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Welcome to critical issues in urban education.

Today, I'm going to be giving you a few lectures that focus on the foundational

tenants of American public education.

The idea behind this is to tell you a little bit about the history of public

education in the United States.

And to help you to understand how it's different from

education in other parts of the world.

It's also to intentionally draw connections

between the history of American public education, and

the other topics that we will be addressing in the course.

And what you will see in that process

is that this distinctive approach that the American system takes to education really

influences the way that we think and talk about the different course topics.

I'm going to start with the unit over view that essentially gives you a summary

of what we're going to be focusing on in the next three segments.

To begin with, I'm going to talk about the history of public schooling and

local control.

Local control is a concept of American public education being controlled

at the district and the state level rather than being a national system of education.

Secondly, I'm going to talk with you about school funding.

This is connected to the first topic in focusing on local control issue.

Because education is locally controlled in the United States,

it means that school funding is primarily done at the local level.

And this has implications for

inequities about the way that funding is distributed across the country.

And then finally, I'm going to talk with you a little about

the history of public school reform in the United States, again as a foundation for

some of the other topics that you'll be learning.

So, to begin with, let's focus on public schooling and local control, and

the history of the way public schooling came to be in the United States.

And this takes us back to the common school period in the United States.

It's a really interesting history.

And it's one that I think is a story that's generally untold and

that sometimes people forget.

And that is that actually in the United States public schooling,

this idea of compulsory schooling that's funded through property taxes.

The system that we have today is sometimes assumed to have been a foregone

conclusion.

Like this is something that was meant to happen in the United States.

And it actually is the case that wasn't true, that almost it didn't happen that

there was compulsory publicly funded education in the United States.

And the conversation about this really started with Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson was among the first to make the argument

that an informed citizenry needed a basic education.

And that state should pay for this.

And he started making this argument really as early as 1785,

saying that everyone deserved a basic education, that it should be funded and

paid for, not dependent on somebody's background or whether or

not they come from a wealthy family.

And three times, he tried to take this proposition forward, and

three times it was denied.

And so really, this idea of the common school,

this idea of locally controlled publicly funded education,

didn't come to be until states took it into their own hands, and

decided to design systems at the state level.

And there's a group of reformers at the state level that started

to really activate an argument for this at the state level.

As you can imagine in the history of the United States there was generally

an idea that the Federal Government shouldn't have heavy control

in what happened in localities.

And this grew up really in the colonies and

came all the way forward when states were established throughout the country.

So reformers then said, we're going to demonstrate that we need this system or

we're going to build it at the state level.

And Horace Mann was really one of the main activists

that created this argument for the idea of the common school.

And the idea behind it was simple.

We're going to increase standardization of the types of schooling that happens,

things like textbooks, things like chairs and desks,

the ways that classrooms are organized, making the argument that we actually need

standardization in the classroom of what we learn and how we learn it.

This idea of expanded opportunity, that having a basic education

in the common school would lead citizens to be able to be more informed and

to participate in the democracy in a more effective way, and

that it also establishes this idea of reducing conflict by

having a shared history, a shared culture, a shared understanding of the country.

And also building shared morals, and values, and history.

This was the idea behind the Common School.

So how did Horace Mann do this in Massachusetts?

How did he effectively make a state argument that then translated into

a national idea of what public education would look like?

In some respects, Horace Mann even though he was a state activist situated in

Massachusetts is known as the father of public education, or

the public school movement in the United States.

And what he argued for

was this idea of a common education starting in Massachusetts, and he had

this role in Massachusetts essentially as the secretary of the board of education.

He was appointed to this role, he had nobody working for him,

he had no real authority.

But what he did was, he painted a picture of what public schooling looked like

in early American society by riding around on horseback throughout the colonies,

and looking at the physical state, and the state of education

within different places in the country and really capturing that.

Capturing that writing reports about it,

publishing those in the common school journal, and

getting the word out about how education was being enacted in those early days.

And this idea of you know public education sprouting

out of the state of Massachusetts then led to a set of laws in Massachusetts,

then other states, then emulated and copied.

And this became then the foundation for public schooling in the country,

state based, locally controlled, education system.

I should mention that there's a really great video

resource on this that is from PBS.

It's from the Public Broadcasting System, and it actually summarizes this

history quite beautifully if you're interested in learning more.

So shifting quickly then to state and local control.

So I've shown you now that the foundation of public schooling

starting with activists like Horace Mann.

