The Role of Federal Government in Education

Conflict has always been a great motivation for forward thinking, new technology, and the drive for better education. As the Soviets dominated the Space Race in the 50s the United States Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to “enhance the security of the nation” (Sadker, 251). Legally decisions on education should be left to the state, as the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution states that anything not specifically mentioned as the job of the Federal Government should be left to individual states to frame as they please. While Americans took the NDEA in stride in the late 1950s and early 1960s (possibly because of positive propaganda or a general national desire to seem as bright and upwardly-mobile as rival countries), today states stand firm in their desire to decide what their students learn. Should the government be able to decide what the national education standards are?

"Colonial recitation lesson" - Sadker p238

The early leaders of the United States may have wanted to keep education out of the hands of the government for the same reason they wanted religion and state separate: to prevent Government curtailing their freedoms by telling the populace what to think (Sadker, 251). It could also have been that education was primarily a religious education to prepare young people to battle “Satan” by being able to read the Bible (Sadker 238) and the Constitutional framers had already instituted a separation of church and state. Still, as early as 1785 the government was able to set land aside for “public educational purposes” and use federal money to support the multitude of institutions that arose. Benjamin Franklin has established a secular “academy” in 1751 and a hundred years later there were over six-thousand academies (Sadker, 241) with practical curricula, most of them supported by federal money.

As time went on the government funded teacher training, veteran's tuition, school meal programs, head-start programs, bilingual education programs and much more (Sadker, 252). In the 21st century they have agreed upon a National Standard for Education. Yet because the states still hold education separate adoption is voluntary and some of the more religious states refuse even though their schools are, and have been, successful products of Federal development.

Sadker, David Miller. Teachers, Schools, and Society, 2010. Page 151.