Conservatives and Policymaking in the United States

We are currently in the midst of a research boom on conservatives and their impact on American politics. Political scientists, sociologists, economists, historians, and scholars from related disciplines have engaged in a systematic analysis of the origins of modern conservative ideas; the emergence of various conservative factions and the tensions and resonances between them; the forging of organizations and networks to influence elections and policymaking; and the impact of conservative electioneering and lobbying on developments in many areas of policy, especially social welfare, regulatory, and tax policy.Footnote ¹⁵

To be sure, considerable debate remains about why conservatives have gained increasing political power; which conservative groups have the most influence; which policy areas are changing most significantly; and what role Democrats and liberals have played in these developments. While it is important to keep these nuances in mind, it is possible to draw several general conclusions from this scholarship. The first is that diverse conservative groups, including corporate and financial leaders, conservative intellectuals, religious traditionalists, and racial conservatives have forged a durable, if occasionally tense, political alliance within the Republican Party to accomplish joint objectives. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson put it in a recent study of the politics of economic inequality, “the leaders of the Christian right have formed an alliance, through the Republican Party, with powerful interests [in the corporate sector and the intellectual conservative movement] deeply committed to advancing a winner-take-all economy.”Footnote ¹⁶ The second is that this heterogeneous alliance has made a profound mark on politics and policymaking over the past generation, both by helping to elect majorities favoring shared objectives, and by developing the organizational muscle and ideological wherewithal to lobby effectively for these priorities. As scholars such as Hacker and Pierson, Mark Blyth, Steven Teles, Andrea Campbell, and Mark Smith have shown, the major factions of the conservative alliance have invested heavily in building intellectual, media, fundraising, and grassroots infrastructures that have helped them consolidate control of the Republican Party, elect conservative candidates to office, and lobby for their favored policies.Footnote ¹⁷

Third, many scholars agree that the diverse strands of the conservative movement have converged on a practical policymaking approach—increasingly embedded in the contours of public policy—which combines a commitment to marketizing reforms (welfare state retrenchment, economic deregulation, privatization of government services, and tax cuts) with an embrace of the disciplinary power of the state to promote markets and enforce standards of personal conduct. As Hacker, Pierson, Nolan McCarthy, and other scholars have noted, conservatives have subtly challenged universal programs such as Social Security and Medicare by introducing private-sector competitors (such as Individual Retirement Accounts and Health Savings Accounts) or by eroding their fiscal integrity through massive tax cuts. Empowered by a political polarization which has made gridlock a frequent occurrence, they have also largely succeeded in blocking federal government efforts to address risks, such as divorce, unemployment, and income volatility, which have intensified over the past several decades.Footnote ¹⁸

At the same time, scholars have suggested, conservatives have sought to transform social programs—especially but not exclusively those serving the poor—so that they operate “according to market logics, become more reliant on market actors to achieve [their] purposes, and can be used affirmatively as a tool for constructing markets, serving well-positioned market actors, and enforcing compliance for poorly-positioned market actors,” in the words of Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, Linda Houser, and Richard Fording.Footnote ¹⁹ As Schram, Soss, Fording, and their coauthors show in a series of compelling articles, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children) has emerged as a prototypical marketizing/disciplining policy, integrating market mechanisms into welfare provision, shifting the emphasis of welfare from poverty alleviation to work enforcement, and using sanctions to induce compliance with market norms.Footnote ²⁰ Many scholars have noted a marketizing/disciplining turn in criminal justice policy as well. Whether in response to the increasing social marginality of low-income citizens or as a conservative reaction to the civil rights movement, Michael Tonry, Loïc Wacquant, Bruce Western, and Vesla Weaver have traced both an increasingly harsh system of criminal justice and an infusion of the carceral system with marketizing features such as for-profit prisons, private policing, and low-wage prison labor.Footnote ²¹ The themes of monitoring and punishing are not limited to “welfare” or criminal justice, however; scholars such as Jonathan Simon and David Garland also find them in areas such as domestic relations and the workplace.Footnote ²²

Although the “marketizing” and “disciplining” impulses seem tension-ridden in theory, perceptive analysts such as Soss, Schram, and Fording and Wacquant, as well as Wendy Brown and David Harvey, have made a convincing case that they are often consonant in fact.Footnote ²³ In contemporary conservatism, the state works actively to promote both a market-oriented economic order in which individuals compete for opportunities and take responsibility for their own self-care, and a conservative political and moral environment emphasizing personal responsibility, self-regulation, and acquiescence to authority. Many agree that these policies and norms have contributed significantly to economic inequality and to the growing marginalization of disadvantaged people, especially those of color.Footnote ²⁴

