Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. He received his B.A. in history at Harvard University and his
Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He has written for numerous newspapers and journals,
including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, Commentary,
and National Review. His books include Losing Ground: American
Social Policy 1950-1980, What It Means to Be a Libertarian,
and Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools
Back to Reality. His new book, Coming Apart: The State of White
America, 1960-2010, will be published at the end of January.
THE CASE FOR the Department of Education could
rest on one or more of three legs: its constitutional appropriateness,
the existence of serious problems in education that could be solved only
at the federal level, and/or its track record since it came into being.
Let us consider these in order.
(1) Is the Department of Education
constitutional?
At the time the Constitution was written,
education was not even considered a function of local government, let
alone the federal government. But the shakiness of the Department of
Education’s constitutionality goes beyond that. Article 1, Section 8 of
the Constitution enumerates the things over which Congress has the power
to legislate. Not only does the list not include education, there is no
plausible rationale for squeezing education in under the commerce
clause. I’m sure the Supreme Court found a rationale, but it cannot have
been plausible.
On a more philosophical level, the framers of
America’s limited government had a broad allegiance to what Catholics
call the principle of subsidiarity. In the secular world, the principle
of subsidiarity means that local government should do only those things
that individuals cannot do for themselves, state government should do
only those things that local governments cannot do, and the federal
government should do only those things that the individual states cannot
do. Education is something that individuals acting alone and
cooperatively can do, let alone something local or state governments can
do.
I should be explicit about my own animus in
this regard. I don’t think the Department of Education is
constitutionally legitimate, let alone appropriate. I would favor
abolishing it even if, on a pragmatic level, it had improved American
education. But I am in a small minority on that point, so let’s move on
to the pragmatic questions.
(2) Are there serious problems in education
that can be solved only at the federal level?
The first major federal spending on education
was triggered by the launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in
the fall of 1957, which created a perception that the United States had
fallen behind the Soviet Union in science and technology. The
legislation was specifically designed to encourage more students to go
into math and science, and its motivation is indicated by its title: The
National Defense Education Act of 1958. But what really ensnared the
federal government in education in the 1960s had its origins
elsewhere—in civil rights. The Supreme Court declared segregation of the
schools unconstitutional in 1954, but—notwithstanding a few highly
publicized episodes such as the integration of Central High School in
Little Rock and James Meredith’s admission to the University of
Mississippi—the pace of change in the next decade was glacial.
Was it necessary for the federal government to
act? There is a strong argument for “yes,” especially in the case of
K-12 education. Southern resistance to desegregation proved to be both
stubborn and effective in the years following Brown v. Board of
Education. Segregation of the schools had been declared
unconstitutional, and constitutional rights were being violated on a
massive scale. But the question at hand is whether we need a Department
of Education now, and we have seen a typical evolution of policy. What
could have been justified as a one-time, forceful effort to end
violations of constitutional rights, lasting until the constitutional
wrongs had been righted, was transmuted into a permanent government
establishment. Subsequently, this establishment became more and more
deeply involved in American education for purposes that have nothing to
do with constitutional rights, but instead with a broader goal of
improving education.
The reason this came about is also intimately
related to the civil rights movement. Over the same years that school
segregation became a national issue, the disparities between black and
white educational attainment and test scores came to public attention.
When the push for President Johnson’s Great Society programs began in
the mid-1960s, it was inevitable that the federal government would
attempt to reduce black-white disparities, and it did so in 1965 with
the passage of two landmark bills—the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act and the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education didn’t
come into being until 1980, but large-scale involvement of the federal
government in education dates from 1965.
(3) So what is the federal government’s track
record in education?
The most obvious way to look at the track
record is the long-term trend data of the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP). Consider, for instance, the results for the
math test for students in fourth, eighth and twelfth grades from 1978
through 2004. The good news is that the scores for fourth graders showed
significant improvement in both reading and math—although those gains
diminished slightly as the children got older. The bad news is that the
baseline year of 1978 represents the nadir of the test score decline
from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Probably we are today about where
we were in math achievement in the 1960s. For reading, the story is even
bleaker. The small gains among fourth graders diminish by eighth grade
and vanish by the twelfth grade. And once again, the baseline tests in
the 1970s represent a nadir.
From 1942 through the 1990s, the state of Iowa
administered a consistent and comprehensive test to all of its public
school students in grade school, middle school, and high school—making
it, to my knowledge, the only state in the union to have good
longitudinal data that go back that far. The Iowa Test of Basic Skills
offers not a sample, but an entire state population of students. What
can we learn from a single state? Not much, if we are mainly interested
in the education of minorities—Iowa from 1942 through 1970 was 97
percent white, and even in the 2010 census was 91 percent white. But,
paradoxically, that racial homogeneity is also an advantage, because it
sidesteps all the complications associated with changing ethnic
populations.
Since retention through high school has
changed greatly over the last 70 years, I will consider here only the
data for ninth graders. What the data show is that when the federal
government decided to get involved on a large scale in K-12 education in
1965, Iowa’s education had been improving substantially since the first
test was administered in 1942. There is reason to think that the same
thing had been happening throughout the country. As I documented in my
book, Real Education, collateral data from other sources are
not as detailed, nor do they go back to the 1940s, but they tell a
consistent story. American education had been improving since World War
II. Then, when the federal government began to get involved, it got
worse.
I will not try to make the case that federal
involvement caused the downturn. The effort that went into programs
associated with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 in
the early years was not enough to have changed American education, and
the more likely causes for the downturn are the spirit of the 1960s—do
your own thing—and the rise of progressive education to dominance over
American public education. But this much can certainly be said: The
overall data on the performance of American K-12 students give no reason
to think that federal involvement, which took the form of the Department
of Education after 1979, has been an engine of improvement.
