Article #4 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

The Ineptitude and Irrelevance of Academic Policy Originating in the United States Department of Education

 

During the early 1970s, Title IX provisions brought greater equity to the public schools;  typical for American education, the greatest impact was seen in athletics, within which we now see an essentially equitable availability of programs for females and males.  Also, the IDEA program raised the level of attention to the needs of those facing vexing dilemmas pertinent to cognitive, emotional, or physical development.  These were advances for public education, as was the heightened attention that the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administration had brought to matters of demographic equity during the late 1960s with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

 

Despite the advances in gender equity and attention to special needs, though, the broad goals of the Education and Secondary Education Act were never achieved:  Academics, the main reason for the existence of the public schools, got worse in the course of the 1970s and is no better in this very year of 2021.  The drama that ensued with the attempt to implement No Child Left Behind illustrates the inefficacy of federal education policy pertaining to academics.

 

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiative of 2005 was the most important attempt to address the academic inequities of public education in the history of the United States.  No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan legislative initiative that included then Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and Democrat stalwart Ted Kennedy.  The idea was to induce attention to fundamental mathematics and reading skills while establishing more rigorous curriculum across the liberal arts, imparted to students of all demographic descriptors.

                                 

But the forces of both the left (including teachers unions and other members of the education establishment) and right (including former NCLB backers among Republicans who succumbed to pressure from constituencies who objected to federal intervention in local school district and state curriculum standards) eventually worked toward the demise of NCLB and associated standards.  In Minnesota, education establishment embarrassment mounted over massive student failure on the objective Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), opposition to the MCAs and the standards increased.  Nonwhite demographic groups and those on free/reduced price lunch performed particularly badly, but even students from school districts typically overhyped for educational quality, such as Edina and Minnetonka, performed poorly on a mathematics MCA that students in Taiwan and Singapore would find laughable for lack of rigor.

 

No Child left Behind died a slow death and gave way to a kind of federal NCLB Light dubbed the Every Students Succeed Act (ESSA) and on the state level to ineffective programs, such as World’s Best Work Force (WBWF) and Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), emanating from intellectually corrupt staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).

 

At the state level, this sort of intellectual corruption persists through administrations of both Republicans and Democrats.  Federal and state ineptitude and a national mania for local control constitute the essential reasons why the needed overhaul of preK-12 education must come at the level of the locally centralized school district, and why my own activism focuses on the Minneapolis Public Schools.