I am posting this article from the Hillsdale College Imprimis because it addresses a problem we need to face.
January 2012
Charles
Murray
American Enterprise Institute
Charles
Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He
received his B.A. in history at Harvard University and his Ph.D. in political
science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written for
numerous newspapers and journals, including the Washington Post,
the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Weekly
Standard, Commentary, and National Review. His books
include Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, What
It Means to Be a Libertarian, and Real Education: Four Simple
Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. His new book, Coming
Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, will be published at the end
of January.
The
following is adapted from a speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, on October
28, 2011, at a conference on “Markets, Government, and the Common Good,”
sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Center for the Study of Monetary Systems and
Free Enterprise.
THE CASE
FOR the Department of Education could rest on one or more of three legs: its
constitutional appropriateness, the existence of serious problems in education
that could be solved only at the federal level, and/or its track record since
it came into being. Let us consider these in order.
(1) Is
the Department of Education constitutional?
At the
time the Constitution was written, education was not even considered a function
of local government, let alone the federal government. But the shakiness of the
Department of Education’s constitutionality goes beyond that. Article 1,
Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the things over which Congress has the
power to legislate. Not only does the list not include education, there is no
plausible rationale for squeezing education in under the commerce clause. I’m
sure the Supreme Court found a rationale, but it cannot have been plausible.
On a
more philosophical level, the framers of America’s limited government had a
broad allegiance to what Catholics call the principle of subsidiarity. In the
secular world, the principle of subsidiarity means that local government should
do only those things that individuals cannot do for themselves, state
government should do only those things that local governments cannot do, and
the federal government should do only those things that the individual states
cannot do. Education is something that individuals acting alone and
cooperatively can do, let alone something local or state governments can do.
I should
be explicit about my own animus in this regard. I don’t think the Department of
Education is constitutionally legitimate, let alone appropriate. I would favor
abolishing it even if, on a pragmatic level, it had improved American
education. But I am in a small minority on that point, so let’s move on to the
pragmatic questions.
(2) Are
there serious problems in education that can be solved only at the federal
level?
The
first major federal spending on education was triggered by the launch of the
first space satellite, Sputnik, in the fall of 1957, which created a perception
that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in science and
technology. The legislation was specifically designed to encourage more
students to go into math and science, and its motivation is indicated by its
title: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. But what really ensnared the
federal government in education in the 1960s had its origins elsewhere—in civil
rights. The Supreme Court declared segregation of the schools unconstitutional
in 1954, but—notwithstanding a few highly publicized episodes such as the
integration of Central High School in Little Rock and James Meredith’s
admission to the University of Mississippi—the pace of change in the next
decade was glacial.
Was it
necessary for the federal government to act? There is a strong argument for
“yes,” especially in the case of K-12 education. Southern resistance to
desegregation proved to be both stubborn and effective in the years following Brown
v. Board of Education. Segregation of the
schools had been declared unconstitutional, and constitutional rights were
being violated on a massive scale. But the question at hand is whether we need
a Department of Education now, and we have seen a typical evolution of policy.
What could have been justified as a one-time, forceful effort to end violations
of constitutional rights, lasting until the constitutional wrongs had been
righted, was transmuted into a permanent government establishment.
Subsequently, this establishment became more and more deeply involved in
American education for purposes that have nothing to do with constitutional
rights, but instead with a broader goal of improving education.
The
reason this came about is also intimately related to the civil rights movement.
Over the same years that school segregation became a national issue, the
disparities between black and white educational attainment and test scores came
to public attention. When the push for President Johnson’s Great Society
programs began in the mid-1960s, it was inevitable that the federal government
would attempt to reduce black-white disparities, and it did so in 1965 with the
passage of two landmark bills—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and
the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education didn’t come into being
until 1980, but large-scale involvement of the federal government in education
dates from 1965.
(3) So
what is the federal government’s track record in education?
The most
obvious way to look at the track record is the long-term trend data of the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Consider, for instance, the
results for the math test for students in fourth, eighth and twelfth grades
from 1978 through 2004. The good news is that the scores for fourth graders
showed significant improvement in both reading and math—although those gains
diminished slightly as the children got older. The bad news is that the
baseline year of 1978 represents the nadir of the test score decline from the
mid-1960s through the 1970s. Probably we are today about where we were in math
achievement in the 1960s. For reading, the story is even bleaker. The small
gains among fourth graders diminish by eighth grade and vanish by the twelfth
grade. And once again, the baseline tests in the 1970s represent a nadir.
From
1942 through the 1990s, the state of Iowa administered a consistent and
comprehensive test to all of its public school students in grade school, middle
school, and high school—making it, to my knowledge, the only state in the union
to have good longitudinal data that go back that far. The Iowa Test of Basic
Skills offers not a sample, but an entire state population of students. What
can we learn from a single state? Not much, if we are mainly interested in the
education of minorities—Iowa from 1942 through 1970 was 97 percent white, and
even in the 2010 census was 91 percent white. But, paradoxically, that racial
homogeneity is also an advantage, because it sidesteps all the complications
associated with changing ethnic populations.
Since
retention through high school has changed greatly over the last 70 years, I
will consider here only the data for ninth graders. What the data show is that
when the federal government decided to get involved on a large scale in K-12
education in 1965, Iowa’s education had been improving substantially since the
first test was administered in 1942. There is reason to think that the same
thing had been happening throughout the country. As I documented in my book, Real
Education, collateral data from other
sources are not as detailed, nor do they go back to the 1940s, but they tell a
consistent story. American education had been improving since World War II.
Then, when the federal government began to get involved, it got worse.