And he was one among many who started this

state level public education system in the country.

But what I'm going to show you now is the implications of the fact

that public education is state and locally controlled.

So first of all, we have to understand that this concept of publicly funded

compulsory education is simply not written into the Constitution or

the Declaration of Independence.

It's something that resides in the minds in the legislation at the state level, but

it's something that has never existed at the national or

federal level in the United States.

As I just demonstrated to you,

the state control is really at the roots of history in the United States.

And so it goes back to Massachusetts and other early adopters

that the common schools were established at the state level,

and that there is no national or federally controlled public education system.

What does that mean?

What do states and localities control?

Number one, they control funding.

I'm going to spend another segment explaining what that means and

what the implications are, but this means that each state controls their

own funding, each district controls their own funding, largely speaking.

Which means there's lots of differences and inequities across the country.

They control districting.

Meaning, how many schools are within a district?

How you define how schools are situated together whether it's regionally,

whether it's across between urban and rural lines.

How many schools are in them?

How many students are included in the district, that's all locally determined.

Governance. So is a school board elected, or

is it appointed?

Is the head of a school district appointed, or

are they selected through elections?

These governance issues all vary state to state and locality to locality.

Similarly, curriculum, so

there is no national system of mathematics at the elementary, or the secondary level.

Every state,

every local district picks their own curricular approach to teaching students.

Certification.

This one becomes really important,

this is certification of the professionals in the education system.

Teachers, principals, early childhood providers that are connected to

the school system states determine how to certify them.

What does quality mean?

All of those things vary from state to state, and finally accountability.

Accountability meaning how do we determine what a quality education is.

Where is the bar set?

How are we measuring whether or not students and

teachers are hitting certain performance benchmarks is all locally controlled.

So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw just very brief

connections between each unit of the course, and

the information that I just shared with you about local control.

And when we get to the actual course topics I'm going to make these connections

backwards to this lecture, but I'm going to just give you a sneak preview

of why in the world is this idea of local control so important in the units of

study that you're going to be presented with in this course.

So starting with the unit one which is going to focus on federal intervention.

It really is going to take you into the heart of

how the federal government has intervened in public education.

And I'm going to talk about that generally.

I'm also going to talk about that specifically through

the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Common Core State Standards.

This local control concept becomes really important when we talk about

federal intervention.

And the reason is because the federal government doesn't really have a stake,

they aren't really allowed to intervene according to the Constitution.

They don't really, as you'll see in the funding segment,

they don't really have the funding backing to intervene.

Because they actually give a relatively small percentage of

overall education funding.

And so what you'll see is that they use

levers around the limited funding that they provide.

That's the main leverage point they have for

things like implementing something like the No Child Left Behind Act or

trying to influence the Common Core State Standards.

These approaches use incentives because the federal government can't actually

mandate that states and localities adopt certain policies or ways of thinking.

They can use heavy sanctions, heavy incentives, but

they can't actually mandate, and you'll see that in the creative

way that the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core State Standards

actually tried to motivate states without mandating.

So that's the link there between local control and federal intervention.

In the second unit we're going to focus on school choice and charter schools, and

local control is actually the foundational

sort of prerequisite for having something like a charter school.

You can imagine if we had a national system of education in the United States,

this idea that under guard school choice of innovation

of students making choices about where they attend a school based on their needs,

based on their parents' desires.

That all goes away if everybody's teaching the same thing in the same way.

And so, school choice, in and of itself is a result of local control.

There wouldn't in some ways be a space for

an idea of school choice is everybody was already doing things in the same way.

So that's the key link there.

And then finally for school accountability,

I've already drawn this connection earlier in this segment.

About how local control means that where the bar is set.

What does quality mean?

What does learning mean?

What does student growth mean?

If that's all defined by localities,

and not defined by any kind of a national system or the federal government.

Then by definition school accountability is a local thing, and

that gets really tricky when you put that side by side with federal intervention,

and the federal government through the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance,

trying to provide incentives for states to do accountability in a certain way.

And yet not really having the constitutional backing or the funding

backing to do that, and so there's direct connections here between local control and

the arguments that we'll make further on in the course about accountability.

So that's the end of this first segment of the American foundational tenants.

In the next segment, I'm going to be focusing in more specifically on school

funding and explaining how that works in the United States.

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Public Schooling & Local Control

Critical Issues in Urban Education

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