a theme of school reformers for decades (Cutler 2000; Tyack and Cuban 1995). Efforts to force schools to serve parents, or at least special-nee...