Oregon Educator, a high school principal in that state, poses some hard questions about the federal role in education.

The federal government puts up about 12% of the cost of public education but has grown increasingly assertive about exercising maximal control over state and local decision-making.

She writes:

“In 1965, President Johnson’s landmark education bill was designed to equalize schooling as part of his War on
Poverty. It went a long way to accomplishing that. Unfortunately, now fifty years later, the federal dollars constitute less help and more control, resulting in testing regimens and a hyper-concentration on the tested skills that undermine programs in the arts and sciences as well as experiential learning that has been shown effective. We are now down the rabbit hole of tightly managed programs with single metrics (tests) that lead to ever more restrictive programs. Schools in poor neighborhoods are scapegoated while other poverty factors are ignored. And because we can now blame public schools for their alleged poor performance, more and more of public education dollars are skimmed off by charter schools, many of them run by highly profitable corporations.”

Is the transfer of power to Washington, D.C., irreversible. No, it is not. As the public becomes aware that all of the Bush-Obama initiatives have failed and that state and local control has been replaced by corporate control, there will be a demand to reverse the power-hungry federal control of public education. Federal control was not the intent of Congress in 1965 when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. Nor was it the intent of Congress when the Department of Education was created in 1979. No child Left Behind was and is a failed aw. Obama’s Race to the Top is NCLB on steroids. The two in tandem are imposing failed ideas and doing serious harm to public education. The only question is whether our schools can survive nearly three more years of Arne Duncan’s destructive “leadership.”