Role In Education

For the better part of American history, the federal government did not play any real significant role in education, as education and educational policy was left up to state and local governments. As a result, state and local governments throughout the country devised educational systems that ostensibly reflected the needs and desires of their residents, systems that ultimately left people with various skills that they then drew upon when entering the workforce. With time, the federal government’s role in education grew more expansive, and was particularly prominent when George H.W. Bush was president, as he devised No Child Left Behind, which sought to push schools to raise standards; and when Barack Obama led the nation, as he implemented

Though some may see the states serving as a laboratory of democracy in a favorable light, and may use this light to further argue that the federal government should stay out of education, state policy has, so far, shown itself incapable of meeting student educational needs. While some states, of course, do a better job at educating their students than others, very few states do an exceptional job, and so, to reiterate a previous point, students passing through public education will not all graduate with a solid education. Instead, some will, while others simply will not. With a federal policy in place, one to which all states ascribe, all schools and educators would be required to teach the same material to their students, decreasing the variance in what students learn and helping to assure that all students graduate with the skills needed in the 21st century. In today’s partisan political climate, the likelihood that all states would ascribe to the same federal policy is nil, as states would undoubtedly take the opportunity to reject this policy solely on the grounds that it was put forth by a member of the opposing political party. Thus, for policy to gain traction, the federal government would have to offer some sweeteners in the form of funding, for example, to encourage the most reluctant states to adopt the federal policy, or perhaps incentivize the states in other ways, like allowing them to have a say in what policy is eventually crafted. For the states that place a premium on state’s rights, in short, providing an opportunity to craft the policy that the states would ultimately implement could help these states come aboard. In other words, the central policy change that would need to occur to achieve this