Chalk it up to too much eggnog. In today’s Washington Post, columnist Michael Gerson expresses a beatific faith in the ability of the federal government to micro-manage American education.
Lamenting the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which retires the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act and sharply reverses a quarter-century of growing Washington control over America’s schools, Gerson declares the new law a betrayal of disadvantaged children. Indeed, he declares that Senator Lamar Alexander’s principled, conservative triumph “devalues the educational needs of black children.”
What makes the column so peculiar is that Gerson concedes NCLB was a failure and offers no reason to think that it knows how to do better. Of NCLB, he writes, “The whole thing was a mess from the start . . . Teachers didn’t like the relentless emphasis on testing, which ate into their time for the unmeasurable joys of learning.”
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Gerson even notes, “The Every Student Succeeds Act ends the back-seat driving of the federal government in education policy. State and local officials will be free to set academic goals and to determine if schools are meeting them. While the law still mandates consequences for the worst-performing schools, states will determine what those consequences are.”
If this all sounds pretty good . . . it should. But Gerson frets that, “with the end of federal nagging,” some states will do “really good, creative things for students”—but some may not. Some might see this as the healthy dynamics of federalism, with state and community leaders tackling their challenging, innovating, learning, and being held responsible for the results. Gerson does not.
Gerson’s musings are curiously devoid of any consideration of what Washington should be doing or does well. Instead, it embraces the starry-eyed progressive credo that, if something is important, Washington should be in charge of it. The truth is that ESSA embraces a remarkably grounded and constructive view of the federal role. It’s rooted in recognizing that federal mandates are moderately effectively when simply requiring that states do them is enough. For instance, requiring states to administer annual tests and report the results is pretty straightforward. It’s a lot like mailing Social Security checks—there’s just not that much room for slippage. It’s an easy requirement to enforce, and therefore it entails little red tape or intrusion.
On the other hand, when it comes to things like micro-managing accountability systems and school improvement, whether they’re done matters infinitely less than how they’re done. Here federal efforts have yielded incoherent mandates, bureaucratic sprawl, and one-size-fits-all dictates, with lots of consequent foot-dragging and ineptitude. This constricts those seeking to do things well while ensuring that school improvement will be done poorly and with little ownership or accountability.
Gerson is a self-avowed “reformicon.” The reformicon project is to apply conservative principles to devise policies that address today’s public policy challenges. On the right, the effort suffers from suspicion that it’s little more than camouflage for big government Republicanism. This column, with its cri de coeur for more “federal nagging” and cheerful willingness to ignore Washington’s dismal track record in schooling, will justifiably feed that skepticism.
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