Federal Control of Public Schools and the Decline of Community

CARL L. BANKSTON III is Professor of Sociology at Tulane University and author of Public Education-American’s Civil Religion: A Social History.

Robert A. Nisbet was one of the great
social theorists of the twentieth century
and a profound analyst of the nature
and sources of social order. In a summary
of Nisbet’s thought, Brad Lowell Stone has
pointed out that this theorist’s insights all
stemmed from a single theme: the destruction
of community by the extension of the
power of the central state.¹

Nisbet argued that the most effective
social relations have existed historically
within small, highly localized, face-toface
ties. In the past, the “institutional
systems of mutual aid, welfare, education,
recreation, and distribution” were primarily
the products of “family, local community,
church, and the whole network of
interpersonal relationships.”² Nisbet did
not idealize these immediate interpersonal
arrangements, but he did maintain that
for all their imperfections they have been
important sources of personal identity,
security, and adaptation to environmental
demands. These arrangements of social
ties not only fulfilled functions; they were
maintained by their functions. The continuing
need for families and communities
strengthened families and communities.

Centralized state power, from Nisbet’s
perspective, has resulted in serious problems
for modern societies. It has weakened
traditional and immediate institutions,
such as the family, without being able to
replace fully the functions of those institutions.
This has created settlements of
atomized individuals in place of true communities
as well as undermined the abilities
of those individuals to work together
for common goals. The egalitarian interventions
of political power in society,
at the same time, have introduced new
tyrannies for the sake of universal leveling.
The history of the growth of federal
control of American public schools provides
both an excellent illustration of and
empirical support for Nisbet’s thesis. For
that reason, Nisbet’s conceptualization can
also help us understand the contemporary
situation of our schools and raise questions
about recent and current trends in educational
policy.

I.

The foundation of American political life,
the U.S. Constitution, makes no reference
to schools or education. The great controversy
around the adoption of the Constitution
concerned how much power the
central government should have and how
much power the states should have, and
much of the document reflects compromises
on these questions. Most noticeably,
the Tenth Amendment reserves all powers
not expressly delegated to the federal
government for the states or the people.
The absence of any mention of education
evidently leaves educational policy, from a
constitutional perspective, exclusively in
the hands of local or state authorities.

Schools were so closely identified with
local communities in the late eighteenth
century that it probably never occurred
to any of the framers of the Constitution
that education might be a concern of any
higher level of government. Whether or
not towns or villages even had publicly
available schools depended entirely on the
towns or villages themselves.

The best-known early proposal for a
public school system came from the pen
of Thomas Jefferson in his 1779 essay “A
Bill for the More General Diffusion of
Knowledge.” Jefferson outlined a plan for
his own state of Virginia that entailed local
districts creating three-year schools for
children aged seven to ten, a set of higher
three-year schools for the top graduates of
the district schools, and a state college for
the top graduates of those higher schools.
Although the state college did come into
existence as the University of Virginia,
Jefferson’s blueprint was never translated
into reality. In fact, Jefferson opposed an
1817 bill to provide free primary education
in Virginia on the grounds that the creation
of a state board of education would
entail excessive centralization of political
control.

Before the Civil War, the northeastern
part of the country gradually achieved
almost universal public education for
young children. This region also had the
greatest degree of state-level involvement
in education, a degree of centralization
already too much for Jefferson. As early as
1799, the Connecticut legislature passed
an act to fund, encourage, and regulate
schools. New York passed its first appropriation
for state public schools in 1795 and
established a permanent state school fund
in 1805. By 1820 every town in Maine was
required to raise an annual tax for schools.
The common school movement, the push
to establish free public schools, is usually
dated from 1830, but this arbitrary date
really marks the intensification of an existing
trend.

The common schools were under the
guidance of the states, and state involvement
could become fairly extensive under
the guidance of an active official, such as
Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary
Horace Mann, who took office
in 1837. Although the federal government
played no part in public schools,
these schools did frequently have a highly
nationalistic and socially reformist character,
advocating citizenship training. The
centralizing trend in American government,
which first emerged from fear of
France and Britain and was later promoted
in the Northern states by conflicts with
the South, encouraged the establishment
of schools as instruments of national unification. Still, even in the states where the
common school movement was strongest,
schools remained under the immediate
control and direction of officials elected by
towns or cities.

The real birth of the American public
school system as we know it today came
after the Civil War, and it had close connections
to the Progressive movement.
Although Progressivism was a complicated
phenomenon, its core feature was the goal
of reforming society by political direction,
especially through the efforts of the federal
government. In Robert Nisbet’s terms,
Progressivism aimed at the absorption of
the social by the political. Born in the late
nineteenth century, the Progressive education
movement aimed at using the schools
to socialize students for the emerging
national industrial society. By World War
I, public education was both universal and
compulsory in the United States.