In short, while there are important nuances and differences of opinion, many analysts have converged on the view that diverse conservative forces have embraced a marketizing/disciplining policy paradigm and significantly reshaped the trajectory of social policymaking in the United States.Footnote ²⁵ However, researchers have also noted the important role of Democrats and liberals in the development of a more marketizing and disciplinary style of social policymaking, though there are some different, albeit complimentary, views on the nature and causes of Democratic contributions. In some renditions, Democrats, led by “New” Democrats, embraced more conservative positions on tax, regulatory, and social welfare matters as a coping strategy to address the party's unpopularity and poor electoral performance in the post-1968 period.Footnote ²⁶ This Democratic drift has been reinforced by party members' increasing reliance on the contributions of corporate leaders and the financial services industry to fund their campaigns.Footnote ²⁷ Another not inconsistent view, pioneered by Theda Skocpol, is that the Democratic coalition has bifurcated in ways that have tended to bring about more conservative outcomes on matters of public policy.Footnote ²⁸ As she explains, “while privileged Americans continue to join membership groups—especially professional associations—blue collar unions and long-standing membership federations involving ordinary citizens have dwindled. Professionally managed “public-interest” advocacy groups seek monetary contributions, not active members, and on balance tend to promote causes of special concern to well-to-do and highly educated Americans.”Footnote ²⁹ With wealthier liberals preoccupied with “quality of life” issues such as environmentalism, good government, and group rights, and membership groups serving progressively-minded middle- and lower-class citizens in decline, conservative efforts to remake tax, regulatory, and social welfare policies along more marketizing/disciplining lines have faced less effective opposition among grassroots Democrats or their elected officials.Footnote ³⁰

Although relatively few political scientists and scholars from related fields have closely studied conservatives' influence on education,Footnote ³¹ students of education policy have echoed their conclusions in studying the rise of standards, testing, accountability, and choice policies. Michael Apple summarizes many of these claims, describing the rise of a powerful conservative alliance and articulating their primary interests.

As Apple and others such as David Hursh, Kenneth Saltman, Henry Giroux, and Pauline Lipman suggest, this set of commitments has led conservatives to promote reforms in education that parallel those in other areas of social policy.Footnote ³³ Rather than strip away government powers in education, the “conservative alliance” has sought to reshape and redirect them toward marketizing reforms such as school vouchers and charter schools, on one hand, and disciplining reforms such as standards, testing, accountability, on the other.Footnote ³⁴ In this perspective, NCLB (and related federal education reforms) represent the culmination of the conservative-led marketizing/disciplining project. According to Pauline Lipman,

Although Democrats, especially “New” Democrats, may have been forced to acquiesce to (or been co-opted into supporting) these new education policies, the results are profoundly illiberal, according to this view; these policies reinforce economic inequalities and undermine democratic practices by “sorting” students in ways that reify race and class inequities, imposing punishments primarily on schools serving disadvantaged groups, narrowing the curriculum to the study of reading and mathematics, and replacing the broad civic and social missions of schooling with a narrow vocational focus.Footnote ³⁶

Limitations of Prevailing Views

The studies considered above have made important contributions to our understanding of the trajectory of policymaking in the United States over the past several decades. But they are not beyond reproach. Several general limitations, as well as a few empirical problems specific to education policy, deserve mention.

One general difficulty is the tendency of scholars to contrast marketizing and disciplining reforms, usually linked with conservatives and Republicans, with the socializing and enabling policies historically associated with liberals and Democrats (at least, prior to the rise of the New Democrats).Footnote ³⁷ The implication, underscored repeatedly in studies of standards, testing, and accountability reforms in education, is that marketizing and disciplining policies are motivated by fundamentally inegalitarian impulses and generally bring about inequitable results.Footnote ³⁸ But I see no a priori reason to link marketizing and disciplining policy instruments—even in the context of social policy—to one ideology or another. Scholars such as Stephen Skowronek remind us that savvy political actors, seeking to advance their interests or achieve their ideological objectives, can adapt ideas and policy tools to purposes wholly unanticipated by their originators.Footnote ³⁹ What really defines the political meaning of marketizing and disciplining reforms is the intent of the authors, the design of the policies, the targets of government action, and ultimately the results.Footnote ⁴⁰ To be sure, a given marketizing or disciplining reform may be imbued with inequitable intentions, and it may produce unjust results. But if certain liberal or Democratic groups can reappropriate such policy instruments for their own purposes, perhaps neither of these conditions may hold.

This point dovetails with my second concern about much existing work on conservatism and policymaking: a prevailing tendency to deny liberal and Democratic groups much agency in the politics of contemporary policymaking. In most studies in this genre, liberals and Democrats are either defeated by better-organized and better-funded opponents, lured away from their principles by the demands of electoral competition, co-opted by the promise of campaign funds or special benefits, or fragmented so that they cannot offer effective opposition. In consequence, liberals and Democrats are often portrayed in a reactive mode, coping with their political disadvantages by acquiescing to conservative-led reforms when out of power and adopting them as their own when controlling the reins of government.Footnote ⁴¹ But this portrait of Democratic weakness and immobility is difficult to reconcile with the dynamic agency so frequently ascribed to conservative forces. If conservative groups and their elected representatives have been so effective recently in articulating new ideas, crafting novel strategies, raising funds, and mobilizing new constituencies, shouldn't Democrats possess similar agency to reverse their position (or at least exert considerable influence over policymaking)?Footnote ⁴² After all, at least since William Riker, scholars have known that the losers in a political struggle can regain influence by raising new issues, crafting fresh policy solutions, and building novel coalitions.Footnote ⁴³ It is not my intention to deny historical examples of liberal/Democratic defeat, co-optation, or fragmentation, or to claim that progressively-oriented groups can accomplish any objective. But I find it implausible that liberals and Democrats are inevitably forced into a defensive crouch. I want to suggest that, at least under certain circumstances, liberals and Democrats may be able to craft strategies and policies that are simultaneously (1) motivated by egalitarian values and (2) politically successful.

The case for considering the possibility of liberal and Democratic agency is strengthened when we reflect on two empirical anomalies attending the rise of standards, testing, accountability, and public school choice reforms in federal education policymaking. The first relates to the way that these reforms are structured. Unlike marketizing and disciplining reforms in, say, federal welfare or criminal justice policymaking, recent federal education reforms do not dramatically escalate market provision or values in the context of education, nor do they target socially marginal citizens for discipline and punishment. Although recent federal education reforms promote public charter schools, the role for the private sector remains sharply limited.Footnote ⁴⁴ More revealingly, rather than seek to manage or harass disadvantaged populations, recent federal education reforms use monitoring and sanctioning techniques in an effort to pressure schools to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students, which has historically lagged that of affluent and white students. Consider the No Child Left Behind Act, the most prominent federal education standards and accountability law. The law mandates that all students achieve academic “proficiency”—as defined by states—by 2014, and requires schools to report the yearly progress of all student groups toward this standard. If a school's disadvantaged students do not make annual academic progress, the school may be subject to an escalating series of sanctions under the law, even if the average student is succeeding. These pivotal features of the law—which the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights views as preserving the “rights of children to obtain a quality education”Footnote ⁴⁵ —are disciplinary, but not in the way conservatives usually intend. In fact, prominent conservative pundits such as Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticize NCLB precisely because it focuses so much attention on disadvantaged students, thereby diverting attention from higher-performing (and presumably white) ones.Footnote ⁴⁶ What, then, accounts for the peculiar structure of recent federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms?

Indeed—and this is the second empirical anomaly—conservatives and Republicans, especially those in Congress, have generally opposed the expansion of new federal disciplinary controls in education policymaking (the claims of scholarship reviewed above notwithstanding). While most Republicans vociferously promoted marketizing reforms to federal education policymaking, and supported standards, testing, and accountability reforms voluntarily established at the state level, they consistently resisted efforts to expand federal involvement in education standards, testing, and accountability unless one of their own was president (as was the case with No Child Left Behind). They have been especially skeptical of reforms that have placed the spotlight on the low achievement of disadvantaged students and generated pressure to alter schools serving them. Even in the case of NCLB, Republicans only backed the law because their president had staked his political credibility on it, not because they agreed with its policy features.Footnote ⁴⁷ From where, then, did the impetus for these reforms come?

CROSA's Political Entrepreneurship and Federal Standards, Testing, and Accountability Reforms

I believe we can begin to answer these questions—and enhance our broader understanding of the dynamics of social policymaking today—by considering how political entrepreneurs can shape politics and policymaking. For several decades, scholars have been turning to political entrepreneurs to help explain important instances of institutional change.Footnote ⁴⁸ Political entrepreneurs are “individuals whose creative acts have transformative effects on politics, policies, or institutions.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Seeking to upset existing arrangements and install new institutions that further their ideological and material interests, entrepreneurs engage in an array of creative behaviors to produce political change. First off, entrepreneurs exploit moments of opportunity to draw attention to a new issue or alter the way a salient issue is discussed.Footnote ⁵⁰ Drawing together normative, causal, and political arguments, entrepreneurs craft a powerful narrative that transforms the brute facts of the situation into a “problem” or “crisis” demanding attention in the political arena.Footnote ⁵¹ Having identified a “problem” in need of remediation, entrepreneurs develop a causal story that locates the origins of the problem in some existing set of institutions, discrediting the status quo and setting the stage for a new policy departure.Footnote ⁵² Entrepreneurs complete the rhetorical circle by proposing a policy “solution” or “blueprint” that explains how to change existing institutions in order to resolve the problem at hand.Footnote ⁵³

A central part of entrepreneurs' rhetorical project is the creative recombination of existing problem and solution ideas. Political actors appropriate claims of authority from diverse sources, combining various ideas to make their purposes resonate.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Adam Sheingate suggests, creative recombination not only allows for the construction of novel ideas from existing ones; it also “allows entrepreneurs to consolidate their innovations by building robust coalitions in support of institutional change.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, effective ideational innovation is tied to entrepreneurial mobilization, organization-building, and coalition formation. Moving from the realm of ideas to the field of action, entrepreneurs undertake the hard work of organizing potentially sympathetic groups and brokering political compromises among contending interests.Footnote ⁵⁶ Political entrepreneurs also pay the costs of disseminating ideas, developing means for presenting their proposals in an accessible format and conveying them to a broad audience. Identifying potential opportunities with which to pursue an agenda—for example, a sympathetic legislator willing to submit legislation, an effective venue in which to plead one's case—is another important activity that political entrepreneurs may undertake.Footnote ⁵⁷

