American Educator Magazine: Local Control Led to Educational Inequality
Local control is bad, horrible, no good if you were to listen to the arguments being made by William Schmidt and Nathan Burroughs in their article in the Spring 2013 edition of American Educator which is a publication ofAmerican Federation of Teachers. They promote the standard talking points – “it resembles the standards of high-achieving countries and exhibit the key features of coherence, rigor and focus.” Schmidt and Burroughs go beyond being cheerleaders to demonizing the concept of local control of curriculum, as they note it is a barrier to the successful implementation of the Common Core Math Standards.
The first and most evident risk to the CCSS-M’s realization is that they directly challenge the long-standing tradition of local control of the curriculum in American education – a structure that is itself one of the major factors related to educational inequality. Since their inception, each of the more than 15,000 local school districts has enjoyed wide latitude in curricular decision making. Incursions by other levels of government on local autonomy with respect to the curriculum, most especially by the federal government, usually have been met with skepticism at best and hostility at worst. Some quarters perceive the new standards as a transgression by the federal government against localism, as a “takeover” of education by national authorities. Even the recognition that the Common Core is a state-led initiative has not appeased all critics, in part because many state-led reform efforts also have aroused considerable opposition.To some extent, the CCSS-M do not break with precedent: after all, every state has educational