Out of the Civil War came the first
federal involvement with elementary and
secondary education (as well as federal
involvement with post-secondary education
through the Land Grant Act colleges).
Reconstruction brought teachers
employed by the federal government to
the South, and the first federal Department
of Education was established in 1867. This,
however, was later downgraded to the
Bureau of Education in the Department of
the Interior, charged mainly with collecting
school statistics. World War I gave a
new push to federal efforts. The Children’s
Bureau, established in 1912, began to call
for standards of school health in 1919.³

Although schools were a nationwide
phenomenon by the early twentieth century
and had contributed to the political
consolidation of the country, they
remained highly localized institutions.
The old tension between community and
central government continued to be a part
of American life, and the schools were
centers of communitarian social pluralism.
Political control remained in the hands of
locally elected officials despite the fact that
the states set the broad outlines of educational
policy and communication among
school officials, and maintained a general
curricular coordination at the national
level. School board members were the representatives
with the most immediate links
to small-scale constituencies. In the two
decades before World War II, the United
States had nearly 120,000 school districts,
with board members who had to answer
to relatively small numbers of families
and neighborhoods. These small political
communities controlled schools through
funding, as well as the election of representatives,
since the property taxes that
primarily funded schools were decided
upon by local districts.

Although both the Civil War and World
War I had stimulated the expansion of the
federal government, this government was
still small in size and limited in authority
compared to the one that appeared during
and after World War II. Most of the
initial involvement of this rapidly growing
federal authority in education came
in the form of support for post-secondary
schooling, especially through the Servicemen’s
Readjustment Act or GI Bill, first
passed in 1944. Yet, federal penetration of
the elementary and secondary levels soon
followed.

Although the Eisenhower Administration
used National Guard troops to
enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown decisions
in Little Rock in 1957, the primary
means of controlling local school districts
was the federal purse. The more Washington
became a source of money for school
districts, the greater its power became.
In 1958, the centralizing force of the
Cold War led to the first major national
education bill in the nation’s history, the
National Defense Education Act (NDEA).
This $900,000,000 four-year bill marked
the first move toward creating a national
curriculum through grants to specific areas
of study, funding for testing and counseling
of students, and money for teacher
training.

The federal power of the purse became
far greater in the middle of the 1960s,
when President Lyndon Johnson, fighting
the Cold War and beginning to intensify
U.S. involvement in Vietnam, drove
the centralization of the state further by
adopting a domestic form of mobilization
through the War on Poverty. Under Johnson,
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, which enabled the federal author
ity to withhold funds from districts that
defied the Brown decisions or engaged in
other forms of racial discrimination. The
following year, Congress created one of
the key weapons in the struggle for social
reform through the schools when it passed
the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (ESEA). This historic bill made enormous
amounts of money available to school
districts. All of this money, however, could
be withheld under the Civil Rights Act.
In addition, the bill aimed at restructuring
American society to create greater equality
among the citizens of the increasingly
centralized state. As part of the War on
Poverty, Title I directed funds to schools
and school districts that held high percentages
of low-income students. One of the
perverse effects of this provision was that
schools would eventually seek to achieve
the status of a Title I school, making poverty
a desirable quality for schools and districts.

The ESEA became the basis of future
federal school legislation. The No Child
Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) was
born out of a reauthorization of the 1965
bill. NCLB, as we shall see, was true to
the social-redesign spirit of the original
act through its effort to standardize
and equalize the educational achievement
of American citizens. By 2010, the
Obama Administration was seeking a new
reauthorization of the ESEA, as well as
attempting to realize its own program of
standardization and equalization through
its Race to the Top program.

While the federal government increased
its control of school districts, the districts
themselves consolidated during the
postwar period, so that the communities
behind school boards became larger.
In the 1939–40 school year, there were
over 117,000 school districts in the United
States. By 1949–50, this had dropped to
under 84,000 districts. Even as the population
of the United States grew rapidly,
school districts grew fewer, so that there
were under 15,000 districts by the last
school year of the twentieth century. Fewer
districts representing more people meant
that each individual, family, or association
in a district had a smaller voice while
the voice of Washington, DC became ever
larger.⁴

From 1961–62 to 1980–81, total federal
revenues given to schools grew from
$138 per student to $563 per student in
2007 dollars. Nevertheless, the apparent
achievement level of students had dropped
so much that the 1983 report A Nation at
Risk warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity”
in American schooling. In response,
the report and successive public policy
statements of course called for more federal
programs and more federal intervention.
By 2005–6, federal spending on schools
had reached $993 for each student.⁵ The
schools were no better for all this spending,
however, because the political intervention
behind the money undermined
the basic social institutions on which education
rests.