These insights form the theoretical backbone of my argument that CROSAs played a pivotal role in crafting federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms in education. Always motivated by the desire to expand educational opportunities for disadvantaged students, CROSAs were spurred to embrace a new agenda of standards, testing, and accountability by profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. Stagnating achievement trends among historically disadvantaged students in the 1990s, evident on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, revealed the inadequacy of existing federal, state, and local policies and stimulated a search for new policy solutions.Footnote ⁵⁸ The permissive approach of existing federal education policies—nothing happened if the students served by these programs failed to learn—was undermined by its uneven record in improving the achievement of eligible students.Footnote ⁵⁹ Furthermore, from the 1980s onward, CROSAs amassed copious evidence that (in their view) proved that state and local leaders systematically discriminated against disadvantaged students by holding them to lower standards. This encouraged CROSAs to look to the federal government for accountability leadership.Footnote ⁶⁰

At a broader level, the rise of marketizing, monitoring, and disciplining themes under the guise of the “New Public Management” provided new, politically potent ways of talking about the reform of public programs, just as CROSAs were becoming disillusioned with the poor performance and lack of accountability of federal, state, and local education policies.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet whereas conservative political entrepreneurs were seizing on these policy ideas to reconstruct areas of social policymaking on more conservative, inegalitarian lines, the case studies show that CROSAs intended to adapt them to pressure the federal government and the states to focus on raising the achievement of disadvantaged students and take action if these students did not make progress. Indeed, in one sense, the CROSAs' strategy could be seen as a new twist on the traditional civil rights strategy of attempting to leverage federal authority and resources to overcome states' and localities' habitual tendency to neglect disadvantaged populations in the context of education.Footnote ⁶² In another sense, however, this approach was different, especially insofar as it placed the emphasis more firmly on performance evaluation and accountability, albeit with a link to increased education spending, rather than on access and resources alone.

This agenda both overlapped with, and departed from, aspects of the agendas of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Democrats had long championed the cause of historically disadvantaged students and endorsed federal efforts to promote their interests, spearheading efforts to build the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and other federal education programs. However, some Democrats have also been influenced by the major teacher unions and education administrator groups, which opposed standards and accountability policies both because they were seen as pedagogically suspect and because they exposed schools to the threat of sanctions. While CROSAs agreed with teachers and administrators that more money was needed for education—and, indeed, fought consistently for expanded education spending at the federal, state, and local levels—they insisted that states, localities, and schools demonstrate that they were using federal funds in an effective manner to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students. Many Republicans claimed to support raising standards and holding schools accountable for results. But Republicans generally preferred promoting private school choice and devolving authority to states and localities, rather than federally-led standards, testing, and accountability reforms, as means to improve schools. In contrast, CROSAs viewed vouchers and block grants as threats to public education and to government efforts to target disadvantaged students for assistance. Given their long experience with state and local governments, CROSAs were especially skeptical of the notion (often voiced by Republican politicians) that states and localities would work hard to improve education for disadvantaged students in the absence of federal pressure.Footnote ⁶³

To negotiate this complex policymaking environment and make their influence felt in national politics, CROSAs acted as political entrepreneurs. First, they worked to shape the education discourse, highlighting the low achievement of disadvantaged and minority students, locating this problem in existing educational institutions, developing novel policy solutions featuring standards, assessments, and accountability for results, and explaining why these reforms served disadvantaged students. Second, they recruited powerful political allies in the executive branch and Congress who could translate their objectives into public policies. Finally, CROSAs helped construct a broad, diverse legislative coalition favoring federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms. Amidst political shakeups that frequently threatened to upend federal standards, testing, and accountability laws, CROSAs repeatedly rallied Democratic officials to support these initiatives. They also forged lasting tactical alliances with powerful business organizations, such as the Business Roundtable and the National Alliance of Business, which hoped that federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms would strengthen the nation's “human capital.”

In what follows, I document my claims through an examination of the historical development of federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms. My analysis centers on the sequential debate and enactment of the three most important reforms: the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994; the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002; and the Race to the Top initiative of 2009–2010.Footnote ⁶⁴ Drawing on dozens of original interviews, fresh archival evidence, and an analysis of many primary and secondary sources, my approach is historical, tracing the mechanisms by which CROSAs shaped federal standards, testing, and accountability laws over the course of several decades.Footnote ⁶⁵ To further reinforce the plausibility of my claims, I present evidence that casts doubt on the adequacy of alternative claims about the origins of these policies (i.e., that conservative Republicans spearheaded these reforms, or that New Democrats adopted them as a coping mechanism).Footnote ⁶⁶ This approach is particularly appropriate for the argument I seek to make. As Paul Pierson explains in a series of compelling works, a historical approach is ideal for “explaining important or surprising patterns, events, or arrangements” rather than very general processes presumed to apply to all times and places; analyzing the complex interplay among various actors and institutions, as opposed to the behavior of one actor or institution; and assessing dynamic processes that unfold over time, rather than those which occur at a particular moment in time.Footnote ⁶⁷ This “process tracing” approach has additional methodological virtues. Because it examines a process within a case (federal education policymaking in the United States) that plays out over time (i.e., a “within-case” approach), and draws on many pieces of evidence to support the various aspects of my argument, my approach avoids some of the problems of “selection bias” that can confound quantitative and qualitative studies that rely only on cross-sectional variation as the basis for inference (i.e., “cross-case” approaches).Footnote ⁶⁸

I conclude with a discussion of the broader policy and political consequences of the CROSAs' entrepreneurship. As I suggest, while the CROSAs' contributions to the politics of education policymaking are indisputable, the prospects of advance toward their substantive objectives are less certain.

