Recently I have been asked to talk about the trials and tribulations that began in 2008 in Seattle when the school superintendent determined that several schools should be closed. The lives of hundreds of people went through a great upheaval and communities were affected in unexpected ways.

That began a journey that many of us took together to understand why a person would decide to take such an action because it was beyond reason to propose such an idea.

We began our research with Seattle, then determined it was a nationwide issue and that took us to the top of the ladder of privatization, to then President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

During those years, we questioned everything and I began to question how education was determined at the top, on the federal level. This is a level that many times is filled with people who are not educators, have had no experience working in a classroom or school, except for the fact they attended a school. They are political appointments and some come with an agenda as did Arne Duncan and later with Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos.

I wrote the following article several years ago but it was not published on this blog. Oddly enough, I came across it last week, just before I was contacted by a parent in Seattle about the school closings happening once again..

With the attention in Seattle back to the subject of education in public schools and school closings, I decided this might be good time for people who are concerned about public education to challenge the system, the framework that we have taken for granted for as long as any of us can remember. I believe it is time for a major overhaul from the federal level down to every city, town and community.

To follow are my thoughts.

The US Department of Education, how accountable are they?

Two of our constitutional amendments played an important role in public education. In 1791, the 10th Amendment stated, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Public education was not mentioned as one of those federal powers, and so historically has been delegated to the local and state governments.

The League of Women Voters: Role Of Federal Government In Public Education: Historical Perspectives

There is always talk about “accountability” for teachers, students, parents, principals and schools with the concomitant proliferation of high stakes tests and assessments, but what about the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE)? How do we ensure its accountability and measure its performance?

In the last few decades, the USDOE has created a constant state of flux in our public schools, based on the whims of politicians and guided by big money, and with the tacit or explicit approval of the President.

For example, billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, are influencing Federal policy that affects teachers and students around the country in every district and township. They have no credentials in education or child development, have not taught in a public school and have no direct knowledge of what’s happening in classrooms or in the surrounding neighborhoods around the country, and yet they are determining education policy. The revolving door of employees between the Gates Foundation and the Department of Education has been well-documented.

How did we get to the point where education has become top-down, starting with the President of the United States appointing a cabinet level Secretary of Education – in clear violation of the 10th Amendment? Many of the past appointees have not been educators. Shirley Ann Mount Hufstedler, the first Secretary of Education, was a lawyer and judge, while William Bennett, Lamar Alexander and Richard Riley were all politicians, and Arne Duncan, a basketball player who, through personal connections, found his way to being CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

Has the U.S. Department of Education gotten too big to be accountable? If so, how can it be streamlined? What should its role be? Where is the accountability in terms of its policies’ successes or failures? And finally, what has the cost been to enforce Federal policies on a state and district-wide basis such as the required technology upgrades of school districts and the computerization of classrooms to provide access to the Common Core Standards’ required testing using either the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests?

These are the questions I began to ask after chronicling the many failings of former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan with his push for the Common Core Standards, high-stakes testing, merit pay based on students’ test scores, Race to the Top, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Waiver, the privatization of public schools by way of charter schools and the weakening of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Duncan’s final “accomplishment” was the rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) now called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that places greater pressure to adhere to Federal “guidelines” with the threat of withholding Federal funding, a push to increase the number of charter schools in the country and promotion of “personalized” or “blended” learning in which you have a student interact with a computer, rather than a human instructor, for the greater part of their class time.

“Personalized learning” and the Common Core State Standards provides an inexpensive way to provide an “education” to students. This is particularly useful for charter school owners wanting to keep their operating costs and staff budgets to a minimum. It’s also being seen as a path to digital edu-bucks, “Edublocks”, and digital badges creating a permanent gig economy of piecework employment.

In the last few decades, the direction of public education has gone from bad to worse, starting with former President Clinton’s propensity for privatization of public schools in the 1990s by way of charter schools and a desire to establish national standards, which is unconstitutional, George W. Bush’s unrealistic No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy which demanded that 90% of high school students graduate on time by 2014, (The date was moved to 2020 by Arne Duncan) and the rewrite of it by President Obama’s administration titled Every Child Achieves Act (ESEA), and Race to the Top legislation.

When do we begin to take back public school education on a local level and have it reflect the goal of creating well-educated responsible citizens with the capacity for thoughtful, critical and creative thinking and discourse? When will we have a curriculum created by educators who have an understanding of child development and the requirements of a diverse population?

Let’s take a look at the evolution of the U.S. Department of Education.

The state constitutions of Massachusetts in 1780 and New Hampshire in 1784, set up systems of public education and many early Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Horace Mann, wrote about the importance of an educated citizenry.

There was the Land Ordinance of 1785 and a Northwest Ordinance established in 1787 that together required a system of public education be established in every township. Money was to be raised with a tax system along with the buying, selling or the renting of public land.

