Education Department Budget by Major Program, Essay Example

Education has always had two challenges, money being the first, and curriculum being the second. Or maybe it is vice-versa, since a proposed curriculum will probably determine how much money, public and private, is made available to both public and private school systems. Today, a researcher who Googles “three educational challenges” will find plenty of responses. There are three principle gaps to overcome and three principle challenges to meet. (They may or may not be the same three from website to website, which is not surprising.) But those are top-down views. I will also discuss challenges from the bottom, the parent-student point of view.

In America, the federal government is increasingly involved in public and private education, and will probably be even more involved in the future. Any discussion of education must include this aspect of it. That is why we must look upon the U.S. president as the primary educational leader who confronts American educational challenges. The modern expansion of the federal government into education began with then-president Jimmy Carter, who led the creation of the cabinet-level Department of Education (DOE) in 1979. Many political conservatives believe the DOE to be unconstitutional, citing the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”; and claim that the DOE was created at the behest of the national teachers union known as the National Education Association (Cato Institute). Regardless, the official goal of the DOE is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access” (U.S. Dept. of Education) and we may take that as the educational challenge that Carter, a Democrat, was responding to. Its first budget, in 1980, of total allocations to the states for educational programs and grants was $10,870,028,859 (2ed.gov).

Our second educational challenge involves then-president George W. Bush, a Republican, who wanted to overcome educational challenges apparently not being addressed by the DOE. He helped create the “No Child Left Behind Act” or NCLB, signed into law in 2002, to do so (EducationWeek). The essence of the challenge was “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments” (2ed.gov). The Act is long and detailed, but the main tool to achieve the goal is nationwide standardized testing. The effect of the Act is to test the schools and staff even as their pupils are being tested. If a particular set of students fails to progress over several years, the school they attend can itself fail and be punished in various ways that can result in reorganization, loss of funding, and a loss of jobs to the teachers at that school. The reasoning behind the Act is that if public schools in the fifty states accept federal taxpayer dollars, they should be held accountable to federal standards instead of state or even local standards (although such standards can also apply if they do not conflict with federal ones). In any case, the result of the NCLB has been controversial from the start and its results definitely have been mixed — it was thought to have led to “teaching the test” and even to teachers engaging in widespread cheating to improve their students’ test scores. Although it probably still has its defenders in the educational bureaucracies, NCLB is now widely believed to have left many children behind, and is, at least in the opinion of one reform group, “almost universally acknowledged as a failure” (Karp). As a result, the NCLB itself has become an educational challenge to be responded to.

That response came from the states in the form of what is called the Common Core, our third educational challenge and response. This time the leader was a collective of leaders, namely the governors of forty-eight states along with various educational experts operating at both the state and national level. President Obama then joined in the movement with his “Race to the Top” initiative, which, with its own multi-billion dollar budget, advocates its own standards and reforms, and works with the Common Core movement. If you thought NCLB was controversial, one blogger has written: “Common Core Standards = No Child Left Behind on Steroids” (Rafferty) and that viewpoint seems to have set the tone for a very polarizing debate.

It seems that much of the modern history of education in the United States is about reforming the reforms. Those reforms come from either the federal government, as seen in Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education; and George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act; and Barrack Obama’s Race to the Top; and so down to the states, with their Common Core standards. As one governmental program is seen to fail, another one is created to at least partially replace it, because as a state or nation we can no more imagine reform without government action and participation than we can imagine a fifth dimension of space and time, try as we might.

But now we can take a look at the other extreme: the students and their parents. They can roughly be divided into those who can vote with their feet and those who cannot and so are dependent on governmental decisions and budgets and public schools. Affluent parents confronted with poor public schools (or, in the Colonial era, no public schools at all) have always had the option of sending their children (male, mostly) to private schools. That is still true today in this country. Even those who are not affluent can sometimes just homeschool their children — one parent teaches while the other one works. This of course requires a reasonably stable marriage or partnership arrangement. (Many homeschoolers have religious backgrounds.)

