Week 12 Federal Spending MAKE UP BLOG SORRY!

So, I totally spaced on when I was supposed to blog, not even thinking to look until it was already a week too late. So apologies for this being about something we already talked about in class, two weeks ago now.

But I feel like it can be informed by what we talked about in class! To recap, I felt it was instructive to think about federal spending on education as a fight between the 10^th and 14^th amendments, with the 10^th saying that all of the powers not explicitly granted in the Constitution go to the states, and the 14^th saying that all people must receive equal treatment under the law. For a long time, the 10^th amendment won out, and the federal government had basically no role in education policy. Then in the 1960s, the Supreme Court set down the Brown v. Board of Education decision using the 14^th amendment to declare that schools could no longer be segregated based on race because when students were separated, they were not treated equally. This spurred the federal government to get involved in making sure schools became integrated.

(Way to go, Federal Government!)

The article doesn’t mention it, but the same logic was later used in 1974 by the non-native English-speaking Chinese-American community in San Francisco to successfully argue in front of the Court in Lau v. Nichols that speakers of other languages deserved bilingual education programs that allowed them access to an equal education, which they were not receiving in English-only classrooms. So the federal government has had real value in making sure that minority communities have access to equal protection under the law.

(Bilingual education for all!)

But then federal spending took a turn under No Child Left Behind, becoming both a “carrot” and a “stick,” rewarding districts that achieved “Annual Yearly Progress” with money and punishing those that didn’t by not only not giving them money, but in some cases firing teachers, closing schools, allowing turn-around schools or charter programs to take over. This caused chaos in the places where it took place (fun fact, it’s also how I got my first Spanish teaching job, in 2008 in a Baltimore County high school that had not made AYP and fired many of its teachers the year before (and, more fun facts, is where both Ta-Nehisi Coates and the murder victim from Season 1 of Serial went to school (though not while I was there))), and was ameliorated by the Obama administration, who issued waivers to states so that they didn’t have to close low-performing schools, and later by Congress, who passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which basically codified the waiver approach into law by officially kicking the responsibility for what happens to failing schools down to the states.

(Booooooooo AYP)

In class we had a debate about whether the federal government should set a national set of learning standards, with most of our class ending up agreeing with the sentiment. I sided with the majority in agreeing. As a teacher, I do believe teachers should have a measure of flexibility in determining what they teach. But I think that having an agreed-upon set of standards across the states, so that no matter where a child is born or moves to, they will acquire the same common set of skills and knowledge from their education is a move in the right direction. It would mean that places like Texas couldn’t delete Hillary Clinton from the history curriculum, as we discussed in class. It would mean other southern states wouldn’t be able to take evolution out of the science curriculum and replace it with Creationism or “Intelligent Design,” which is pseudoscience (I'm looking at you, Louisiana). It would mean other topics that are controversial among the public but not among experts, like that humans are causing climate change, would be protected from zealous parents and politicians. 

The Common Core curriculum is an example of this (sort of) working, with experts getting together from many places and creating an open-ended framework that allows different places to teach differently, but still cover the same basic skills. Groups like ACTFL, who have come up with an oral test* and ten-level grading scale (three levels, low, mid or high in three categories, Novice, Intermediate, or Advanced, with the tenth level being Superior/Native Speaker) for speaking a language, could be in charge of coming up with the grade-level standards (shielding them from political influence), which the federal government could then incentivize states to adopt, much like Obama did with his Race to the Top initiative and the Common Core. Thinking like an engineer, it would eliminate a lot of redundancy within the system, allow for more fluid movement (of people) within the system, and hopefully improve outcomes. 

(That whole last paragraph was an excuse to get a picture of Obama into this blog)

What are your thoughts? Anybody feel like they had more to say about the national curriculum? In what ways should the federal government be more involved or less involved in education?

*Another fun fact about me: I've actually taken ACTFL tests four times for Spanish, once to get my Michigan teaching certificate (I had to get at least Advanced Low, and did!), then three times in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua (I got Advanced Mid twice at the beginning of my service, but made it to Advanced High after two years of service). It is a very good test of oral proficiency, which changes based on the input from the test subjects. It's given me a positive outlook on national standards!