The centralization of American education
and the displacement of pluralistic
local authorities could be seen in many
aspects of American schooling. However,
the revolution from above primarily took
place through two movements: the desegregation
movement and the standardization
movement, both of which profoundly
affected the connections between American
society and American education.

II.

In The Quest for Community, Nisbet argues
that the French Revolution is often mischaracterized
as a struggle to liberate individuals
which evolved into the authoritarian use of
state power to transform society. He countered
that libertarianism and authoritarianism
were parts of the same effort to destroy
traditional, often unfair and oppressive,
plural social authorities and replace them
with a monistic state that would have a
direct relationship with each individual
and would seek to reorder and rationalize
the lives of all. This description can also be
applied to the most revolutionary movement
in modern American education, the
desegregation movement.

Brown v. the Board of Education, the ruling
that began the federal fight against segregation,
is often seen as a decision about
the rights of individuals. The Supreme
Court’s ruling in Brown that segregated
schools violated the equal protection clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment can be seen
as guaranteeing only the equal treatment
of individual students. Thus, the Court
proclaimed, “school children irrespective
of race or color shall be required to attend
the school in the district in which they
reside and that color or race is no element
of exceptional circumstances in warranting
a deviation from this basic principle.”

Brown was not, however, expected
merely to recognize the legal right of individuals
to enroll in their schools. While
commenting on the decision in 1954,
attorney (later Justice) Thurgood Marshall
said that he expected it would take “up
to five years” to eliminate segregation in
education throughout the United States.
Further, the New York Times reported that
Marshall “predicted that, by the time the
hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation was observed in 1963,
segregation in all forms would have been
eliminated from the nation.”

Marshall and others initially expected
that this transformation of American society
would come about as the legal barriers
to discrimination fell. It soon became
evident, though, that these barriers would
have to be battered down. In 1956, 101
Southern state senators put their names
to a manifesto that repudiated the Court’s
decision and declared the decision itself
illegal. In Virginia, officials of Prince
Edward County proclaimed in 1957 that
they would shut down all public schools
rather than comply with the law. The first
real act of federal enforcement of Brown
took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, where
President Dwight Eisenhower activated
the Arkansas National Guard to escort
seven black students through a screaming
mob in order to integrate Little Rock
Central High School. The drama of Little
Rock began to make the integration of
American schools a focus of national attention.

Hannah Arendt’s controversial 1959
Dissent article “Reflections on Little
Rock” recognizes that federal enforcement
of racial integration could involve
more than simply protecting a legal right
to free access by individuals. In terms that
were strikingly similar to Nisbet’s distinction
between the political realm of
the state and the social realm of non-state
associations, Arendt distinguishes among
the private, social, and political realms.
She maintains that these three realms
overlapped in schools, since schools were
the places where the private concerns of
parents to make decisions about their own
children, the social right of people to associate
according to their own choices, and
the political obligations of the government
came together. In her mind, this made
schools the last places that should come
into a project of racial integration, not the
first.⁶

Arendt has been criticized for providing
moral support to segregationists and
for not recognizing that public schools are
explicitly political institutions. However,
if we look back at her reflections and think
about the social realm in Nisbet’s terms, as
the authorities that grow out of tradition
and social networks, and not simply out of
legally defined rights, then we should rec
ognize that Arendt was expressing realistic
and meaningful concerns. We might agree
that citizens of the United States have the
right to attend school without racial discrimination
and that government has an
obligation to protect that right. But at the
same time, we can recognize that families
and associations among people are not
established on the basis of abstract rights
and may frequently have goals that conflict with fairness and equality. To impose
a political solution on this conflict is to
displace a complex network of social relations.

Forty years after the Little Rock
struggle, President Clinton visited the
high school. By that time, two-thirds of
the students in the formerly whites-only
school were black. But it was internally
segregated: black students in the majorityblack
school accounted for only 13 percent
of those in the advanced classes, and black
students showed substantially lower rates
of achievement, higher dropout rates, and
more discipline problems than their white
schoolmates.

Between the effort to protect individual
rights by political means at Little Rock and
the time of President Clinton’s celebration
of that effort, the displacement of local
social relations by central political direction
had taken the shape of far more radical
programs. From the assertion of individual
rights in the era of integration, federal rule
of American schools became a project of
restructuring the whole society.