I will
not try to make the case that federal involvement caused the downturn. The
effort that went into programs associated with the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 in the early years was not enough to have changed
American education, and the more likely causes for the downturn are the spirit
of the 1960s—do your own thing—and the rise of progressive education to
dominance over American public education. But this much can certainly be said:
The overall data on the performance of American K-12 students give no reason to
think that federal involvement, which took the form of the Department of
Education after 1979, has been an engine of improvement.
What
about the education of the disadvantaged, especially minorities? After all,
this was arguably the main reason that the federal government began to get
involved in education—to reduce the achievement gap separating poor children
and rich children, and especially the gap separating poor black children and
the rest of the country.
The most
famous part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was Title I,
initially authorizing more than a billion dollars annually (equivalent to more
than $7 billion today) to upgrade the schools attended by children from
low-income families. The program has continued to grow ever since, disposing of
about $19 billion in 2010 (No Child Left Behind has also been part of Title I).
Supporters
of Title I confidently expected to see progress, and so formal evaluation of
Title I was built into the legislation from the beginning. Over the years, the
evaluations became progressively more ambitious and more methodologically
sophisticated. But while the evaluations have improved, the story they tell has
not changed. Despite being conducted by people who wished the program well, no
evaluation of Title I from the 1970s onward has found credible evidence of a
significant positive impact on student achievement. If one steps back from the
formal evaluations and looks at the NAEP test score gap between high-poverty
schools (the ones that qualify for Title I support) and low-poverty schools,
the implications are worse. A study by the Department of Education published in
2001 revealed that the gap grew rather than diminished from 1986—the earliest
year such comparisons have been made—through 1999.
That
brings us to No Child Left Behind. Have you noticed that no one talks about No
Child Left Behind any more? The explanation is that its one-time advocates are
no longer willing to defend it. The nearly-flat NAEP trendlines since 2002 make
that much-ballyhooed legislative mandate—a mandate to bring all children to
proficiency in math and reading by 2014—too embarrassing to mention.
In
summary: the long, intrusive, expensive role of the federal government in K-12
education does not have any credible evidence for a positive effect on American
education.
* * *
I have
chosen to focus on K-12 because everyone agrees that K-12 education leaves much
to be desired in this country and that it is reasonable to hold the
government’s feet to the fire when there is no evidence that K-12 education has
improved. When we turn to post-secondary education, there is much less agreement
on first principles.
The
bachelor of arts degree as it has evolved over the last half-century has become
the work of the devil. It is now a substantively meaningless piece of
paper—genuinely meaningless, if you don’t know where the degree was obtained
and what courses were taken. It is expensive, too, as documented by the College
Board: Public four-year colleges average about $7,000 per year in tuition, not
including transportation, housing, and food. Tuition at the average private
four-year college is more than $27,000 per year. And yet the B.A. has become
the minimum requirement for getting a job interview for millions of jobs, a
cost-free way for employers to screen for a certain amount of IQ and
perseverance. Employers seldom even bother to check grades or courses, being
able to tell enough about a graduate just by knowing the institution that he or
she got into as an 18-year-old.
So what
happens when a paper credential is essential for securing a job interview, but
that credential can be obtained by taking the easiest courses and doing the
minimum amount of work? The result is hundreds of thousands of college students
who go to college not to get an education, but to get a piece of paper. When
the dean of one East Coast college is asked how many students are in his
institution, he likes to answer, “Oh, maybe six or seven.” The situation at his
college is not unusual. The degradation of American college education is not a
matter of a few parents horrified at stories of silly courses, trivial study
requirements, and campus binge drinking. It has been documented in detail,
affects a large proportion of the students in colleges, and is a disgrace.
The
Department of Education, with decades of student loans and scholarships for
university education, has not just been complicit in this evolution of the B.A.
It has been its enabler. The size of these programs is immense. In 2010, the
federal government issued new loans totaling $125 billion. It handed out more
than eight million Pell Grants totaling more than $32 billion dollars. Absent
this level of intervention, the last three decades would have seen a much
healthier evolution of post-secondary education that focused on concrete job
credentials and courses of studies not constricted by the traditional model of
the four-year residential college. The absence of this artificial subsidy would
also have let market forces hold down costs. Defenders of the Department of
Education can unquestionably make the case that its policies have increased the
number of people going to four-year residential colleges. But I view that as
part of the Department of Education’s indictment, not its defense.
* * *
What
other case might be made for federal involvement in education? Its
contributions to good educational practice? Think of the good things that have
happened to education in the last 30 years—the growth of homeschooling and the
invention and spread of charter schools. The Department of Education had
nothing to do with either development. Both happened because of the initiatives
taken by parents who were disgusted with standard public education and took
matters into their own hands. To watch the process by which charter schools are
created, against the resistance of school boards and administrators, is to
watch the best of American traditions in operation. Government has had nothing
to do with it, except as a drag on what citizens are trying to do for their
children.
Think of
the best books on educational practice, such as Howard Gardner’s many
innovative writings and E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum, developed
after his landmark book, Cultural Literacy,
was published in 1987. None of this came out of the Department of Education.
The Department of Education spends about $200 million a year on research
intended to improve educational practice. No evidence exists that these
expenditures have done any significant good.
As far
as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive
accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement,
nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged,
nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of
money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education
disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that
anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a
dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually
doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants
so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.
Sadly,
even that isn’t practical. The education lobby will prevent any serious inroads
on the Department of Education for the foreseeable future. But the answer to
the question posed in the title of this talk—“Do we need the Department of
Education?”—is to me unambiguous: No.
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