I love the premise of Jack Jennings’ piece on the need to redefine the federal role in education, and, like Jack, I believe that it’s not too early to start a dialogue on the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of his argument:
- I agree with Jack that the federal government should make it a higher priority to support better research and data collection in K-12 education. Specifically, I think the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has lost its mojo and needs an overhaul. For years, when I worked on Capitol Hill, I tried to convince IES that it has a responsibility not just to fund gold standard research studies but to help create more demand, in the field, for good research and data. I was unsuccessful, but I still think this is important to pursue.
- I disagree with the idea that the feds can or should get into the curriculum business. Some may recall Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), the curriculum that the National Science Foundation supported in the mid-1960s. Politically speaking, it was a disaster, as was the federal effort, in the 1990s, to create K-12 history standards — it resulted in a 98-1 vote of condemnation by the Senate. While I agree that the Secretary of Education has a role to play in this area (e.g., calling for an independent commission to study the issue and make recommendations about the curriculum), I would argue that the real action has to be at the state and district levels.
- Jack doesn’t address special education, but it is badly in need of reform, and it should get more attention from federal policy makers. Just this morning, by coincidence, I was talking with a former assistant secretary for that division, and we agreed that there’s an urgent need to work more effectively with school and district leadership. Local administrators know there are laws and policies in place, but they don’t necessarily understand the details of those policies or the decisions that went into them. Further, many administrators have never received training in special education, and many are making terrible mistakes — in implementing programs, allocating resources, and so on — that are costing children their futures.
- As Jack argues, K-12 education also has severe human capital issues that need attention, and federal policy does have a role to play here. By almost every measure, our current approach to teacher training is terrible and leaves graduates floundering. School districts need to find better ways to onboard new recruits and give them substantial support and mentoring. And efforts to train and develop educational leaders and school board members have always been poorly supported. Here, I agree with Jack: Washington should push states to do much more to build human capital, using grant funding as an incentive.
- The toughest issue, as Jack knows well, is to rethink the ways in which we finance K-12 education. While I am not sure what the federal role should be here, it’s obvious that the way we now spend dollars at the district and school level is dysfunctional. Every other sector, from health care to policing, has revolutionized the ways in which needs are identified and resources are allocated, but school systems haven’t changed their spending practices for decades, even though they’re collecting and using new kinds of data, looking for ways to personalize learning, creating stronger links between high school and college . . . Again, I don’t know that Washington should be involved in telling states and districts what to do, but this could be another place where it could be useful to create a federally sponsored commission to propose new funding models and issue a report to the nation.
This article is an invited response to “It’s Time to Redefine the Federal Role in K-12 Education” by Jack Jennings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Cross
CHRISTOPHER T. CROSS is chairman of FourPoint Education Partners, a distinguished senior fellow with the Education Commission of the States, and a consultant to the Broad Foundation.