Stable domestic arrangements are often hard to find in poor areas. In such cases, the parents have few choices. Either do their children, or at least so it would seem. But then anyone enrolled in school loses a lot of choices. The lesson starts early that students are there to obey. Really, very little latitude is allowed, and instructors are free to intimidate and embarrass their students, as long as there is no physical contact and it can be done in some way related to a lesson. I remember in kindergarten one day when the teacher told each one of us to stand up and sing a song in front of the other students. The teacher herself sat at the piano and played whatever the student requested. (The student had to whisper his or her choice in the teacher’s ear.) Most of the students did this without much problem, and a few enjoyed it just fine and so did I (although I forget what song I requested — I can’t even remember the teacher’s name). But one poor kid was totally destroyed. I bet she remembers the incident today as well as I do. She just could not sing. It was painful to watch, torture for her and us. But it was not torture for the teacher, who insisted she finish the song. She said that we had to learn to overcome our natural shyness. I guess it didn’t occur to her that shyness cannot be bullied or “corrected.” The point is that that girl was completely unable to “challenge the process.” Many students, from kindergarten to middle- to high-school and probably into college and maybe even graduate school never learn to challenge the process. Some do, but not so well and end up being punished in some way. What students need is a course in verbal classroom karate.

Karate was developed to allow people who were not allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves physically. If they could not use weapons they could use their hands and feet instead. Classroom karate would be a way for students to defend themselves using words and logic against an authority figure who is allowed to carry the weapons of authority. Experienced teachers have a big advantage because they have learned how to handle students and often know at a glance what kind of a person each student is by comparing them to past students they knew.

So students are confronted by the basic challenge of exactly what process they want or need to challenge and how to go about it in the face of someone who has seen and heard it all before.

Let’s go back to that girl who psychologically just could not sing alone in front of a group. What would have happened if she had just said no? What could the teacher have done? The answer is that the teacher could not have done anything at all. But those situations are kind of trivial, even if painful for those directly involved. The more important question is whether students can change the curriculum in their schools, or at least change the way they are taught. Probably not. Students don’t have the money or political power and schools are all about that.

For example, there is no way that students can change the way a foreign language is taught at their school. I remember a friend of mine from Middle School who did not like the way dialogues in his German class had to be memorized and sort of acted out in front of the class, like actors rehearsing. He disliked the rote memorization and how the language was taught in terms of English grammar, like direct and indirect objects. He complained to the teacher that he barely knew what direct and indirect objects were in English, never mind German, and couldn’t learn. Since he planned to quit German the following year, he suggested to the teacher that at least the dialogues be made mandatory only for students who wanted to get higher than a C in the class.

You can guess what the instructor’s answer was. But my friend was someone who really could have just said no to the requirement that he memorize a bunch of dialogues. Probably the teacher would just have accommodated him. (In California, starting in 2015, it will be illegal to expel students who “willfully defy” teachers or administrators, although they can be suspended after third grade (McGreevy). We might take that as a way that existing leadership has responded (or been required to respond) to a problem.) But like that little girl in kindergarten, my friend had no headspace for the concept of an outright refusal. That is because students are recruits in the boot camp of career and graduate education. Obedience is required if the process is to work. But auto-obedience also sets a very bad precedent. Maybe we should “just say no” more often.

References

2ed.gov. Education Department Budget by Major Program. Government Report. Washington, D.C.: 2ed.gov, 1980-81. Document.

—. Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Summary and Background Information. Government Report. Washington, D.C.: 2ed.gov, 2015. Document.

Cato Institute. Cato Handbook for Congress. Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2002. Document.

EducationWeek. Education Week. 19 September 2011. Website. 26 December 2014.

Karp, Stan. Rethinking Schools. 20 September 2013. Website. 26 December 2014.

McGreevy, Patrick. “California’s new laws for 2015: How are you affected?” Los Angeles Times 1 January 2015.

Rafferty, Lawrence E. Jonathan Turley. 29 June 2013. Website. 26 December 2014.

U.S. Dept. of Education. NCLB. 6 December 2010. Website. 26 December 2014.