The Trouble with the President’s Education Plan <br>

By Matthew Brouillette and Mary Gifford

President George Bush’s education agenda-the No Child Left Behind Act-is lauded as the “bill to close the achievement gap…so that no child is left behind.” Although the President’s plan suffered several major revisions, it successfully emerged from the House of Representatives with only ten percent of the House members objecting, including Arizona Representatives Flake, Shadegg and Stump.

These objections point out the need for a closer review of this proposal. Worse than doing nothing, the plan erodes local control and further expands the federal government’s involvement in education.

Reforms designed to improve the quality of education fall into three categories: Those dealing with rules, those involving resources, and those concerning incentives. Rules-based reforms include such things as imposing national and state testing, extending school days and the school year, changing teacher certification and school accreditation requirements, and the like. Resource-based reforms include such measures as increasing funding, buying new textbooks, wiring schools for Internet access, renovating or updating school facilities, reducing class sizes, and other measures requiring greater financial expenditures.

While management and resource allocation are very important issues in education, reforms in these areas have failed to significantly improve the quality of education delivered in our public schools.

The U.S. Department of Education recently issued a report that documents the results of rules-based reforms: 38 million hours of paperwork per year, or the equivalent of 18,000 public school employees filling out forms full-time. Twenty-five years of pumping additional resources into urban areas resulted in the country’s widest achievement gap between White and African American students.

These two types of reforms have, together, created more than 760 education-related programs spread across 39 federal agencies. Instead of manipulating the laws or adding more money, policy makers should focus on introducing greater choice and competition into the system.

This would compel schools to either improve or risk going out of business. Just as consumers improve the products they purchase by exercising their judgment of value in choosing one product over another, parents will be able to improve education by applying their own values and priorities in selecting a school.

Schools will be supplied with the needed market incentives that drive continuous quality improvement in every other area of our economy. So, which kind of reform is the No Child Left Behind Act? While the preamble of the bill and its advocates recognize the need for market incentives, a closer look reveals that it is merely more of the same dead ends. It is heavy on rules and money but lacks any market incentives. Greater regulation on public schools and intrusive controls over private schools accepting federal funds abound in the nearly 1,000-page bill.

In addition, H.R. 1 boosts funding to the U.S. Department of Education’s K-12 programs by 22 percent. It is ironic that this department will receive the single largest budget increase of any Cabinet-level agency considering its historic financial mismanagement (two unacceptable audits in recent years and more than $400 million in missing funds).

Originally, H.R. 1 offered an anemic “school choice demonstration” project. This program, which amounted to about one-half of one percent of the federal education budget, was unceremoniously removed from the bill because it was too controversial. Without market incentives “better” rules and “targeted” resources will not improve our public schools. More of the same will produce more of the same, and good intentions are not enough to fulfill promises. —- Matthew Brouillette is an adjunct scholar at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, AZ and the director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, MI. Mary Gifford is a research fellow at the Goldwater Institute and the director of leadership development at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Goldwater Institute. Permission to reprint is granted provided credit is given to the authors and the Goldwater Institute. Full text is available online at http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org.