States’ rights: a slippery slope back to mediocrity?

Peter Meyer / February 13, 2012

In the midst of the waiver news last week—which set many a reformer’s teeth on edge—came a few events and reports that provide some interesting ringtones for the current debate over the federal role in education.

Let the dollars follow the child was the proposal from the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force, which also makes a compelling case for the federal government’s “central role” in our nation’s education future. Let the feds butt out was the message delivered by Rep. John Kline, Republican chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, as he explained two ESEA rewrite bills at an American Enterprise event. And Unconstitional! was the Pioneer Institute’s conclusion about the federal government’s support of the Common Core:

Actions taken by the Obama Administration signal an important policy shift in the nation’s education policy, with the Department placing the nation on the road to federal direction over elementary and secondary school curriculum and instruction.

One wonders whether “states’ rights” are being invoked to cover up the very inequities that NCLB was determined to remedy.

I hesitate to invoke Civil War analogies here, but there are some troubling signs in the current dust-up that make one wonder whether “states’ rights” are being invoked to cover up the very inequities—the “soft bigotry of low expectations”—that No Child Left Behind was determined to remedy. In a press release from the Education Committee’s Republicans we learn that they “have long recognized the progress state and local officials have had implementing innovative reforms that hold schools accountable for student achievement, support excellent teachers, and

» Continued

States’ rights: a slippery slope back to mediocrity?