The Commission on Chapter 1 and The Improving America's Schools Act, 1990–1994

The contribution of CROSAs to federal leadership of standards, testing, and accountability reforms began with their entrepreneurial framing of legislation that would become the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994 (IASA). The IASA reconfigured the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the premier federal program serving disadvantaged students, to require states to adopt education standards in math and reading, institute aligned tests, develop school report cards, and ensure that all students made progress toward the same high standards.Footnote ⁶⁹ The IASA thus anticipated the No Child Left Behind Act and the initiatives of the Obama administration, inaugurating both a significant expansion of federal involvement in standards, testing, and accountability and an intensified focus on the academic achievement of historically disadvantaged students.Footnote ⁷⁰

To grasp why CROSAs advocated such reforms in the early 1990s, some historical context is necessary. Prompted by widespread fears of economic and educational decline, an “excellence in education” movement, featuring more rigorous course requirements, new teacher standards, and expanded education funding, had swept through the states in the 1980s.Footnote ⁷¹ Hoping to profit politically from the interest surrounding education, George H.W. Bush styled himself an “education president” and proposed a number of relatively modest reform measures, all of which were rejected by the Democratic Congress.Footnote ⁷² In any case, Bush's proposed reforms failed to highlight the special challenges facing disadvantaged students or to pressure schools to address these students' needs. During Bush's presidency, the achievement of disadvantaged students began to stagnate; additionally, reputable contemporary studies indicated that teachers still held lower expectations for these students; that these students were exposed to less challenging materials; and that these youths were less satisfied with themselves and their school experiences.Footnote ⁷³

These developments antagonized CROSA leaders such as William Taylor and Dianne Piche of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights; Kati Haycock of the Children's Defense Fund; Cynthia Brown of the Council of Chief State School Officers' civil rights unit; Phyllis McClure of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; and David Hornbeck, a private lawyer (and former Children's Defense Fund chairman), each of whom had a long record of experience in the federal education policy community. These figures were especially frustrated that earlier “excellence in education” reforms did not seem to have made much of a dent in the achievement gap.Footnote ⁷⁴ Viewing the status quo as unacceptable, they set out to change it. Thus, in December 1990, with support from liberal foundations, they formed a Commission on Chapter 1 (named after the most important chapter of the ESEA) to develop a comprehensive plan for reauthorizing the ESEA which would “use or change Chapter 1 to provide a challenging educational program of deep content to educationally disadvantaged students.”Footnote ⁷⁵

To bolster the viability of their project, these activists reached out to education policy luminaries (including close confidantes of Arkansas governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Clinton, Marshall Smith of Stanford University, and Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy), as well as to representatives of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Further broadening their coalition, Commissioners also invited representatives of the Business Roundtable and National Alliance of Business to participate in the Commission's deliberations.Footnote ⁷⁶

CROSAs not only brought together diverse groups to promote a common purpose; they also recombined ostensibly “liberal” concerns about the achievement of disadvantaged students with ostensibly “conservative” standards, testing, and accountability proposals to craft a novel approach to educating the disadvantaged. Although the Commission's professed target was the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, its chief criticism of the law was not that ESEA was internally flawed. Rather, reflecting their native skepticism of states and localities when disadvantaged students were concerned, the CROSAs main complaint was that the ESEA failed to transform state and local policies that discriminated against disadvantaged students by holding them to lower standards. Appropriating the themes of standards and accountability for their own purposes, CROSAs proposed to remedy this situation by leveraging the ESEA to require states and localities to adopt reforms that would hold schools accountable for raising the achievement of disadvantaged students.Footnote ⁷⁷ As the Commission explained in its report, Making Schools Work for Children in Poverty,

Indeed, anticipating the provisions of NCLB, the Commission proposed that each state set high education standards for all students, as well as performance benchmarks that calculated student progress against the standards; develop assessments that gauged all students' progress toward the standards; establish annual report cards that tracked schools' yearly progress in raising both the achievement of all students and the performance of disadvantaged groups; institute criteria that measured whether students' and schools' yearly academic progress was “adequate”; and implement accountability systems that rewarded or punished districts and schools based on their performance. States would also have to expand investment in teacher professional development and target ESEA funds to disadvantaged districts and schools. Finally, in a reflection of the fear that fiscal differentials would undercut reforms, the Commission recommended that the ESEA induce states and localities to reduce financial inequalities between districts and schools so that all children would have greater opportunity to reach high levels of achievement.

