Sec. Spellings

Giving parents and families the opportunity to choose the very best education options available for their children is not only the right thing to do, but it leads to accountability for results.

School choice plus standards, assessments, transparency for results, and consequences for failure has been the recipe our nation’s public schools have been following for the past decade under No Child Left Behind.

This work has not been easy. I didn’t think it would be. In fact, it’s been hard. It’s why a lot of adults in the system have pushed back so hard. They don’t like change. They don’t want to be accountable for results. And some simply don’t want the “feds” telling them what to do, which is something they weren’t shy about telling me!

I know it won’t surprise you to hear I fielded the occasional question during my years in the White House as head of the Domestic Policy Council, and then as a Cabinet secretary, about the legitimacy of the U.S. Department of Education. The questioner would ask where in the Constitution it provided for the establishment of the agency, knowing such language did not exist. The message was simple: the federal government should simply stay out.

Sadly the “stay out” message has been exploited and leveraged by powerful teachers’ unions and other entrenched interests, who, with no principled opposition to a federal role in education, just want more taxpayer dollars with fewer strings attached. This “unholy alliance” between the unions and those who want no role for the federal government in education is propping up the status quo on the backs of our most vulnerable children. It’s shameful beyond words.

Here’s why there’s a legitimate role for the federal government in education.

When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was signed into law in 1965, by any measure, poor and minority students were overwhelmingly denied meaningful educational opportunities because of the abysmal quality of the schools they attended. Then, and now, education remains a civil rights issue. While the federal role in education has been and remains limited, providing less than 10 percent of the total funding for the nation’s public schools, it is focused on our disadvantaged students, helping them to have a shot at the American Dream. (more…)