What about the education of the disadvantaged,
especially minorities? After all, this was arguably the main reason that
the federal government began to get involved in education—to reduce the
achievement gap separating poor children and rich children, and
especially the gap separating poor black children and the rest of the
country.
The most famous part of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act was Title I, initially authorizing more than a
billion dollars annually (equivalent to more than $7 billion today) to
upgrade the schools attended by children from low-income families. The
program has continued to grow ever since, disposing of about $19 billion
in 2010 (No Child Left Behind has also been part of Title I).
Supporters of Title I confidently expected to
see progress, and so formal evaluation of Title I was built into the
legislation from the beginning. Over the years, the evaluations became
progressively more ambitious and more methodologically sophisticated.
But while the evaluations have improved, the story they tell has not
changed. Despite being conducted by people who wished the program well,
no evaluation of Title I from the 1970s onward has found credible
evidence of a significant positive impact on student achievement. If one
steps back from the formal evaluations and looks at the NAEP test score
gap between high-poverty schools (the ones that qualify for Title I
support) and low-poverty schools, the implications are worse. A study by
the Department of Education published in 2001 revealed that the gap grew
rather than diminished from 1986—the earliest year such comparisons have
been made—through 1999.
That brings us to No Child Left Behind. Have
you noticed that no one talks about No Child Left Behind any more? The
explanation is that its one-time advocates are no longer willing to
defend it. The nearly-flat NAEP trendlines since 2002 make that
much-ballyhooed legislative mandate—a mandate to bring all children to
proficiency in math and reading by 2014—too embarrassing to mention.
In summary: the long, intrusive, expensive
role of the federal government in K-12 education does not have any
credible evidence for a positive effect on American education.
* * *
I have chosen to focus on K-12 because
everyone agrees that K-12 education leaves much to be desired in this
country and that it is reasonable to hold the government’s feet to the
fire when there is no evidence that K-12 education has improved. When we
turn to post-secondary education, there is much less agreement on first
principles.
The bachelor of arts degree as it has evolved
over the last half-century has become the work of the devil. It is now a
substantively meaningless piece of paper—genuinely meaningless, if you
don’t know where the degree was obtained and what courses were taken. It
is expensive, too, as documented by the College Board: Public four-year
colleges average about $7,000 per year in tuition, not including
transportation, housing, and food. Tuition at the average private
four-year college is more than $27,000 per year. And yet the B.A. has
become the minimum requirement for getting a job interview for millions
of jobs, a cost-free way for employers to screen for a certain amount of
IQ and perseverance. Employers seldom even bother to check grades or
courses, being able to tell enough about a graduate just by knowing the
institution that he or she got into as an 18-year-old.
So what happens when a paper credential is
essential for securing a job interview, but that credential can be
obtained by taking the easiest courses and doing the minimum amount of
work? The result is hundreds of thousands of college students who go to
college not to get an education, but to get a piece of paper. When the
dean of one East Coast college is asked how many students are in his
institution, he likes to answer, “Oh, maybe six or seven.” The situation
at his college is not unusual. The degradation of American college
education is not a matter of a few parents horrified at stories of silly
courses, trivial study requirements, and campus binge drinking. It has
been documented in detail, affects a large proportion of the students in
colleges, and is a disgrace.
The Department of Education, with decades of
student loans and scholarships for university education, has not just
been complicit in this evolution of the B.A. It has been its enabler.
The size of these programs is immense. In 2010, the federal government
issued new loans totaling $125 billion. It handed out more than eight
million Pell Grants totaling more than $32 billion dollars. Absent this
level of intervention, the last three decades would have seen a much
healthier evolution of post-secondary education that focused on concrete
job credentials and courses of studies not constricted by the
traditional model of the four-year residential college. The absence of
this artificial subsidy would also have let market forces hold down
costs. Defenders of the Department of Education can unquestionably make
the case that its policies have increased the number of people going to
four-year residential colleges. But I view that as part of the
Department of Education’s indictment, not its defense.
* * *
What other case might be made for federal
involvement in education? Its contributions to good educational
practice? Think of the good things that have happened to education in
the last 30 years—the growth of homeschooling and the invention and
spread of charter schools. The Department of Education had nothing to do
with either development. Both happened because of the initiatives taken
by parents who were disgusted with standard public education and took
matters into their own hands. To watch the process by which charter
schools are created, against the resistance of school boards and
administrators, is to watch the best of American traditions in
operation. Government has had nothing to do with it, except as a drag on
what citizens are trying to do for their children.
Think of the best books on educational
practice, such as Howard Gardner’s many innovative writings and E.D.
Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum, developed after his landmark book,
Cultural Literacy, was published in 1987. None of this came out
of the Department of Education. The Department of Education spends about
$200 million a year on research intended to improve educational
practice. No evidence exists that these expenditures have done any
significant good.
As far as I can determine, the Department of
Education has no track record of positive accomplishment—nothing in the
national numbers on educational achievement, nothing in the improvement
of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged, nothing in the
advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of money. This
brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education
disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only
reason that anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public
schools have developed a dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As
a practical matter, actually doing away with the Department of Education
would involve creating block grants so that school district budgets
throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.
Sadly, even that isn’t practical. The education lobby will prevent
any serious inroads on the Department of Education for the foreseeable
future. But the answer to the question posed in the title of this
talk—“Do we need the Department of Education?”—is to me unambiguous: No.