By the late 1960s, it became evident that
entrenched social patterns would not be
changed by asserting the rights of individuals
to attend their schools of choice or by
prohibiting discrimination. Because black
and white Americans frequently lived in
separate neighborhoods, they enrolled
in separate schools. In many cases, local
school boards intentionally drew school
boundaries to separate students by race.
In the 1968 Supreme Court case Green v.
County School Board, the Court ruled that a
Virginia school district’s freedom of choice
policy had not led to genuinely integrated
schools and ordered the school board to
come up with a plan that would effectively
mix students by race. In the 1971 case of
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the court
ruled that busing students to achieve integration
was constitutional.

By the early 1970s, a desegregation
order meant that a federal judge became
overseer of a school district. Judges could
and did order schools to redraw attendance
boundaries, close schools, bus students,
and transfer personnel in order to achieve
desired racial compositions. In this atmosphere,
advocates and policy makers began
to argue that schooling was a mechanism
by which American society could be redesigned
to eliminate inequality, prejudice,
and discrimination. The respected social
scientist Christopher Jencks declared in
1972, “if we want a desegregated society,
we should have desegregated schools.”
The political realm would take authority
away from the social and reshape the latter
through the schools.

Many of the resulting clashes can be
understood as the resistance of traditional
communal authorities to the intrusion
of the state. Nisbet observed in Twilight of
Authority, published in 1975, that most of
the opposition to busing came from “pride
in and the sense of attachment to neighborhood.”
⁷ The neighborhoods of South
Boston, for example, were tightly integrated
ethnic communities of Irish Americans
when the Boston school district was
ordered to desegregate through busing
in 1974. The widely televised rioting of
white parents angry at the busing of their
own children to the northern part of the
city and the busing of black children to
the southern part clearly involved intense
racial prejudice. But it was also clear that
the expressions of prejudice were the reactions
of people who felt that their own
communities and the schools that they saw
as their own were being taken from them.
With the putative success of desegregation,
the schools lost the support and even the
participation of people who had traditionally
been active in them. White families
began fleeing the system by the thousands,
never to return. The percentage of white
students in the average minority child’s
classroom in Boston decreased every single
year from the beginning of forced busing
in 1974 to the turn of the twenty-first century,
during which time the system went
from 57 percent to 15 percent white.

The displacement of immediate nonstate
social arrangements by desegregation
may have affected black communities
even more than white communities. Fundamental
sources of social order for black
Americans have long been under great
pressures. The end of slavery did see the
rise of black churches, and it is widely
agreed that church has been critical to the
structure and organization of black social
networks in the United States. However,
black church membership and participation
has been declining, and other essential
authorities have been vanishing.

By the 1930s, about one-third of newborn
black children were the offspring of
unmarried mothers. Whatever the origin
of this demographic characteristic, at the
time of the War on Poverty out-of-wedlock
births began to increase rapidly among all
Americans, but especially among black
Americans. Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised
the alarm about the crumbling of the
fundamental social structure of the family
among low-income blacks in a 1965
Department of Labor report, and called
for “national action.” It was not clear just
how the nation could reconstitute families.
More plausibly, state intervention was
removing the functional necessity for family,
creating the kind of direct relationship
between residents of inner-city minority
neighborhoods and the central state
described by Nisbet. By the 1990s, over
three-quarters of black children were born
to single mothers.

While their families crumbled, black
neighborhoods saw their communities literally
destroyed. The Housing Act of 1937
provided federal aid to municipal housing
authorities to renovate urban areas. The
Housing Act of 1949, in the atmosphere of
governmentally directed change that followed
World War II, provided funds that
led to the bulldozing of poor, especially
black, neighborhoods, and the gradual
relocation of black families in many parts
of the country to subsidized housing. Critics
sardonically referred to urban renewal
as “Negro removal.”

With these threats to the social organization
of black social groups, neighborhood
centers took on added importance in
the late twentieth century. These centers
were often schools. By closing or dissolving
black neighborhood schools, federal
authorities may have done even more
damage to black communities than to the
Irish of South Boston.

In the earliest years of desegregation,
the effort to redistribute students already
showed signs that it would damage black
communities. After a comparison of black
high schools in the 1962–63 school year
with integrated high schools in 1972–73,
Frederick A. Rogers concluded:

The desegregation of public high
schools in North Carolina destroyed
“community” within the schools
for the black student specifically,
and ultimately this change is likely
to contribute to the destruction or
at the very least, a radically altered
direction for the black community
in general. Destruction of commu
nity within the black high schools is,
in part, related to the loss of black
influence and control over the shape,
kind, and extent of educational
experiences black youth are to have.
In addition, the desegregation of
public high schools in North Carolina
proved to be school consolidation
[italics in the original] and, as such,
reduced the number of high schools
(attendance units) in the state by
almost one half and increased dramatically
the student population in
each attendance unit.⁸

