A Brief History of Federal Involvement
The federal government is a relative newcomer to elementary and secondary schooling. As many advocates of a federal role in education are quick to point out, the Land Ordinance of 1785 and Northwest Ordinance of 1787 contained provisions calling for territories to dedicate revenue from the sale of portions of land to educational purposes. But those laws preceded the Constitution, were often ignored, and asserted no federal control over what might be taught, how, or by whom. Education was also barely discussed in the Constitutional Convention. And when it was, the specific subject was almost entirely a national university, which, it was understood, could be created under a specific, enumerated power: jurisdiction over the “Seat of Government,” not any education power. Reinforcing this view, in 1792 James Madison argued against a bill to provide aid to fisheries by noting that, were Congress to decide that the Constitution furnished the authority to spend money thusly, it could also, absurdly, “take into [its] own hands the education of children.” In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson recommended using some federal monies for education, but said “an amendment to the constitution” was “necessary, because the objects now recommended are not among those enumerated in the constitution.” In 1943, the U.S. Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, chaired by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, published a document that included the following: “Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education? A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the states.”
It was not until the Soviet Union sent the satellite Sputnik into orbit in 1957, and the American public briefly panicked, that the federal government began to exercise significant influence over education. That foray, the National Defense Education Act, primarily aimed to improve capacity in science and engineering at the college level. And the act had a clear connection to a constitutionally explicit federal responsibility: national defense.
Only in the mid-1960s, under President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, did Washington completely break with the Constitution by enacting a K–12 law untethered to explicit defense needs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), enacted in 1965, sought, primarily, to provide compensatory funding to districts serving low-income populations, not to exercise authority over states and districts. What was discovered over the course of about two decades, however, was that funding alone made little difference in outcomes.
By the early 1980s, many people considered the American education system to be failing. As a result, the federal role began to morph from one focused on funding to one focused on control made possible by attaching coercive rules to federal dollars. The Reagan administration—which at first strove to eliminate the cabinet-level U.S. Department of Education that had just been created in 1979—published the report A Nation at Risk in 1983 with a Sputnik-like effect. It intoned, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The administration’s second education secretary, William Bennett, became a major personality to whom the media and public looked for guidance on education issues, and the 1988 reauthorization of the ESEA for the first time called on states and districts to demonstrate academic achievement. The era of “standards and accountability” had begun, and it arguably reached its apex with the 2002 ESEA reauthorization, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
NCLB asserted enormous control over the shape and functioning of K–12 education, requiring that all schools adhere to uniform state standards, be held accountable by aligned standardized tests, and bring all students (including numerous subsets based on race and other group identities) to full “proficiency” by the end of the 2013–2014 school year. Schools were punished if any group failed to make “adequate yearly progress” toward that full-proficiency goal.
Over time, parents and others came to greatly dislike the law’s strictures and its emphasis on standardized testing, and irritation evolved into disgust with the “Race to the Top” program. Among other things, that program essentially required states to use the Common Core national curriculum standards and one of just two federally funded, Core-aligned tests, to compete for a share of a $4 billion pool of funding. The program also called for greater data collection on students and teacher evaluations based on students’ test scores. In addition, the Obama administration started to offer NCLB waivers in exchange for states’ adopting administration-selected policies. Those centralizing efforts united opposition on the left and right against Washington, the new “national school board.”
The end result is the latest iteration of the ESEA, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which President Barack Obama signed in December 2015. The ESSA removed some onerous provisions of NCLB, Race to the Top, and NCLB waivers, especially “adequate yearly progress,” coercion to adopt the Common Core, and mandatory use of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. Still, it is too controlling, continuing the requirements that states have uniform standards and tests, that almost all students in grades 3 through 8 take those tests, that all high school students take at least one standardized assessment, and that test results be a part of school accountability evaluations. It also still required that states submit detailed school improvement plans to Washington for approval.
Outcomes
What have we gotten from federal spending and control? First, it is very difficult—perhaps impossible—to fully separate the effects of federal policy from numerous other variables that affect academic achievement. Those variables include state policies, local policies, students’ family lives, attitudes toward education, and more. Thus, we cannot say definitively that federal policy caused something to happen or not happen. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that federal K–12 interventions have been largely ineffectual and almost certainly not worth the money expended on them. Note that this failure does not include interventions by federal courts, which have often been necessary to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection requirements against state and district discrimination.
Historically, the evidence is powerful that neither government provision of schools nor compulsory attendance was needed for most people to educate their children. Numerous historians have noted that white Americans (blacks were often prohibited by law from receiving an education) had very high rates of literacy before there was significant provision of “common schools,” and very large percentages of Americans were sending their children to school before attendance was compulsory. People valued education and did not appear to need government provision, which largely followed widespread education.
To assess learning in the modern era, the most consistent national measure we have is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term trend assessment. The assessment is given to a nationally representative sample of students—but without stakes attached and, thus, insulated against “gaming”—which has remained largely consistent since the 1970s. There was a long lag in administration of the tests, but a new one occurred for 9- and 13-year-olds in 2020, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the most important group for assessing the “final products” of the education system—17-year-olds—was unable to take the exam before COVID-19 made administering it untenable.
It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the effect of federal education spending—the main thing Washington does—on NAEP results, and standardized tests scores are just one limited measure of educational success. But it is also the case that the federal government itself calls the NAEP the “Nation’s Report Card,” so it is valuable to see whether it indicates success.
Looking at 9- and 13-year-olds, there has been improvement over the course of the past several decades. First looking at math (Figure 1), both age groups have seen increases in the share of students hitting the top score bands (250 or higher for 9‑year-olds and 300 for 13-year-olds). Indeed, the share more than doubled for 9‑year-olds from beginning to end and came close to doubling for 13-year-olds.
