Federal Involvement In K-12 Education

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The governance of K-12 education has historically been a major responsibility of local governments. The first public schools to crop up in the 1800s were called “Common Schools”, and there was minimal state and no federal control involved in the administration of these schools. The local government solely controlled them. Their intent was to serve all the children in a school district, along with teaching children the values that these communities were most interested in inculcating. (Kaestle 1983).

However, over time through numerous policy changes and acts, there is now more federal and state involvement in K-12 education than ever before. One of the first and arguably the biggest incidence of federal involvement in K-12 education was
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While ESEA was introduced to eradicate racial inequity, it spread to gender equity as well, with Title IX in 1972. “Title IX is a comprehensive federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity” (Overview of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 n.d.). This was another use of fiscal control to influence public education, and therefore another blow at local governance, even though its primary motive was to equalize women’s sport in higher education …show more content…
No Child Left Behind, introduced in 2002, by President George W. Bush, is essentially a reauthorization of the ESEA. Much like previous attempts to alter local governance of K-12 education, NCLB was also met with its fair share of resistance. The aim of NCLB is “improving the academic achievement of the disadvantaged” according to the U.S. Department of Education. (Title I - Improving The Academic Achievement Of The Disadvantaged n.d.). Just as the ESEA, if schools do not comply with the standards set by the federal government, they have to forgo federal funding. However, NCLB had a multitude of flaws, and was not representative of academic achievement in many ways. The structure as well as implementation had numerous critics, including the architects of the act themselves (Fritzberg 2003). Its failure was apparent and obvious. In 2012, President Obama granted waivers concerning the standards that NCLB enforced (CNN Staff