Rogers found that while black high
schools in North Carolina had been
chronically short on funds and materials
during the Jim Crow era, these schools did
enjoy the participation of the adults around
them. Thirty years after Rogers published
his work, researchers Vivian Gunn Morris
and Curtis L. Morris looked at the
impact of desegregation on the small town
of Tuscumbia, Alabama.⁹ The Morrises’
book does not romanticize the segregated
schools of the Jim Crow era. Trenholm,
the black high school in their study, was
consistently shortchanged in instructional
resources, physical plant, and technology.
But it occupied the central place in
local black society. It was a focal point of
adult involvement. Although desegregation
meant that students moved to a better
physical structure with more materials, it
also meant that this central place for forming
commitments and voluntary associations
was destroyed. Morris and Morris
recount that students and adults were in
shock when the school was torn down.
The colors and other symbols of the school
“were important socially and emotionally
to the students and to the African American
community. It was around these symbols
that the school community rallied.”¹⁰
Asa G. Hilliard III, in a foreword to the
Morrises’ study, summarizes the authors’
findings on the impact of desegregation:
“The demands of the African community
were hijacked in the court system and
among supporters who saw the solutions to
our problems as the breakdown of communities
by sending children to be integrated
into predominantly White schools.”¹¹

To come full circle, we can return to
Topeka, Kansas, where the historic Brown
case had first originated. In 2004, the black
former district superintendent of Topeka
lamented the destruction of community
during the previous half century. He complained
to reporters of Time that “the closing
of black neighborhood schools—with
their traditions, yearbooks, mottoes, fight
songs and halls of fame—ripped the centerpiece
out of those communities.”¹²

The centralizing force of the national
government, pursuing the egalitarian goal
of liberating citizens, had imposed the
political realm on the social. As the nation
entered the twenty-first century, there
were still many school districts operating
under desegregation orders. However, the
desegregation movement had lost much
of its steam. While the black middle class
had grown, the poorest black children,
those most subject to being shifted around
in the effort to achieve an ideal equality,
were left in central-city areas almost destitute
of two-parent families and functioning
neighborhood social structures. There
were no white or even middle-class black
children left in many urban districts to ship
around in the name of equality. The Obama
Administration does seek to enforce racial
equality as a social desideratum that could
be imposed by federal policy. Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan, for example,
announced in March 2010 that he would
send out legions of civil rights attorneys to
enforce the quest for equal outcomes on
schools. The extension of federal control
over schools, though, increasingly placed
more emphasis on a standardization movement.

III.

As the ideology of the monistic political
community replaces pluralistic social
communities, the process of centralization
expresses itself as rationalization, standardization,
and uniformity, according to Nisbet.
The mass collection of equals, each
ideally bearing the same relation to the
state, must become an assembly of interchangeable
parts. Since statist ideology in
the United States places a heavy emphasis
on schools as places for reshaping individuals
and reforming society, the standardization
of schooling has become one of the
most prominent features of the extension
of federal control.

The contemporary push to achieve uniform
standards in schooling, enforced by
the federal government, can be traced back
to the 1983 publication A Nation at Risk.
Concerned about educational decline, the
report issued a call for standardized curricula
and standardized assessments to bring
all American students up to prescribed
levels of performance. The move toward
centralization and greater federal control
of schooling intensified as the twentieth
century reached its last decade. For
example, the New York Times proclaimed
in 1988 that “the schools are the best
place to forestall illiteracy, but are falling
far short of meeting the needs of a challenging
work force. To do so, the nation’s
system of public education needs to be
thoroughly revamped.”¹³ The federal government
began to draw up the blueprints
for reengineering “the nation’s system” the
following year.

At the Charlottesville Education Summit
in September 1989, President George
H. W. Bush, who had described himself as
“the education president,” met with state
governors to attempt to create a nationwide
educational reform agenda. The
constitutional basis for such a program was
unclear, but the participants agreed on six
goals, which President Bush repeated in
his 1990 State of the Union Address. The
summit and President Bush declared that
by the year 2000, the following would be
accomplished: (1) All children in America
would start school ready to learn; (2) The
high school graduation rate would increase
to at least 90 percent; (3) American students
would leave grades four, eight, and
twelve having demonstrated competency
in challenging subject matter, including
English, mathematics, science, history, and
geography; and every school in America
would ensure that all students had learned
to use their minds well, so they would
be prepared for responsible citizenship,
further learning, and productive employment
in the modern economy; (4) American
students would be first in the world
in science and mathematics achievement;
(5) Every adult American would be literate
and would possess the knowledge and skills
necessary to compete in a global economy
and exercise the rights and responsibilities
of citizenship; (6) Every school in America
would be free of drugs and violence and
would offer a disciplined environment
conducive to learning.¹⁴

