President Obama issued a misguided veto threat of a House Republican education reform bill on Wednesday because the legislation would limit the federal role in education.
The bill includes many fixes to No Child Left Behind. For instance, it would repeal federally-prescribed remedies for bad schools and replace them with a requirement that states design their own intervention plans for poorly-performing schools that serve low-income students. The bill also repeals federal annual progress standards that have become overly burdensome the longer No Child Left Behind has been in place. Instead, the bill requires states to design their own accountability systems that fit broader federal guidelines.
Thanks to the burdens of No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Department of Education has been able to increase its influence by granting conditional waivers to states desperate for a reprieve. Forty-three states now operate under waivers that include education reforms preferred by the Obama administration.
“H.R. 5 abdicates the historic federal role in elementary and secondary education of ensuring the educational progress of all of America’s students, including students from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color,” a White House statement read. “It fails to maintain the core expectation that states and school districts will take serious, sustained, and targeted actions when necessary to remedy achievement gaps and reform persistently low-performing schools.”
But the federal role in education is not as truly historic as the administration wants to think. The Department of Education did not become its own Cabinet-level agency until 1980. The first iteration of No Child Left Behind was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, first passed in 1965. Nowhere in the Constitution are the words “education” or “educate.”
In the Department of Education’s own words, “Education is primarily a state and local responsibility in the United States,” according to its webpage about the federal role in education. “It is states and communities, as well as public and private organizations of all kinds, that establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine requirements for enrollment and graduation.” Yet Obama’s veto threat ensures his Department of Education will have an excessively important role in education policy.
Only 12 percent of school funding comes from the federal government, with the rest about equally split by state and local funding. However, since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the federal government has taken on an outsized role in education that exceeds its portion of funding.
The bill would also allow states to decide if low-income students should be able to take their federal education funding to a different public school of their choice. As I wrote on Monday, this form of school choice would help low-income students escape failing schools. Yet Obama cited this section of the bill in his veto threat on Wednesday, writing, “Rather than investing more in schools, H.R. 5 would allow states to divert education funding away from the schools and students who need it the most through the so-called ‘portability’ provision.” If Obama truly wants to help low-income students get a quality education, he should support portable education funding.
The Student Success Act already faces difficult odds in the Senate, requiring some Democratic support to pass a 60-vote threshold. Obama’s veto threat ensures that federal education policy will remain more burdensome than ever, with his Department of Education wielding outsized power that should belong to states and localities.
