But we shouldn’t assume that an invisible hand will then suddenly materialize and orchestrate all of the fixes American education needs. Reforms of systems are important, but reforms of substance don’t always follow.
There’s a historical fact to bear in mind: American schooling was far from perfect prior to the 1979 creation of the Education Department. There were numerous reports and indicators in the 1970s showing that things were badly off track. The panel that penned the 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 18 months earlier. The Department of Education didn’t singlehandedly cause our education struggles; ending it 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 requires a track record of consensus-building.
President Donald 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 (ESSA) — a different decentralization movement from a decade ago.
It’s hard to overstate Lamar Alexander’s education leadership credentials. He was a two-term governor of Tennessee 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’s 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 (NCLB) while preserving its important features related to content standards and assessments. The law also rapped the knuckles of the Obama administration, especially those of then-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, and the lowest-performing students have fallen even farther behind. 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. 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 school 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.
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, Va., 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.
Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a former New Jersey deputy commissioner of education and a former president of the Maryland State Board of Education. He currently serves on the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland. (All views expressed here are his.) This commentary is adapted from a post on his Substack, Governing Right. Read the original here.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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