This set of aims was later expanded
slightly by the Goals 2000: Educate America
Act of 1994. By 2000, every school in
the United States would also be free of
drugs, violence, the unauthorized presence
of firearms, and alcohol, while offering a
disciplined environment conducive to
learning. In addition, every school would
promote partnerships that would increase
parental involvement and participation in
promoting the social, emotional, and academic
growth of children.¹⁵

This ambitious agenda might remind
the critical reader of old Soviet Five-Year
Plans, with delusional schedules for trac
torization and hydroelectric power replaced
by dictates for the progress of American
minds. The final goal completely reversed
the role of family in public and political
life found in Nisbet’s communitarian
approach. Instead of seeing education growing
out of the family and community relations
formed by people to meet their own
needs, the federal government would act
through schools to shape family and community
relations.

President Clinton participated in the
Charlottesville Summit as then-governor
of Arkansas and supported the program
of national education standards when he
became president. The federal government
took the biggest step toward national standardization,
however, under the administration
of George W. Bush. The second
President Bush declared his dedication
to an educational reform program based
on his “deep belief in our public schools
and their mission to build the mind and
character of every child, from every background,
in every part of America.”¹⁶

This national mission took the concrete
form of the No Child Left Behind
Act (NCLB), which became law in 2002.
NCLB was not a new initiative: it grew
out of all the efforts to extend federal reach
into education of the previous decades. It
reauthorized President Johnson’s Elementary
and Secondary Education Act of
1965, carrying the War on Poverty into
the twenty-first century, and it provided
a means for translating the goals of Goals
2000 into action.

The new act mandated the annual
administration of standardized tests to
children in grades three through eight
and required that all states develop progress
objectives to ensure that all groups of
students would reach proficiency (which is
another way of saying at or above average)
by 2014. The test results and the progress
objectives were to be broken down by classifications of poverty status, racial and ethnic
groups, disability status, and English
proficiency. All groups were to advance at
the same rates on essentially the same measures
of achievement.

NCLB was explicitly intended to erase
all variations among students produced by
their historical traditions, social networks,
neighborhood contexts, or family influences.
One of its particular projects was
closing achievement gaps among racial and
ethnic groups in order to achieve universal
equality among all groups. Although the
Bush Administration opposed affirmative
action in education, it made racial and
ethnic categories a key part of its strategy
for using testing and corrective measures
in schools to eliminate group variations in
outcomes.

One of NCLB’s key concerns, then,
was with the idea of equity on a single
scale, with school, district, state, and
federal efforts concentrated on the historically
disadvantaged or educationally
weakest groups. There were penalties for
any school that failed to meet goals for
any group, including special education
students and students who did not speak
English (on English administered tests).
Students could transfer out of schools
that had failed to meet standards for any
group. In addition, school districts had to
use federal Title I funds to pay for extra
tutoring or other educational services for
students in schools that consistently failed
to meet overall goals or goals for specific
groups. The idea that uniformly high educational
achievement could be distributed
by schools to all children had left schools
with the responsibility (and the blame) for
any shortcomings.

Researchers often distinguish between
“input factors” and “process factors” in
education. The former are the assets or
liabilities that students bring with them to
their schools from families and communi
ties. In other words, these are the pluralistic
social authorities that give students
differing and unequal backgrounds. The
latter are the administrative, curricular,
and pedagogical offerings of the school.
The NCLB approach to education seeks to
completely cancel out all of the “inputs” so
that schooling in America will be purely a
matter of “processes.”

On the one side, the schools, as administrative
manifestations of the state, have
all the volition and all of the responsibility
for the fates of their students. The students,
as atomized individuals, should become
identical units. The point of the testing is
to identify any gaps or variations that may
be due to associations outside of the school
and eliminate these categorical differences.
On the other side, students, as citizens of
an egalitarian mass democracy, have the
right to demand equal results from their
bureaucratic institutions.

The attempt to flatten all social realities
in order to leave only administrative processes
from above and abstract individual
rights from below accounts for the reduction
of thought about education to statistics
and jargon in contemporary standardized
testing. Statistical data are most useful for
representing masses of entities that differ
only numerically. Jargon is a technique of
restricting what can be thought and said to
some simple set of unquestioned assumptions.

