Congressional panel calls for larger federal role in directing schools
By Tom Chorneau
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
A white paper released Tuesday on improving educational competitiveness and closing the achievement gap called for a significantly larger federal role in the management of the nation’s public school system.
The report, developed by a Congressionally-chartered advisory commission to the U.S. Department of Education, questioned the logic of a governance system that “diffused” authority among more than 100,000 school boards that are subject to “state and local political shifts and economic volatility.”
Led by Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a law professor from Stanford, and Christopher Edley, Jr., the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, the 27-member Equity and Excellence Commission concluded that “America has become an outlier nation in the way we fund, govern and administer K-12 schools.”
To fix the system, the commission offered recommendations within five major categories of activities: school finance, teaching, early learning, high poverty schools and governance.
Perhaps most controversial of the recommendations came from the governance and accountability chapter where the panel said the federal government “must be clearer about our national expectations for student outcomes, insist on realistic but aggressive state plans to meet them, allocate resources to level the playing field across states and