No Child, but States Left Behind
Since America’s schools apparently are not functioning well enough, the federal government has, once again, decided to step in and save the day. As promised in his 2000 campaign, President Bush pushed an education bill through Congress promising to overhaul our beleaguered education system, and states are now beginning to feel the effects. In an Edweek.org article by Erik W. Robelen, “States Suffer Halting Start On Tutoring,” the pressure upon schools to execute the federal mandate is clear. Robelin discusses the federal requirement that is now causing states to provide tutoring to students in “consistently low-performing schools.” What is evident from the article, though, is that the guidelines and timetables instituted at the federal level are, it seems, unrealistic in application.
The article begins by explaining the problems schools are having even recognizing the necessity of “supplemental educational services,” as the tutoring is being called. Citing five states that feel no improvement is necessary, Robelen goes on to explain the various reasons for some of those states in their assessment of the federal mandate’s inapplicability to their statewide educational systems. For the most part, the rationale is either that the states could not determine whether districts needed help or not because of newly instituted testing procedures, state assessment procedures, or the incompatibility of the new federal guidelines with those previously used in the states’ own assessment process. In any case, several states have made little headway toward implementing the federal plan to satisfaction. The result is more pressure upon those states to comply immediately.
The difficulty in compliance, though, is inherent in the federal guidelines. Changing education systems takes time. To incorporate new regulations into preexisting ones and, in some cases, to throw out old procedures to the exclusive use of new ones requires a certain time of transition. However, the federal guidelines demand that tutoring programs begin as soon as possible, intending that they be available for the start of the 2002-2003 school year. That this is impossible should be obvious, given the tasks facing state systems: assessing which school systems need help requires processing test scores from last spring, which are not yet available; hiring the force necessary to provide the tutoring service takes time, especially considering the necessity of hiring only qualified people and companies for the job; providing funds for the new program, given that some states have faced budget cuts.
Given these prominent hurdles, much maligned state systems are, by and large, working with all available speed to implement the new guidelines in a timely manner. Robelin’s article is another example of how top-down management affects the work being done at the state level. Although it may be politically important for President Bush to see his plan enacted as soon as possible, in order to see progress before the next election, rushing progress does not always benefit the ultimate objective, which is to improve the quality of education. More time planning the process and allowing for its gradual integration into existing state plans for improvement would seem to be the more beneficial course of action in the long term, as that would more likely ensure a higher level of success. It is true, steps need to be taken to encourage improvement in America’s schools, but these steps need to be incremental, not in giant strides.