Local Control—Blessing or Curse

The A Nation at Risk report of over 25 years ago bemoaned the rising tide of mediocrity and observed that if a foreign power had imposed our education system on us we would consider it an act of war. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Where are the legions fighting for better service to our kids? Taking a nap, watching a sporting event, playing a stupid game on Facebook, watching some mindless reality TV program, taking a nice trip, whatever. The pro-kids legions are missing in action, taking the low and easy road of believing the false assertions that the education system is doing as well as can be expected. It is like the Alamo where kids’ futures are massacred. But in this case no one remembers this “Alamo” because it might cause them to have to get up off of their behinds and actually demand better for the kids.

Let’s look at the issue of government control of our schools. Education has controlling entities locally, at the state level and at the federal level. But local control is a large and popular piece of the total education pie. Should it be?

Local control has been waning for decades as the federal and state influences have increased. Now there is an effort to institute national standards which is causing lots of controversy and angst because the fans of local control see it as a battle that if lost will de facto do away with local control. It is the typical carrot and stick approach. States are told if they implement the new national model they will get more federal dollars, if not they will get less dollars.

It seems logical (not an oft used skill in political debate) that it would make sense to assess whether local control has proven a positive or negative force for our education performance. That is, has local control been an aid to doing the right things in education or a roadblock preventing education performance improvements? First, let’s look at some facts so that we can determine if local control is providing support for making the situation better. Or is the love of local control simply analogous to an infant throwing a tantrum if his environment doesn’t conform to his wishes. The infant doesn’t really know what is best for his development only what “feels good” now, the lack of parental control.

Facts—See references below
1. Our education performance is unacceptable, even in our best performing districts.
2. The education process that has been employed for the last six or more decades is based on technically wrong ideas about education.
3. While real spending (after adjusting for inflation) has increased dramatically, performance against our global competition has declined.
4. The achievement gap is here to stay unless major underlying changes in education philosophy to embrace ideas that are technically correct can be implemented.
5. Educators have been successfully brainwashed in false doctrines during their education school training preventing the truth being faced and corrective action from being taken.
Considering the facts above, what changes are required to move to an acceptable educational performance?

The biggest problem is to remove the current anti-curriculum approach and replace it with a content rich and coherent curriculum. Notice I am not saying replace the flawed local curricula with flawed national curricula. This is especially important in grades K-6. See Why the Absence of a Content-Rich Curriculum Core Hurts Poor Children Most. (reference follows) It makes the point with data that poor children also face a higher move incidence than those from higher income families. One conclusion is that children who change schools frequently are more likely to be low achievers. This reinforces the need for a nationally consistent content-rich core curriculum so that these children don’t have to start over from way behind in every new school they attend. A chart in the reference shows that based on General Accounting Office data the percentage of third grade low-income children who have attended three or more different schools since the beginning of first grade at 30%! Can a patchwork quilt of local control anti-curriculum approaches that vary from district to district make sense in such an environment? No! Well that isn’t exactly true but the conditions for sensible local control have been long ago abandoned. First, the consolidation of small districts into “more efficient” larger districts has made the local school boards servants of the political powers in their community not the parents and taxpayers in the heterogeneous districts as a whole. These political powers are centered on the education power groups who contribute heavily to school board candidate election campaigns making boards malleable to their agendas.

The contrast to the American Common School experience of the nineteenth century is stark. In that time, there were many smaller districts and an attitude that serving the kids well was the requirement. There wasn’t so much money sloshing around in the system to cause self-serving behavior. Thus, the boards of these smaller districts ended up with a de facto content rich curriculum because they knew it was the right thing to do. Today we have pseudo education experts who tell everyone on the local levels what they need to do. And that conforms to the “how to” approach with virtually no content which does not prepare our kids to compete well in the global economy. The current system is run to benefit the adults in education not the kids who attend school.

The anti-curriculum, content-poor approach hurts poor kids most because they need the structure of a knowledge based approach that builds sensibly from year to year through at least grade 6. The current discovery, child-centered approach is particularly harmful to children who do not get exposed naturally in their outside school environment to the background knowledge required to understand what they read or compute.

E.D. Hirsch in his book The Knowledge Deficit, comments on localism and its impact on education. "Along with the terrible trinity of naturalism, formalism, and determinism, localism deserves a dishonored place in American education. Among the wider public it may be the most powerful educational idea of all. On the surface it just implies that our state or our town will decide what should be taught in our schools. It says nothing about what those things should be, so localism is another content-free idea, and as a practical matter it powerfully reinforces an approach that is short on content. It brings liberals and conservatives together to collaborate in support of anti-content, process oriented ideas about education.

This suspicion fed collaboration between liberals and conservatives helps explain why the process point of view has persisted despite its inability to raise achievement or attain fairness. Educationist, process ideas thrive on the liberal-conservative standoff, and our schools and school boards operate under a gentleman's agreement that unites these groups behind the process-oriented creed."

The current patchwork local control facilitated approach works against a critical mass of educators realizing that the ed school catechism they are taught is fallacious and needs to be discarded. Until the “light bulb” turns on, our kids will continue to lag behind their best global competition in the knowledge required to compete. The light bulb will not be turned on by educators. They have proven incapable of facing the truth which the environment they work in so effectively suppresses. We have to turn on the light or better, multiple spotlights and point to the obvious fallacies of the education fiefdom.

To conclude, all three of the controlling entities in the education mess are complicit in its abysmal performance. It matters little what the control function is as long as it supports the status quo of dysfunctional theories that harm kids, especially the gap kids. Only when the control function is set up to perform by serving the kids’ and country’s needs will education be “reformed.” Otherwise “reform” is a null word in the education context. Billions of dollars and decades in the service of pseudo reform have not done anything positive for the kids, but have greatly enriched the adults working in education.