In 1841 and 1848, Congress granted approximately 77 million acres of land in the public domain as endowments to support public schools. The Federal government also granted surplus money to states for public education.

In 1867, the Office of Education was established. It was a relatively minor bureau within the Department of the Interior.

In 1939, the bureau was transferred to the Federal Security Agency, where it was renamed the Office of Education. Then in 1953, the Federal Security Agency was upgraded to cabinet-level status as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

In 1979, President Carter advocated for creating a cabinet-level position for the Department of Education. A bill to create the Department of Education was approved by Congress in 1980. The primary functions of the Department of Education were to “establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education, collect data on US schools, and to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights” and “to increase the accountability of Federal education programs to the President, the Congress and the public.”

Since the approval of a Department of Education to be run by a political appointee, that arm of government has grown into a bureaucratic behemoth retaining approximately 4,000 employees in 32 different divisions with a budget of $70.7 billion in 2016.

With all of the new regulations that have been passed due to ESSA and the NCLB waiver requests, the USDOE asked Congress for additional employees in 2015. The question is, were these policies necessary?

How successful have these programs been? And, how much are they costing school districts and taxpayers?

The report “A Nation at Risk” was published in 1983 and promoted by William Bennett, a politician who served as Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988 under President Reagan. Bennett later went on to co-found K12, Inc., a publicly traded online education company.

There is much hyperbole in “A Nation at Risk” and yet it is devoid of substantiated evidence, statistics or peer-reviewed studies but it was enough to open the gateway for privatization, first with Milton Friedman stating that school vouchers were the answer to this dire emergency, and continued with charter schools, the privatization of a public trust. This phenomenon is described in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine wherein she outlines how public education privatizers exploited the devastating event of Hurricane Katrina to reconstitute the New Orleans school districts entirely with charter schools (which, by most measures, has been a failed experiment).

With President George W. Bush, work began on national standards and a national assessment system, which is illegal according to ESEA, and an education reform program called Goals 2000: Educate America Act “To improve learning and teaching by providing a national framework for education reform” and establishing “school choice” as a priority. The term “school choice” is a euphemism for vouchers and charter schools, the “choice” of profiteering education reformers whose goal has been to redirect public funds into private hands and replace elected oversight of school districts with appointed boards with no public accountability

President Clinton continued Goals 2000 setting up a “Goals Panel” and a Director position with staff to determine “voluntary national content standards, voluntary national student performance standards and voluntary national opportunity-to-learn standards” which were to be certified by the newly assembled National Education Standards and Improvement Council established as part of the executive branch.

Along with Goals 2000 came AmeriCorps which funded a new organization, “Teach for America”. This multi-million-dollar enterprise hires recent college grads, no background in education required, trains them for five weeks and sends them into low income schools and charter schools for a two to three year stint to teach the most vulnerable of our children. The USDOE has granted Teach for America, Inc. $100 million so far in grants, although certified teachers could be hired for these positions.

Then former President George Bush brought us “No Child Left Behind,” which included punitive measures if schools and districts did not perform to a specified standard and the unrealistic goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2015. If schools did not meet the standard, federal funding would be diminished or cut off entirely, taking money away from schools as opposed to supporting them.

President Obama stepped up “No Child Left Behind” a notch by introducing “Race to the Top” with $5 billion to incentivize states to accept the Common Core State Standards and offered four possible options for addressing “failing” schools which was defined as the bottom 5 percent of all schools in each district based on standardized test scores. These extreme, at times draconian measures, included closing the schools, converting them into charter schools, firing half of the school staff or replacing the principal.

This policy was greatly influenced by billionaire Eli Broad, a proponent of charter schools, and Bill Gates who has spent millions of dollars promoting charter schools, merit pay and the Common Core State Standards.

What have we gained with these presidential decrees that have been influenced by multi-billionaires with their own ideas on public education?

So far, an explosion of unregulated charter schools with little regard for whether they are any better than public schools, high-stakes standardized testing, which has taken classroom and recess time away from students and substituted it with test prep, and the unproven, costly experiment known as the Common Core Standards, sucking the creativity and opportunity for critical thinking out of the classrooms with little room for teachers to respond to the student’s needs and intellectual growth.

Somewhere along the way, this nation has forsaken the opportunity for parents, teachers, students and the community, to be involved in public education and instead handed over all policy decisions to those who have lost touch with what is happening every day in the classrooms and with no understanding of the methods, practices or the art of teaching.

This was not the original intent when an arm of the federal government was established in 1780 to ensure there were public schools and teachers available to all school-aged children.

It’s time to look at the history of public schools and evaluate where we need to be today in terms of federal edicts.

It’s time to reassess the role of the Department of Education.

Suggested reading:

▪  The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public Schools, David Berliner

▪  The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

▪  The Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch

▪  Role of Federal Government in Public Education: Historical Perspectives, the League of Women Voters.

▪  Got dough?: How billionaires rule our schools, Joanne Barkan for Dissent Magazine

-Dora Taylor