Despite its radical approach, the Commission's report received a warm welcome in Congress, in no small part due to the effective entrepreneurship of Commission members.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Commission greased the legislative wheels with a well-planned advocacy blitz. It organized numerous briefings with members of Congress and congressional staff; distributed thousands of copies of its report to opinion-makers and elected officials; held regional briefings throughout the United States; and (building on its existing relationships with the Business Roundtable and the National Alliance with Business) consolidated support in the business community. These efforts were supplemented with an organized grassroots campaign, in which Commissioners passed information about their activities to grassroots activists and urged them to write members of Congress and the administration in support of the Commission's recommendations.Footnote ⁸⁰

With comprehensive legislative language in hand, the Commission possessed considerable legislative advantages over its major competitors—the teacher unions and the education administrator groups, on one hand, and small-government conservative activists, on the other—who had only developed vaguely-worded general principles for reform of the ESEA by the end of 1992. The major teacher and administrator groups, aligned in a “Reauthorization of Hawkins/Stafford Consortium” (named after the most recent reauthorization of ESEA) called for increased spending on traditional federal education programs, as well as for new spending on health and social services.Footnote ⁸¹ At the same time, William Taylor recalled that “most Republicans favored block grants to the states and waivers of requirements, ideas that were antithetical to the principle that school authorities should be held accountable for student progress.”Footnote ⁸²

The CROSAs' effective agenda-setting eased Bill Clinton's embrace of the Commission on Chapter 1's agenda as his own. Clinton had amassed an impressive education record during his tenure as governor of Arkansas, and had campaigned on the promise to improve schools during the 1992 presidential campaign to address broader public fears about education and the economy.Footnote ⁸³ He had not, however, articulated a clear agenda for reforming the ESEA.Footnote ⁸⁴ Lacking an agenda of his own, Clinton borrowed heavily from Making Schools Work for Children in Poverty. Clinton's Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, tapped Commission member Marshall Smith to develop the administration's ESEA reauthorization proposal; Smith subsequently worked closely with Commission members in developing the administration's plan.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the end, administration officials reassured House Democrats in mid-1993 that “our proposal is generally consistent with the recommendations of the Commission on Chapter 1.”Footnote ⁸⁶ However, anticipating resistance from both Democrats and Republicans, Clinton's IASA proposal did not detail the testing, reporting, and accountability requirements with the specificity envisioned by the Commission. Furthermore, and much to the chagrin of Commission members, Clinton also dropped the controversial proposal to pressure states to equalize education spending in the face of staunch Republican opposition.Footnote ⁸⁷

Democrats held a commanding advantage in the House of Representatives (with 258 members) and the Senate (with 57 votes), allowing them to seize the initiative. Initially, some Democrats (and their allies in the teacher union and school administrator groups) expressed misgivings about the changes proposed in the IASA. Their main concerns were that federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms shifted the discussion from school resources to school performance; and that these reforms would tend to narrow the curriculum and alter teachers' pedagogy.Footnote ⁸⁸ Even without the strong commitment to remediating fiscal inequities at the state and local levels, CROSAs still viewed the IASA as far superior to a status quo which they believed failed to address both fiscal and academic inequities. Consequently, Commission on Chapter 1 members worked to shore up Democrats' support for the IASA, forging ties with top congressional Democrats and lobbying heavily to convince the rank-and-file. Civil rights activists won over the top Democratic education policymakers in the Senate, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, who emerged as early advocates of the IASA. When influential House Education Committee member George Miller of California joined the group, the CROSAs could claim the support of some of the most prominent Democrats.Footnote ⁸⁹ Meanwhile, former House Education and Labor Committee chief counsel John Jennings explained, “[David Hornbeck, Kati Haycock, and other CROSA leaders] influenced liberals by creating a more open attitude that changes should be made to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.”Footnote ⁹⁰

These efforts proved largely successful: Democrats, not Republicans, provided 230 of the 262 votes in favor of the law in the House, as well as 56 of the 77 favorable votes in the Senate. In the end, the Democrats' allies among teachers and school administrators also grudgingly signed onto the IASA, but more because they wanted to reauthorize federal funding streams than because they favored standards, testing, and accountability reforms.Footnote ⁹¹ The demands of legislative compromise whittled away some of the more stringent features of the Commission's framework, as noted above, as well as the most expansive efforts to redress funding inequities. Even so, as the Commission on Chapter 1 had envisioned, the IASA “lay the foundation for a new accountability regime” focused on raising the achievement of historically disadvantaged students, requiring states and localities to adopt high standards and assessments for all students in order to be eligible for ESEA funds.Footnote ⁹² Immediately after enactment, Commission on Chapter 1 members viewed the law as a major legislative achievement that embodied many of their proposed reforms.Footnote ⁹³

CROSAs and No Child Left Behind, 1995–2002

The IASA, which CROSAs viewed as a major if incomplete victory, was jeopardized however by the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which put Republicans in control of Congress for the first time in forty years. Contrary to accounts portraying conservative activism as the primary impetus for federal standards, testing, and accountability policies, the new Republican majority vehemently opposed the IASA. Operating under a mandate to “Privatize, Localize, Consolidate, [and] Eliminate,” a Republican House Education Task Force recommended in May 1995 the elimination of the Department of Education and the transformation of the IASA into a block grant.Footnote ⁹⁴ Facing withering criticism from resurgent Republicans, the administration retreated from enforcement of the IASA, promising that “we will regulate only when absolutely necessary, and then in the most limited, non-burdensome way possible.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Subsequently, administration officials granted generous waivers to states and localities seeking relief from IASA rules, and turned a blind eye when they failed to meet the act's requirements.Footnote ⁹⁶

