Re: Fw: Re: [eddra] prediction of a natinal curriculum

[LeoCasey@aol.com]

What bedevils this discussion, in my opinion, and what inspired my original 
question/point, is an ahistorical approach and a political naivete expressed 
here concerning issues of American federalism -- the balance of power between 
national and state governments. The discussion concerning the role of federalism 
in education is given over to pro-state power political positions, without a 
proper understanding of the significance and the consequences of those 
position. This approach and naivete is not something unique to education, but is a 
broader phenomenon with serious consequences in a number of fields. Yet it has 
the same negative influence in education that it does in other fields.

Little note is generally taken, for example, of the fact that perhaps the 
most far reaching and lasting jurisprudence that has issued from the Rehnquist 
Court has been in the area of federalism, as the Court has consistently struck 
down federal legislation, in every area from violence against women to the 
prohibition guns from school campuses, from environmental legislation to civil 
rights. It has done so in the name of the protection of the constitutional rights 
and prerogatives of states. But if you think that this is truly a question of 
abstract principle, just recall that the decision in Bush v. Gore completely 
rode roughshod over all of those precedents, overturning a state court 
decision in an area where the states are given express constitutional authority -- 
the running of elections. The pro-state jurisprudence reflects the fact that the 
most progressive legislation from the New Deal onward came most predominantly 
from the federal government, and the privileging of state power vis-a-vis 
federal power provides a mean to strike at that legislation.

Perhaps nowhere is this particular significance of the federalism question 
more apparent than in the field of civil rights for African-Americans. While the 
struggles of African-Americans themselves have played a primary role in 
advancing their cause, it has always been the federal government which has been the 
primary vehicle for institutionalizing the fruits of that struggle. Slavery 
was ended, and full citizenship rights and equality before the law was accorded 
African-Americans by the Civil War Amendments. The long battle to end de 
jure, Jim Crow segregation relied upon the federal government's enforcement of the 
equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and the federal government's 
passage of the civil rights and voting rights legislation. And the opponents of 
freedom, equality and full civil rights for African-Americans have fought 
under the banner of the constitutional powers of the states, from the pre-Civil 
War doctrine of nullification to the calls for state sovereignty that marked 
the end of Reconstruction to the battle cry of "state rights" which defined 
white supremacists during the era of Civil Rights.

Nor is the civil rights for African-Americans the only area in which the 
federal government has been the avenue for progress in American society. Virtually 
every important civil liberties case in the 20th century has been against 
state and local government, and brought about through the federal government 
judiciary. New Deal economic regulation of corporate power and establishment of 
the workers' right to organize, environmental legislation, abortion rights and 
other civil rights for women and disabled people, and so on: the federal 
government has been in the lead.

This is not to say that the federal government's record is unblemished, that 
there are not cases such as Korematsu v. US [upholding Japanese-American 
internment] or Bowers v. Hardwick [upholding anti-gay sodomy laws] or the early 
20th century cases striking down child labor and eight hour day laws in which the 
federal goverrnment was a force for reaction. But the weight of the pendulum 
clearly rests on the side of the federal government as the primary force for 
progress.

And so it has also been in the field of education: when the national 
government has intervened, it has generally been a force for progress -- ending de 
jure segregation, instituting Headstart, Title/Chapter One, subsidized school 
lunches and other programs for children in poverty, the GI bill, the rights of 
children with disabilities and so on. No Child Left Behind is the exception, 
rather than the rule, and it is worth pointing out even here that there is 
nothing the federal government did under NCLB that most state governments were not 
already well on their way to doing on their own.

Would a national currculum be so much worse than the various state curriculla 
now in place? I don't see any compelling reason to think so. I also think 
that it borders on the irrational to see the NAEP report cards, which are based 
on volunatary, non-high stakes tests, as some sort of harbinger of a national 
curriculum. But curriculla is hardly the only issue which should concern us. 
There is every reason to think the a national educational system would, like the 
national educational systems in Europe, be a much more equitable system, 
without the great inter-state and intra-state inequalities which mark the current 
system.

I say all of this not because I think that a national educational system is 
an immediately realizable goal in the US; it is not. But it will be most 
unfortunate if, in the wake of NCLB, educational progressives myopically and 
ahistorically wave the banner of states' rights against the federal government, as 
they may well find themselves to have been their own worst enemy.

I have more to say about Victor's comments on urban and suburban schools, but 
that will have to wait for another day.

Leo Casey

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --