Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.
Shrinking, or even closing, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) would certainly shift power out of Washington. That would be a good thing.
But we shouldn’t assume that an invisible hand will then suddenly materialize and orchestrate all the fixes American education needs. Reforms of systems are important, but reforms of substance don’t always follow.
There’s an historical fact to bear in mind: American schooling was far from perfect prior to the 1979 creation of ED. There were numerous reports and indicators showing that things were badly off track in the 1970s. The panel that penned the famous “A Nation At Risk” report was commissioned in 1981; they were responding to conditions decades in the making, not caused by a federal agency approved eighteen months earlier. ED didn’t singlehandedly cause our education struggles; ending ED won’t end them.
I believe we don’t need much federal activity on education. But I do believe we need national energy.
What that means in practice is a smaller educational footprint for a Washington-based agency but a strong national voice and commitment to students and the institutions that serve them. America should be galvanized to make its schools the best in the world. We should know what the problems are. We should mobilize our state and local leaders to tackle them.
That kind of national leadership, however, requires great knowledge of and experience with education policy and education institutions. It also takes a track record of consensus-building.
President Trump should ask Lamar Alexander to convene the nation’s governors to make school improvement a domestic-policy priority over the next four years.
This would be good for America’s schools and students. It would be good for our politics. It would also help Alexander finish the job he started with the Every Student Succeeds Act—a different decentralization movement a decade ago.
Alexander the Great Reformer
It’s hard to overstate Lamar Alexander’s education-leadership credentials. He was a two-term governor who prioritized school reform. He was the president of his state’s flagship university. He was U.S. Secretary of Education. Then he was a U.S. Senator who gave up a major party leadership position to chair the chamber’s education committee—the perch from which he ultimately led the passage of ESSA, the statute that stopped Uncle Sam from meddling so much in America’s schools.
Alexander knows about limiting federal power, but as a former state official, he also knows that after limiting federal power, you have to do the difficult state, local, and institutional work of making schools better.
ESSA wouldn’t have happened without Alexander. The law scaled back elements of the No Child Left Behind Act while preserving its important features related to content standards and assessments. The law also rapped the knuckles of the Obama administration, especially former secretary Arne Duncan, for its overreach (NCLB waivers, Race to the Top, etc.). Federal education policy is better because of ESSA.
But no one who follows schools closely would argue that American public K–12 education is dramatically better today than it was prior to ESSA. Test scores have fallen to appallingly low levels. Chronic absenteeism is a tragedy. Schools have been engulfed in culture-war melees. We’ve not come to grips with the failure of Covid-era practices and policies. The lowest performing students have fallen even farther behind. Public frustration is high and growing, evidenced by the rapid expansion of choice programs.
And I’ve not even mentioned higher education.
My point is that decentralization alone is not enough. We need America’s governors, legislators, state superintendents, state school boards, college presidents, local board members, and local superintendents to step up. They need to use the power they have to improve schooling.
Alexander has the gravitas, skill, and knowledge to catalyze that movement.
The reform consensus of this decade
Every decade or so, a new education consensus emerges and helps improve American schooling. In the 1950s, Sputnik and other Cold War traumas encouraged new investments in math and science. In the 1960s, the federal government passed the massive Elementary and Secondary Education Act to address the needs of low-income students. In the 1970s, communities fought back against court-ordered busing and the deterioration of student learning and school culture. In the 1980s, “A Nation At Risk” spurred the accountability movement. In the early 1990s, vouchers and charters were created to expand differentiation and choice. In 2002, President Bush signed NCLB into law to push schools and districts to improve. In the mid 2010s, ESSA got Uncle Sam to back up.
We need a new consensus for the 2020s, and it needs to be straightforward: America’s schools must return to focusing on student learning.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush convened the nation’s governors at a summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, to energize school reform. It worked. A bipartisan group of leaders from across the nation set about toughening standards, improving curricula, developing tests, crafting accountability measures, piloting choice initiatives, and much more. It is possible to create a bipartisan push for school improvement.
This is never easy work. It will be especially tough today. It will require a blend of individual leadership, state and local policy, institutional reform, social entrepreneurialism, culture change, and more.
No one person can do this alone. But it sure would help if there was a concerted national effort to get it started. And no one is better suited to it than Lamar Alexander. I hope he gets the call.