In the absence of vigorous federal oversight, state implementation of the IASA was slow and uneven. Fewer than half of the states had completed work on the standards and assessments required under the IASA by 2001.Footnote ⁹⁷ Furthermore, many states were “not positioned to hold schools and districts accountable for outcomes of disadvantaged students” due to uneven collection and reporting of student performance data and inappropriate use of exemptions to exclude certain students from accountability tests.Footnote ⁹⁸ Finally, rather than hold all schools and students to the same high standards, many states established different, usually less rigorous, accountability systems for schools serving concentrations of disadvantaged students.Footnote ⁹⁹ This development dashed the hopes of CROSAs who had anticipated that the IASA would improve outcomes for disadvantaged students. Indeed, the experience reconfirmed the CROSAs' long-held view that states and localities would not work to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students unless the federal government took a more muscular role. As Kati Haycock later explained, “[Under the IASA], far too often … states fell significantly short in developing the necessary assessment, accountability, and public reporting systems. Most school systems continued to perform at a level that was “good enough” on overall averages, allowing schools to hide the underperformance of some groups beneath school averages.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

While the IASA regime imploded, neither Republicans nor Democrats were particularly focused on federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms. Congressional Republicans remained wedded to a voucher-and-block-grant approach to dealing with education. Their main policy contribution, the “Academic Achievement for All Act” (also known as “Straight A's” or “Super Ed-Flex”), would have created a fifteen-state pilot program allowing participating states to transform fourteen federal education programs into block grants in exchange for a promise to the federal government to improve student achievement over a five-year period.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Most congressional Democrats, along with allies among the teacher and school administrator groups, mirrored Republicans in turning away from federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms. In contrast with Republicans, however, they focused on expanding federal commitments to programs such as Even Start and Head Start, and extending federal support to new teacher hiring, class-size reduction, and school rehabilitation and modernization initiatives.Footnote ¹⁰² Given the wide gulf between Republican and Democratic priorities, neither side made much headway.

Frustrated that prevailing political dynamics blocked progress on their favored reforms, CROSAs renewed their entrepreneurial activities to revive support for federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms, along with a major injection of federal education spending. The Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights and the Center for Law and Education published a series of reports condemning the Clinton administration, congressional Republicans, and the states for undermining the IASA. For example, the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights issued a study in the fall of 1998, Title I in Midstream, which concluded that “the shortcomings of [Title I of the IASA] flow in large measure from the failure of federal, state and local officials to heed the call of the new law to renovate and reform the educational system.”Footnote ¹⁰³ To bolster the case for renewed federal enforcement of standards, testing, and accountability reforms, CROSA leaders set out to “prove” that these policies raised student achievement among poor and minority students. Kati Haycock's Education Trust administered a survey of 1,200 high-performing schools serving concentrations of poor students in the fall of 1998 to identify the factors contributing to their effectiveness. Analyzing their data, Education Trust concluded that “the findings [of our analysis] seem to validate” high, common standards, aligned assessments, and accountability for results as means for helping disadvantaged students.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

As Charles Barone (then a chief legislative assistant for Democratic Representative George Miller) recalls, these analyses helped revive enthusiasm for expanded federal leadership in school reform in Congress, especially among Democrats, by “showing that states were using bad tests and weren't disaggregating their test score trends by race, poverty, and other characteristics,” thereby obscuring the performance of disadvantaged students.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, while most Republicans continued to push voucher and block grant schemes in 1998 and 1999, CROSA organizations such as the Education Trust and the Center on Law and Education built on this intellectual foundation to collaborate with influential Democrats such as Senators Edward Kennedy and Jeff Bingaman and Representative George Miller on plans to reform the IASA.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ CROSA leaders and their Democratic allies agreed that the major lesson of the previous few years was that a mere return to the IASA status quo would not suffice. Rather, efforts “to strengthen and improve the law” were needed, the Education Trust explained.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Noting that disadvantaged students were still disproportionately likely to be served by teachers with modest credentials, CROSA leaders also hoped to pressure states and localities to provide these students with “highly-qualified” teachers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To bolster resources for education and expand their coalition, CROSAs also proposed to significantly increase federal spending on education.

Accordingly, with the support of the Education Trust, Miller championed the “Student Results Act” in 1999, which anticipated No Child Left Behind by mandating that states be held accountable for closing the achievement gap, bringing all students to proficiency within ten years, and assuring that all teachers were well-qualified.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Perhaps surprisingly, given Republicans' continued dominance of the House, the “Student Results Act” proved popular, passing the House in a bipartisan vote. Meanwhile, the Center for Law and Education teamed up with Senator Bingaman to develop extremely specific interventions for schools which repeatedly failed to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students. As education policy scholar Elizabeth DeBray explains, these proposals “would survive into the 107^th Congress and become the foundation for the accountability provisions in No Child Left Behind.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

The ideas championed by the CROSAs even shaped the “Public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act” of 1999 (often dubbed the “3R's bill”), a proposal developed by Andrew Rotherham of the Progressive Policy Institute and offered by Senate “New Democrats” that is widely viewed as a precursor of NCLB.Footnote ¹¹¹ Rotherham assumed that the federal government would “stay the course” on reforms championed by the Commission on Chapter 1 and embedded in the IASA while adding new performance incentives and regulatory relief and expanding federal education spending.Footnote ¹¹² Additionally, the proposal relied heavily on recommendations from the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights' 1999 missive, Title I in Midstream: The Fight to Improve Schools for Poor Kids, to justify its approach.Footnote ¹¹³ The “3 R's” bill also apparently borrowed its accountability language from the plan developed by the Center on Law and Education and Senator Bingaman.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Rather than merely a New Democratic genuflection to conservative education priorities, then, “3R's” was shaped by the CROSAs' view that strong standards and accountability reforms would improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students.