The impersonal leveling-out of social
realities is reflected as well in a redistributive
ethic that NCLB inherited from its
War on Poverty origins and that it shares
with the desegregation crusade. The transfer
policy, in particular, shares many similarities
with the desegregation strategy
of moving students among institutions
in order to achieve an abstract equality
of results among individuals in different
groups. Transfers have also, in some
instances, done just as much damage as
desegregation to social order in schools.

U.S. News and World Report formerly
ranked Dewey High School in Brooklyn
as one of the top 505 high schools
in the nation. However, a nearby school
held large numbers of failing students.
Following the standardized approach to
students as equal units, the pupils at this
other school were encouraged to transfer
to Dewey, which would presumably be
able to educate the newcomers in the same
manner and to the same level as its previous
scholars. Instead, the transfers reportedly
did serious damage to the social order
of the school. Dewey teacher Chung Chan
observed that “when I was first here, we
had no discipline problems . . . [but] we’ve
had an influx of students who are unprepared.
It’s destroying our entire school.”
One of the students who had been at
Dewey before the transfers remarked that
“there are more police here than I’ve ever
seen in my life. It feels like a jail. It doesn’t
feel like a school.”¹⁷ This student’s lament
recalls Nisbet’s account of how Jeremy
Bentham’s vision of “the rationally and
impersonally organized” administration of
the political community had led Bentham
to “the policeman and the penitentiary.”¹⁸

President Obama’s Race to the Top
initiative contains the core of the standardization
program: a set of nationwide
standards to be assessed and maintained
by testing. On the surface, it gave some
appearance of decentralization. Each state
participating in the initiative was to design
its means of achieving the standards and
compete for funding. Moreover, the Common
Core State Initiatives (CCSI), the set
of goals to be achieved, came out of work
by the National Governors’ Association
and the Council of Chief State School
Officers. However, state participation in
a nationally coordinated effort was the
strategy employed earlier in Goals 2000.
The use of funding as a means of federal
control is at least as old as the initial adoption
of the ESEA in 1965. Most important,
Race to the Top aimed primarily at
equalization, at eliminating achievement
gaps among politically defined racial and
economic categories of students by means
of federally approved policies. Thus, it
seems evident that the Race to the Top
project and its associated activities that set
the stage for a reauthorization of the ESEA
proposed in late 2010 were simply new
forms of centralized government control
of education. Delaware and Tennessee, the
two states that won funding through Race
to the Top in the first round of competitions
in 2010, won by having state bureaucracies
design federally approved means of
applying uniform, standardized outcomes
to achieve goals set by the federal government.
They did not devolve control and
decision-making to locally elected officials
or neighborhoods.

IV.

One might argue that a modern nationstate
needs a uniform approach to education
in order to compete effectively with
other unified nation-states, as well as
to guarantee equality of opportunity to
citizens. This argument implicitly supports
some form of centralized national
economic planning, with educational
programs serving as the means of workforce
training. Along these lines, Clintonera
Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich
argued that American educational strategies
should be part of a national industrial
policy.¹⁹ Similarly, President Obama’s Race
to the Top program was created as part of
the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act (ARRA), aimed at stimulating
the economy and investing in key sectors.

One may question whether placing
education within the setting of investment
policy is consistent with more traditional
humanistic concepts of learning. Nisbet
argued that precisely this type of investment-
oriented thinking had led to the
degradation of higher education.²⁰ Beyond
this, however, we should be highly skeptical
of claims that we can improve education
through greater federal direction
and standardization. It does not appear
that schooling in America has actually
improved since the original passage of the
Elementary and Secondary School Act.

If we think about schools as outgrowths
of families and communities, we can see
why central planning and efforts at uniformity
and equalization have in fact vitiated
our schools. Families do not support
schools because they are trained to do so
by government programs aimed at increasing
participation. They support schools
because these institutions belong to them
and are part of their own communities.
When students go to school, moreover,
they bring with them the attitudes, expectations,
and values of their own neighborhoods
and they create school cultures
out of the cultures they bring with them.
These surrounding cultures must emerge
from strong networks of relations that
grow over time within religious institutions
and neighborhood groups. Central
state planning cuts off schools from the
roots of tradition.

One of the great ironies of the central
government’s undermining of local
authorities is that it is likely to have the
worst consequences for those that federal
policy intends to help, the relatively disadvantaged.
As schools have been removed
from the control of families and communities,
individual families have retained
some power over the education of their
own children. Some, of course, have more
power than others. The United States is not
a totalitarian nation. As Nisbet acknowledged
in his introductory text, The Social
Bond:

One may grant that the totalitarian
state is but an intensification of tendencies
present in the modern limited
state, an extension of political
powers possessed under the doctrine
of sovereignty even by democratic
states. There is still a profound difference
between a political order in
which power stemming from government
is limited and significant
areas of intellectual, cultural, and
economic autonomy are left intact,
and a political order whose aim is
systematic extermination of these
areas of autonomy.²¹

Precisely because there are still areas of
autonomy in the United States, the extension
of political power tends to drive those
who can to desert the social realms that
have been taken over by the central government.
Public participation, then, often
goes down as public realms are drawn into
the political arena. This appears to be happening
in American public schools.

