Federal assistance steeped in American roots

Federal support of, or meddling in, education is the perennial darling of politicians in search of a wedge issue. The roots of federal participation in education lie deep in American history, beginning in the days of the Confederation. When it became clear in 1771 that the soldiers of the Continental Army lacked necessary competence in mathematics and military regimen, instruction was provided in these areas. Soon thereafter it became evident that the nation's safety required a corps of trained military officers. And national leaders united to establish the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Federal support of education in the individual states began in 1785 when the Congress of the Confederation adopted an ordinance concerning public lands in the Western Territory, providing that one section of land owned by the national government be set aside in each township for the endowment of schools. With the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, higher education became the first major beneficiary of federal education assistance, and it remained so for more than 50 years. How else train a corps of educators for the future?

At the time of the nation's founding, transportation and communication were primitive by today's standards. Consequently, it made sense for states to delegate authority for school operations to local districts. Today the ultimate authority for schooling in the United States resides with the individual states. This is not a system, but rather a set of 50 state-based systems. Whether this continues to make sense in the modern world, whether it yields economies, or diseconomies, of scale is a legitimate question. To many who lived through Southern resistance to desegregation of schools, blanket resistance to federal support of education always resounds with echoes of that sad time, usually buttressed with renewed allegiance to state's rights.

How Americans view federal education support often reflects whether their world is filtered through a zero-sum game lens (if you gain, I must lose). While some programs -- such as the 1946 Federal Impact Aid that subsidizes local school districts in which there is a large federal presence (such as a military base), or The GI Bill of 1944 -- are largely viewed as aggregate gains, others are not. Title I of 1965, providing compensatory education to economically disadvantaged students and Title IX of 1972, outlawing discrimination in any program receiving federal aid would be candidates for the zero-sum view.

If one uses a time-arc measurement from the 1950s to the present (excluding the popular post-war bills) and if one also looks at "Past Trends and Projections in Wage, Work, and Occupations in the United States" (prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Conference on "Strategies for Improving Economic Mobility of Workers," November 15-17, 2007), a counter-argument to politicians' oft-claimed government ineptitude emerges. In 1960, half of American males dropped out of high school and sought unskilled jobs; in 2008, less than 10 percent did. Thus, it could be argued, the enlarging federal role has, in fact, been a positive force.

Conversely, local public high-school graduation rates are below the national average. Does this argue for more or less standardization? Our 5th District representative, Virginia Foxx, champions the latter. When decades of flight from public to private schools have changed the local landscape with respect to both parental involvement and funding incentives, when 58 percent of the occupations with the largest job growth in 2006 were for low, or very low wages, the question and quest seem strangely irrelevant.

In reality, probably the single most influential act in American education was the School District Consolidation Movement of the early 20th century. This movement was premised upon a belief that larger districts were more efficient to operate economically and that they produced better education for students than rural districts. Neither premise has ever been proved. What the movement did produce was larger school districts and larger student-to-teacher ratios.

President Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is a free-market man with more money than any secretary has ever had for incentives for his Race to the Top initiative.

The jury is still out on charter schools. Merit pay for teachers is problematic because it's hard to come up with an algorithm that can define the impact of the teacher separate from the community and the family.

The only measure that statistically has been shown to work is reduction of class size. But the size has to fall a lot -- more than is practical under present commitment.

Janet L. Joyner is retired from a career in education.

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