Opinions

Calling for a smarter government of any size

In print | February 19, 2009

How much do we trust the federal government?

Ask that question casually, and you’ll typically get a pretty cynical response. Ask the question in a poll, and people typically rate the federal government somewhere between stockbrokers (post-Bear Stearns) and used car salesmen.

Debate over the right role for the federal government shaped the Constitution, drove the Civil War, and runs through our arguments over everything from abortion policy to environmental regulations and, yes, the stimulus debates as well.

Sure, there are some areas where it’s pretty obvious to most parties that the federal government plays a necessary role. Take foreign policy. When Vladimir Putin rears his ugly head, I don’t care how close he is to Sarah Palin’s house — I want the State Department to deal with it.
But in most domestic policy issues, there is a legitimate debate. Conservatives on one side worry that the federal government is too inefficient and too bureaucratic ; too insufficiently responsive to and too isolated from local needs and culture.

Liberals, on the other hand, argue that the federal government is necessary and that no other entity has the authority or the resources to get things done. More often than not, they’re both right.
President Obama captured the key issue in his inaugural address when he said, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” Figuring out what works, however, is no easy feat.

There are few policy areas where the debate over federal versus local control is as difficult to navigate — and as important — as educational policy.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) — that’s right, the one that your high school teachers ranted about, the one that made you take those irritating standardized tests — is a premium example of how tricky it can be to push major federal policy in something like education.

For all of its flaws, NCLB has important benefits that reflect some of the potential strengths of federal involvement in educational policy. It enforces standards for assessing and reporting student achievement. It sets goals for progress, and (in principle) provides incentives and support to help schools and districts achieve their goals. It forces schools to break down progress by race so that they can’t bury achievement gaps in aggregate data. It allows some state control by asking states to define their own standards — but it subjects those standards to regulation.

All of these things can be done on a local scale. But in many places across the country, they’re not done at all.

We need only to look back a few decades in the context of school integration after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision to see the problem: the federal government could not trust local governments to correct the problem of school segregation everywhere, so it was forced to use federal policies (and federal troops) to enforce and guarantee compliance on a national level.

The context for NCLB may not be quite as dramatic, but the sentiment of policymakers is completely understandable: schools are not doing a good job, racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are widening, and so far local policymakers have been unable — or unwilling — to take the steps needed to address these problems.

Frankly, it defies credibility to believe that strong policies will be developed simultaneously in more than 14,000 school districts.

The problem, of course, is that NCLB doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in promoting “strong policies.” I won’t elaborate here on the program’s many serious flaws (though I may feel compelled to, depending on the path the Obama administration takes in dealing with it). But the idea that NCLB is the ideal policy for all school districts is clearly wrong.

Meanwhile, there are important benefits to locally developed policies as opposed to federal initiatives. First, these policies can be far more responsive to local needs, and can provide responses appropriate to local social and political environments. Second, having a policy developed through the participation of local stakeholders can get those stakeholders more invested in the program’s success.

These are no small considerations. One of my favorite examples of this is a Denver program called ProComp, which took an extremely controversial idea — merit pay for teachers — and turned it into a highly successful (and popular) program.

Part of the success lies in the flexibility of the policy. The policy asks teachers and principals to work together to determine realistic yet demanding criteria that will provide ways to evaluate teacher success.

Much of the success, however, comes from the way the program was developed in the first place, through negotiations among all the relevant parties: teachers, administrators, politicians and parents, and with the stipulation that teachers get to choose whether to opt in to the program or not.

Increased taxes to fund the program were approved through a citywide referendum in 2005.

By giving so many parties a seat at the table — and by getting their input throughout the plan’s development — the Denver policymakers ensured that all of these people would have a vested interest in making it work. It’s not difficult to see how this lesson could be applied to all sorts of educational policy areas, as well as many other policy fields.

As successful as ProComp has been, my hunch is that if another school district were to adopt its model — even a school district extremely similar to Denver — the program would be less successful. If it were to be proposed nationally, it would be fought tooth-and-nail, and likely would be even less effective.

And yet, even if it doesn’t work as well in other places as it does in Denver, it may still be better than the status quo.

Looking at both ProComp and NCLB, we are left with quite a serious dilemma. Leaving big policy decisions to local policymakers and stakeholders can lead to some incredible successes, but it is just as likely to lead to considerable failures. Denver is one school district; America has roughly 15,000 of them.

On the other hand, allowing the federal government to set policies can successfully defend against some of the most egregious failures — but it also may set strict policies that prevent schools from being great. Innovative and effective teachers, policies and ideas may be pushed aside to ensure compliance with stringent federal mandates like NCLB.

The federal government may not be the most effective entity, but it is also the only one capable of instituting badly-needed changes nationwide. Local solutions may be the only ones capable of being truly great, but these great solutions are sadly few and far between.

Perhaps the best solution, then, is to blur the dichotomy between “federal” and “local” control. Maybe the question shouldn’t be, “Who can make our school districts great, federal or local policymakers?”

Instead, from the local level, we should be seeing how the federal government can provide the resources and develop economies of scale to make reforms more efficient and effective (it should be pointed out that ProComp, in fact, gets much of its funding from the federal government). From the federal level, we should be figuring out how to encourage, support, and pressure local policymakers to create and adopt reforms that will make improve student achievement.

Federal policy may be necessary to prevent the worst. But it must always be wary of standing in the way of the best solutions. Navigating this divide requires strong leadership and creative ideas. Let’s hope President Obama is up to the challenge.

Jesse is a senior. You can reach him at jgotts1@swarthmore.edu.