The Era of Education: The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001

Conclusion

conclusion The Era of Education This study has endeavored to fill a significant void in the scholarly appraisals of late-twentieth-century U.S. political history: while many have written about the presidents and many others have written about the schools, virtually no one (with the exception of the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act during the Johnson administration) has connected the two. While the connection can certainly be overstated (presidents do not educate children, schools do), it instead has been remarkably understated despite its prominence in presidential politics and policies. Scholars continue to exhaustively address the domestic policy legacies of the recent presidents and the outcomes of public school aid, school desegregation, and nonpublic school aid, yet they largely overlook the impacts of elementary and secondary education on those legacies and of the presidents on those outcomes. The Schools Public School Aid Like the assessments of the presidents themselves, evaluations of the impacts of their policies on the nation’s elementary and secondary schools are ongoing, incomplete, and highly contentious. Though the federal role in education remains relatively small, the number of scholarly appraisals of that role is voluminous , further certifying the public’s intense interest in the subject. As has been documented, the primary mission of the federal government during the first two decades under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was to help states and localities achieve equity among their schools. The major burden of this effort continues to fall on Title I, the most expensive and most controversial piece of the ESEA, sending $8 billion annually to forty-five thousand schools in more than thirteen thousand local school districts in 2000.1 The congressionally mandated study of Title I in 1997, Prospects: Student Outcomes , collected data from representative samples of first-, third-, and seventhgraders from four hundred schools nationwide. It concluded that Title I aid was helpful to disadvantaged pupils in those high-poverty schools with greater use of 070 concl (221-230) 2/16/06 11:00 AM Page 221 academic tracking, more experienced principals, a balance between remediation and higher-order critical thinking in classroom instruction, and higher levels of teacher, parent and community involvement in the schools. The study nonetheless concluded that Title I assistance to these schools“was insufficient to close the achievement gap” with students from low-poverty schools. “Data from the Prospects study,”the researchers wrote,echoing the Coleman Report of 1966,“support earlier research findings that the characteristics of the individual student and family account for the largest part of the variation in student achievement measured by test scores, but that schools do make an important contribution that can be enhanced.”2 Like the debate over equity, the dispute over the movement toward excellence was one of means, not ends. The primary method adopted by presidents, superintendents , and principals to address this new emphasis on academic standards is an old one: testing. The proliferation of so-called high-stakes testing, all in the name of raising academic standards, has evoked a furious exchange within the educational community. Largely in response to A Nation at Risk, by the 1987–88 school year forty-five states and the District of Columbia were using some kind of standardized test. By 1993, the federal government was spending $10 million on developing national content standards in other core academic subjects. By 1995, forty-nine states were developing content standards in core academic subjects.3 Testing advocates can point to many successes of the standards movement. A 2000 Heritage Foundation study of twenty-one high-poverty nonpublic and public schools found that they had achieved median scores above the sixty-fifth percentile on national academic achievement tests by stressing high academic standards. Scholastic Achievement Test mathematics scores in 2000 reached their highest level in thirty years, and verbal scores remained stable for the fifth consecutive year.4 Not only are teachers tailoring their instruction to the tests, critics counter, but the tests themselves are flawed. Because of the successful resistance to national testing, the individual states devise uneven assessments that produce uneven results.The examination can be either too easy,rendering it virtually meaningless, or too hard,inviting a revolt by students,teachers,and parents.In Ohio in 2001,98 percent of the state’s high school seniors passed the graduation exam. In California , less than half passed. In Massachusetts, California, Washington, and Oregon, parents refused to send their children to school to take the tests. In Wisconsin, the legislature responded to...