Although rates of attending public
rather than private schools increased among
American children in general in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
those with the greatest power to choose
increasingly opted out of public education.
Among elementary- and secondary-school
children in households headed by individuals
in the top quartile of income earners,
rates of attending private schools went
up steadily from 18.2 percent of students
in 1970 to 23.5 percent in 2008. Among
children in households whose heads were
in the top decile of earners, private school
enrollment increased every decade from
20.8 percent in 1970 to 29.3 percent in
2008.²² Homeschooling, still a relatively
limited phenomenon, also began to grow
among those for whom this was an option.
In 1999, 1.7 percent of all school-aged
children were homeschooled. By 2007,
this had gone up to 2.9 percent. Among
children living in two-parent households,
in which only one parent worked, these
percentages grew from 4.6 percent in 1999
to 7.5 percent in 2007.²³ Those who were
most able to do so were walking away
from public schools in ever-increasing
proportions, removing their contributions
and participation.

Much of the discussion about education
in the United States concerns what
national policy approach is best. Should
we emphasize charter schools or vouchers?
Should we concentrate on teacher training
or curricular reform? Vouchers and specific curricular requirements may certainly
have many virtues. Ultimately, however, I
think we need to ask whether we should
have a national educational policy at all
or whether education, like economic and
social life in general, is best left to the decisions
and traditions of local communities.

NOTES

1. Brad Lowell Stone, Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist
   (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000).

2. Robert
   A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the
   Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York: Oxford University
   Press, 1953), 54.

3. A coauthor and I provide a more
   detailed version of this history in chapters 2 and 3 of
   Carl L. Bankston III and Stephen J. Caldas, Public Education—
   America’s Civil Religion: A Social History (New
   York: Teachers College Press, 2009).

4. U.S. Department
   of Education, Digest of Education Statistics, 2008,
   Table 87.

5. U.S. Department of Education, Digest of
   Education Statistics, 2008, Table 171.

6. Hannah Arendt,
   “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, No. 1 (Winter
   1959), 47–58. Arendt makes the distinction between
   the private, social, and political in other places as well,
   notably in The Human Condition (Chicago: Univer
   sity of Chicago, 1958). In The Origins of Totalitarianism
   (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), as Nisbet points
   out in The Quest for Community, Arendt recognized the
   attempted absorption of the private by the political as
   a key characteristic of totalitarian regimes.

7. Nisbet,
   Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University
   Press, 1975), 261.

8. Frederick A. Rogers, The Black
   High School and Its Community (Lexington, MA: D. C.
   Heath & Co., 1975).

9. Vivian Gunn Morris and Curtis
   L. Morris, The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African
   American Community (New York: Teachers College
   Press, 2002).

10. Ibid., 79.
11. Ibid., x.
12. David E. Thigpen,
    “An Elusive Dream in the Promised Land,” Time
    Magazine (May 10, 2004).

13. L. A. Daniels, “Illiteracy
    Seen as Threat to U.S. Economic Edge,” New York
    Times (September 7, 1988), B8.

14. Maris A. Vinovskis,
    The Road to Charlottesville: The 1989 Education Summit
    (Washington, DC: National Education Goals Panel,
    1999).

15. Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P. L. 103–
    227) (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1994).

16. President
    George W. Bush, “Foreword,” No Child Left Behind
    Act (NCLB), 2001 (P. L. 107–110) (Washington, DC:
    USGPO, 2002).

17. Samuel G. Friedman, “Failings of
    One Brooklyn High School May Threaten Another’s
    Success,” New York Times (May 7, 2008), B6.

18. Nisbet,
    The Quest for Community, 277.

19. See, for example,
    Robert B. Reich, “Making Industrial Policy,” Foreign
    Affairs 60 (Spring 1982), 852–81.

20. Nisbet, Degradation
    of the Academic Dogma (New York: Basic Books,
    1971).

21. Nisbet, The Social Bond: An Introduction to the
    Study of Society (New York: Knopf, 1970).

22. These
    are my own calculations from Steven Ruggles, J. Trent
    Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew
    B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use
    Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database]
    (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).

23. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for
    Education Statistics, Parent Survey of the 1999 National
    Household Education Surveys Program (NHES), Parent and
    Family Involvement in Education Survey of the 2003 and
    2007 NHES.