Neither this Court nor any other court, I respectfully submit, can sit in the chairs of the legislature of South Carolina and mold its educational map…. It establishes the schools, it pays the funds, and it has the sole power to educate its citizens. (as cited in Friedman, 2003)
The Supreme Court rejected that argument in a unanimous decision, ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” and should be integrated “with all deliberate speed” (Friedman, 2003). This ruling established that, under the right circumstances, the federal government could indeed play a role in K–12 education.
Federal Inroads Into K–12 Education
In 1965, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson used Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution to persuade the U.S. Congress to further strengthen the federal role in education. That section of the Constitution specifically gave Congress authority to “lay and collect taxes … to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” (U.S. Const., art. I, § 8). Citing this “general welfare” clause, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) to provide “financial assistance … to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs” (Social Welfare History Project, n.d.).
President Johnson described the legislation as “the most sweeping educational bill ever to come before Congress…. As President of the United States, I believe deeply no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America” (Franklin, Harris, & Allen-Meares, 2006, p. 873).
The law was careful, however, not to totally circumvent the states. Each state could apply for ESEA block grants, and money would flow through the states to the local district. Furthermore, the 1965 legislation stipulated that no funds could be used to create a national curriculum. Matters regarding what students should learn and how their learning should be monitored continued to be reserved to the states. Nevertheless, this law provided the principal means through which the federal government provided funds to schools, communities, and children for education purposes. As Kris Sloan (2007) concludes:
Forty years of sustained federal commitment under the ESEA has changed the face of public education in the United States in many ways. Title I has helped bolster the academic achievement of millions of disadvantaged children particularly in mathematics and literacy…. The Title II Eisenhower Professional Development program has exposed thousands of classroom teachers to new professional knowledge and instructional techniques in mathematics, science, and other critical subject areas. Title VII, Bilingual Education, has helped generations of immigrant children learn English and succeed in school. These and other ESEA-sponsored programs have benefited numerous students, teachers, and parents. (p. 16)
Although ESEA was originally authorized for five years, Congress reauthorized and modified the law ten times between 1965 and 2015.
Although ESEA was originally authorized for five years, Congress reauthorized and modified the law ten times between 1965 and 2015. Both the NCLB Act of 2002 and the ESSA of 2015 are reauthorizations of this initial legislative effort to provide the federal government with a greater voice in K–12 public education. During these years, the call for school reform was never-ending—and the call came from many different sources.
Never-Ending School Reform
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education presented its conclusions regarding the quality of schooling in the United States in a hyperbolic report titled A Nation at Risk. The commission asserted that U.S. education had fallen victim to a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people” (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The report was complete with dire warnings of decline, deficiencies, threats, risks, afflictions, and plight. Americans were urged to reverse the “unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” that had taken hold of our schools and reestablish the United States as the world leader in educational attainment (National Commission on Excellence in Education, n.d.). To address the crisis, the commission called for more—more hours in the school day, more days in the school year, more standardized tests, more credits required for graduation, and more homework. Soon thereafter, more than three hundred different organizations issued proposals for reforming our schools.
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush attempted to gently interject a federal voice into the education reform discussion when he convened U.S. governors for a summit on education to establish national goals for education. To achieve the ambitious goals established at the summit (including that U.S. students would rank first in the world in mathematics and science achievement by the year 2000), President Bush and the governors called for “decentralization of authority and decision-making responsibility to the school site, so that educators are empowered to determine the means for achieving the goals and to be held accountable for accomplishing them” (“‘A Jeffersonian Compact’: The Statement by the President and Governors,” 1989). The federal government might set the goals, but the question of how to achieve them was left to the states and their local districts. This summit led to the Goals 2000: Educate America Act that President Bill Clinton signed in 1994 (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1994).
The federal government might set the goals, but the question of how to achieve them was left to the states and their local districts.
By the year 2000, however, the United States had not come close to achieving any of its education goals. Leaving education in the hands of fifty states and more than fifteen thousand local school districts was not yet providing students with a world-class education.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the failure of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act was that few states had a process for monitoring student learning or holding schools accountable for that learning (Civic Impulse, n.d.b). Many states relied on nationally normed tests that placed students along a continuum of achievement rather than a criterion-referenced test designed to determine which students had met a designated proficiency level.
As of 2002, only nine states required all students in grades 3–8 to take a criterion-referenced test in English language arts, and only seven did so in mathematics (Aldeman, 2015). Most states looked at student performance as a whole rather than disaggregating data by particular groups of students, and only twenty-two states disaggregated high school graduation rates (Aldeman, 2015). At the beginning of the 21st century, if someone accused a school that its students were not learning, in most instances the charges would be dismissed for a lack of evidence. In response to this chaotic situation, the U.S. government stepped in.
No Child Left Behind Act
Within three days of assuming office in 2001, President George W. Bush called for the adoption of NCLB as his first legislative initiative. By December of that year, the law passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the Senate and House of Representatives—87 to 10 and 381 to 41, respectively (Civic Impulse, n.d.a). Its broad themes of additional funding for education, academic standards, accountability, civil rights, and school choice found widespread support in the early days of 2002.
NCLB signaled a major turning point in the effort to reform U.S. education by dramatically increasing the authority of the federal government in matters that had largely been left to the states. The Commission on No Child Left Behind (2007) described it as impacting education “more than any other federal education law in history” and a “bold step to accelerate progress in education and fulfill our promise to our nation’s children” (p. 11).
NCLB aimed to replace this laissez-faire approach to education by establishing accountability with a capital A. While the French expression laissez-faire often describes free trade or other economic policies that allow individuals or nation-states to do as they wish, it described education well in the years before NCLB, when there was no national consensus on what students should know and be able to do. Only a few states, including Missouri (the Show-Me Standards) and Florida