President Obama has never been bashful about proposing major overhauls to the federal education system. But he has failed to deliver major legislation to improve schools and leave education as a cornerstone of his legacy.
The debate over Obama’s education performance has centered on whether he has used legislative gridlock as a crutch to unilaterally implement a rigid agenda or if his administration effectively provided the motivation for local school systems to meet higher standards.
Some analysts said Obama is beginning to lose his education argument and contend his legacy on the issue has already been cemented with so little hope for support on Capitol Hill.
“Obama is going to be the president who talked ambitiously about education, inserted the federal government in unprecedented ways, stirred a lot of conversation,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “But there’s going to be a lot of discussion about whether what he did was for the good. You don’t get effective implementation or sustainable change when these things are done by one-off, executive freelancing.”
Obama lately has generated more headlines for education initiatives hitting a wall on Capitol Hill than getting them across the finish line.
Most recently, he pushed a blueprint to offer free community college to students maintaining a 2.5 GPA and a separate initiative to tax popular 529 college savings plans. The free-tuition push was dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress, and in the face of stiff opposition from senior Democrats, the White House immediately abandoned the levy on 529s.
Those were hardly isolated incidents.
In 2013, Obama outlined a plan for government-funded universal preschool, saying an increase in the federal tax on tobacco products would fund his blueprint. That soon went up in smoke.
And throughout his tenure, Obama has failed to replace No Child Left Behind, George W. Bush’s signature education law, which greatly expanded the reliance on federal benchmarks to identify underperforming schools. The president has instead granted waivers to dozens of states in an attempt to water down the law.
Republicans and Democrats alike took issue with the accountability measures but have never agreed about how to strike the right balance between implementing performance standards and ensuring the federal government isn’t overly involved in the classroom.
That Obama has never been able to move on the needle on so many items, insiders said, is indicative of his lack of political capital in the education debate and the degree to which his schools agenda has been overshadowed by other issues.
“The president has an opportunity to build a lasting legacy of improving education if he’s willing to work with Congress, and unfortunately, it’s still unclear whether he is willing to seize that opportunity,” Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
“Time and again, the Obama administration has acted through executive fiat to double-down on failed education policies,” he added. “The president has unilaterally created more programs and more bureaucracy, and it’s difficult to see how it has helped students succeed.”
However, education observers argue that Obama has transformed the learning process for millions of Americans in real ways.
The centerpiece of Obama’s efforts has been to use grant money to bolster competition at the state level. However, his Race to the Top program lost its funding for 2015 as part of the spending deal reached in December.
With statehouses funding a shrinking share of their education programs, both at the K-12 and postsecondary levels, the federal government has played a much larger role in shaping the direction of the nation’s schools. And the Obama administration has used the allure of federal dollars to get local systems to buy into White House initiatives, even in traditionally red states.
The Obama administration now has an unprecedented amount of data at its disposal to analyze students’ performance.
And even conservatives have welcomed the expansion of charter schools under Obama’s watch, though Republicans say he should do more in that area — and on vouchers. The White House also points to the development of a college rankings system, expanded high-speed Internet access and an easing of the application process for student aid as long-lasting accomplishments.
“In an era where Republicans disagree with virtually everything the president does, education is one of the few areas where we were able to peel off some bipartisan support,” a former senior administration official told the Examiner. “And there’s still plenty of things [on education] where conservatives largely agree with the president but just don’t want to hand him a victory.”
In a sign of Obama’s contentment, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is just one of two remaining members from his original Cabinet, along with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Republicans counter that the shine of Obama’s proposals faded after being tested.
Obama has struggled to get traction behind his legislative proposals, angering both liberals and conservatives at the same time.
Progressives, especially unions, have balked at Obama’s push for the easier removal of ineffective teachers. Other liberals have contested Obama’s crackdown on for-profit colleges.
As Obama moves to scrap No Child Left Behind, he continues to insist on keeping annual testing for third through eighth graders and those in high school, also angering some on the Left.
“The number of kids in this country who get to be juniors and seniors in high school and think that they’re on track to be successful in college, and they’re not even close, it’s heartbreaking,” Duncan explained last month, defending the approach. “It’s absolutely unfair when kids play by all the rules and do all the right things and still find out they’re not anywhere near where they need to be, we as educators have failed them.”
On education, like so many other matters, conservatives contend that Obama’s legacy-defining achievement is executive overreach.
“He did everything he could to increase the size of the federal footprint,” Hess argued. “I think the president believes that leadership on education cannot be left to the states. He believes the federal government needs to pay for reforms.”
