Government Role in Education – A History Lesson

The proposal was defeated by northern industrialists and southern planters who feared schools would deprive them of their cheapest form of labor—children and slaves. The Constitution made no mention of education and thus left the question to the states. The latter, in turn, largely left education to parents, who perpetuated the colonial system of either educating children themselves or, if they could afford to, sending them to local, church-run “common schools.” The landed gentry sent their children to independent private schools, also usually under the direction of churchmen. The only active state control over education was through the issuance of charters of incorporation, which determined a school’s right to operate.
In 1837, Massachusetts was the first state to intervene directly in local education. It established what, in effect, was a state board of education, which encouraged local communities to establish locally controlled public schools. State intervention came in two forms: The state government issued voluntary guidelines for teaching methods and curricula, and it established the first teacher-training school in the United States. By providing uniformly trained teachers from a state-run teachers college to man local schools, the state thus exerted indirect control over what was taught in public schools and how it was taught. In the decades before and after the Civil War, other states established variations on the Massachusetts model, with state governments exerting more or less control over local schools, either directly through legislative action or indirectly by controlling the flow of state funds.
Direct state intervention began in 1852 with passage of the first COMPULSORY EDUCATION law—again, in Massachusetts. By 1918, all states had passed similar laws, although they were not all enforced until 1930, when the economic depression created a labor surplus and state governments had to enforce the laws against child labor to provide job opportunities for unemployed adults. With these laws, additional state intervention in education emerged, as legislatures were forced to supplement funds raised from local property taxes to pay for the education of the poor. Property taxes, paid by property owners, usually covered the costs only of educating their own children. Compulsory education forced poor children of non-property-owners into the schools, and state governments had to cover the costs of their education.
Where state governments provided such funds, they used the power of the purse to impose a wide range of standards, ranging from autocratic imposition of textbooks and even teacher lesson plans to the establishment of statewide educational standards. New York, for example, adopted state-administered competency- based examinations to determine whether students would be permitted to proceed to the next grade. Although such statewide standards remain nettlesome for many local school officials and parents, control of elementary and secondary public school education in most areas of the United States remained firmly in the hands of the citizenry until the last decades of the 20th century. Exercising all the rights of a citizen democracy, separate from the ones governing community, state and nation, local voters held separate elections for SCHOOL BOARDS, in which they vested control over local education, including the power to determine the curriculum, hire and fire faculty and school administrators, and admit or dismiss students.
These near-autocratic powers began to recede in the 1950s and 1960s, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional all discrimination in education on the basis of race, religion, ethnic or national origins and gender. Local school boards were thus stripped of the right to determine who could attend local schools and the right to hire or fire on any basis other than teaching qualifications. While eroding local school board powers, the Court’s various anti-discrimination rulings strengthened and indeed added vast new state and federal powers over schooling. To reinforce the Supreme Court’s decisions, the federal government passed a series of civil rights and education- entitlement laws. These laws forced public schools to accept learning disabled, mildly retarded and physically or emotionally disabled children and provide them with the same education as other students—and also whatever special education such children might need. In effect, such laws imposed open-enrollment policies on all public elementary and secondary schools. Many states reinforced the federal policies by passing laws that extended open enrollment to the public college and university level.
Prior to passage of such civil rights and educational entitlement laws, the federal government had largely limited its involvement in education. Its first, tentative intervention came, with the passage of the first Morrill Land Grant College Act (see LAND-GRANT COLLEGE), in 1862, granting federal lands to the states to establish state-run colleges. A second Morrill Act in 1890 pledged federal funds on an annual basis to help support those colleges. Both acts left state governments with direct control over public higher education but gave the federal government some indirect control through its power to limit or expand the funds it granted to the state colleges. The federal government began expanding its use of the “power of the purse” to influence education during World War II, when it financed enormous research projects at many public and private universities. These projects continued and, indeed, expanded during the succeeding 40-year cold war with the Soviet Union. Washington further expanded its role in higher education with passage of the G.I. BILL OF RIGHTS, under which the government provided all World War II veterans with comprehensive educational allowances to attend accredited schools, colleges and universities. The G.I. Bill was the forerunner of a complex series of programs under which Washington subsequently financed upwards of half the university students in the United States with a combination of outright grants, loans and job subsidies.
The federal government began expanding its use of the “power of the purse” to influence education during World War II, when it financed enormous research projects at many public and private universities. These projects continued and, indeed, expanded during the succeeding 40-year cold war with the Soviet Union. Washington further expanded its role in higher education with passage of the G.I. BILL OF RIGHTS, under which the government provided all World War II veterans with comprehensive educational allowances to attend accredited schools, colleges and universities. The G.I. Bill was the forerunner of a complex series of programs under which Washington subsequently financed upwards of half the university students in the United States with a combination of outright grants, loans and job subsidies.
lower levels of education also applied to higher education. Thus, colleges and universities were forbidden to discriminate in their student admissions and faculty and staff hiring and firing policies, and they were forced to make their campuses barrier-free to accommodate the handicapped.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government extended its influence on public elementary and secondary education by gradually establishing “voluntary” standards of achievement for students. Provoked by the startling 1983 report, A NATION AT RISK, which detailed widespread educational failures of American public schools, the federal government established goals 2000 to raise the standards of American public schools and make American students “first in the world” in mathematics and science by the year 2000. The program set standards of achievement in eight academic areas and provided $1.2 million for the National Assessment of Educational Progress to test students in the fourth, eighth and eleventh grades to see how many reached those standards. The initial legislation also provided hundreds of millions of federal dollars in annual grants to spur “systematic” state education reforms. Although the standards were voluntary, those states that ignored the standards would forfeit millions of dollars in badly needed federal funds for education. Proponents of local control over education opposed what they deemed unconstitutional federal government interference with public school education. Those opponents had little success in blocking the Goals 2000 program, which, in fact, presaged the most massive, direct federal intervention in public school education in American history.
In 2001, Congress imposed the most farreaching federal controls on American public school education with the NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT OF 2001 (NCLB). An amendment to the ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION ACT, NCLB imposed, as a prerequisite for federal aid to public school districts, testing requirements that force every school to demonstrate year-to-year improvements in academic performance— especially schools catering to disadvantaged children. With student academic proficiency at abysmally low levels in parts of the nation, many educators had long called for establishing minimum national academic standards. The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution, however, leaves to the states all powers not expressly conveyed to the federal government by the first nine amendments, and the Founding Fathers purposely omitted education from those amendments to keep education under state purview. Because federal grants provide 10% of their education budgets, however, most school districts have little choice but to accept the conditions that come attached to those grants. A few districts refused in Connecticut, Illinois, Vermont and Virginia, among other states, where they preferred to do without federal aid rather than change their systems of education. Some states even challenged the law on grounds that the federal government failed to cover costs of administering the law and forced states and local school districts to spend local tax dollars to enforce a federal law. A federal court rejected the challenge, saying the states and local districts had the option of withdrawing from NCLB and, of course, forfeiting federal aid as well as federal interference in local education.

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