The feds are coming, the feds are coming

In an interesting twist, earlier this week, my son and I travelled the Battle Road on bikes from Lexington to Concord, the scene of Paul Revere’s famous ride. It was interesting to follow the steps that led to the first skirmish of the American Revolution which took place on April 19, 1775. And it’s interesting to reflect in the place where the flames of liberty were ignited, and concepts of federalism and the limited role of a central government were nurtured.

That ride brought to mind the President’s current push to rewrite education legislation and invoked a federal takeover of schools in this country (see Boston Globe report by clicking here and Newsweek piece by clicking here).

Education has historically been left in the hands of local communities. It’s part of the idea that the governance of education is best done at the local level, where the parents, teachers, administrators, and students are intimately more aware of the needs of their schools. Indeed since colonial times, Massachusetts required the towns to maintain a system of public schools. The statute of 1647 — which is the precursor to G. L. c. 71, Section 1 — required every town with fifty or more householders to appoint a schoolmaster in the town “to teach all such Children as shall resort to him to Write and Read,” and every town of one hundred or more householders or families to “set up a Grammar School, the Master thereof being able to Instruct Youth so far as they may be fitted for the University.”

The federal constitution purposefully says nothing about education. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), a unanimous Supreme Court recognized that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” And in 1973, the Supreme Court recognized that education is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution. San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973). In Wright v. Council of City of Emporia, 407 U.S. 451 (1972), the Court noted that “[d]irect control over decisions vitally affecting the education of one’s children is a need that is strongly felt in our society.” As one of the justices in that case observed:

Local control is not only vital to continued public support of the schools, but it is of overriding importance from an educational standpoint, as well. The success of any school system depends on a vast range of factors that lie beyond the competence and power of the courts. Curricular decisions, the structuring of grade levels, the planning of extracurricular activities, to mention a few, are matters lying solely within the province of school officials, who maintain a day-to-day supervision that a judge cannot.

Despite all of this, the President is making a push to impose national standards in education. Indeed, the federal government is offering funding — through a program called Race to the Top — which will reward school districts that adhere to national standards. But national standards, no matter how brilliantly designed, create uniformity and are harmful to creativity. Aside from that, they ignore the good work that is already being done in states such as Massachusetts. To those who still think American schools are bad and need standards, I suggest you review my last post by clicking here.

For a glimpse of some of the more detailed reasons to oppose national standards, consider the following:

• The best defense against national standards
• Feds In The Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education
• The case against national standards
• Against National Standards

If the federal government wants to help states and local governments, it can begin by funding the mandates already in place. For a list of those mandates already in place and which are not fully funded, click here. For now, the national standards push should be abandoned and we should revert of the federalist system composed at the end of the Revolutionary War.