Meanwhile, CROSAs continued to build support for standards, testing, and accountability reforms with business leaders, as they had in the early 1990s. Coordinating their response, the Business Roundtable, the National Alliance of Business, and other corporate lobbies reinforced the CROSAs' agenda by publicly lobbying for federal reforms that would bolster the IASA.Footnote ¹¹⁵ These corporate organizations were simultaneously encouraging Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to embrace this agenda.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The 2000 presidential campaign overwhelmed efforts to reauthorize IASA prior to the election. Nonetheless, George W. Bush's close advisor Sandy Kress, widely viewed as a primary author of No Child Left Behind, calls CROSAs the “real intellectual fathers of NCLB.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In fact, the proposals advocated by the CROSAs and their congressional allies in 1999 and 2000 went further than Bush's “No Child Left Behind” blueprint by insisting that all students make academic progress each year, that all students reach “academic proficiency” within ten years, and that all teachers be “highly qualified” by 2005. Much to the chagrin of congressional Republicans and intellectual conservatives, who questioned the efficacy and desirability of these comparatively stringent federal measures, a version of each of these proposals made it into NCLB.Footnote ¹¹⁸

As CROSAs built the foundation for NCLB with Democrats, Republicans, led by presidential candidate Bush, were slowly backing away from their attack on the federal role in education in response to very strong public opposition to this stance.Footnote ¹¹⁹ During his successful 2000 presidential election campaign, Bush made education a signature initiative, promising to promote sweeping school reforms if elected. Given Republicans' control of Congress, conservatives eagerly awaited a proposal featuring vouchers and block grants; indeed, conservative Republicans' wariness of federal involvement was such that Bush's personal intervention was needed to block a vigorous effort to make abolishing the Department of Education a plank of the Republican platform.Footnote ¹²⁰ But Bush's “No Child Left Behind” blueprint, which built on the reforms he had pioneered in Texas, much more heavily emphasized the standards, testing, and accountability reforms recommended by the CROSAs eight years earlier through the Commission on Chapter 1 than the voucher and block grant initiatives conservatives prized.Footnote ¹²¹ Because the CROSAs and their congressional allies “were already headed in the direction favored by Bush” (according to National Governors Association executive director Ray Scheppach), the stage was set for bipartisan agreement.Footnote ¹²² Realizing that he needed Democratic votes in the tightly divided Senate, Bush chose to work very closely with Miller and Kennedy during legislative consideration of No Child Left Behind. Indeed, Bush ultimately proved willing to jettison conservative Republicans' favored vouchers and block granting reforms to preserve federal standards, testing, and accountability proposals negotiated with the Democrats.

While Bush whipped ambivalent Republicans into line, the CROSAs consolidated Democratic support with an energetic lobbying campaign.Footnote ¹²³ As Andrew Rotherham explains, organizations such as the Education Trust, the Center on Law and Education, and the National Council of La Raza possessed considerable “moral authority” with liberal Democrats due to their steadfast advocacy of the interests of disadvantaged groups, and thus were effective in convincing Democrats to back the legislation.Footnote ¹²⁴ CROSAs were particularly important in promoting the view among Democrats, made more plausible in light of the IASA debacle, that vigorous federal enforcement was necessary to ensure that states and localities held schools accountable for the achievement of disadvantaged students. Furthermore, according to Kati Haycock, “some of the anxiety [among NCLB skeptics in the Democratic Party] was resolved” by the CROSAs' advocacy of a dramatic expansion in federal education spending.Footnote ¹²⁵ In a blow to congressional Republicans, who hoped to moderate federal education spending, CROSAs and Democrats secured the largest budget increase in ESEA's history.Footnote ¹²⁶ To be clear, though, I do not claim that the CROSAs got everything they wanted on resource/fiscal matters; in particular, as during the Clinton years, muscular federal efforts to pressure states to generate greater fiscal equity were suppressed or defeated, the price of securing more rigorous federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms. Republicans' control of the presidency and the House of Representatives ensured that no bill including strong fiscal equity provisions could prevail.

If the obstacles to fiscal equalization were insurmountable, the CROSAs remained committed to NCLB on the grounds that standards, testing, and accountability reforms, along with a big injection of federal education aid, marked a profound improvement over the status quo. The CROSAs' advocacy of NCLB reforms thus helped pave the way for Democratic support. With Bush (and the CROSAs' allies in the business community) pressuring Republicans to support the initiative, the legislation was passed with virtual unanimity in both houses. NCLB tightened federal standards, testing, and accountability regulations initiated by the IASA, requiring states to establish annual tests in grades 3–8, to monitor schools' annual progress in raising students' achievement, and to implement a series of escalating sanctions against schools whose students failed to make annual academic progress.Footnote ¹²⁷ Notably, NCLB's approach turned a spotlight on the progress of disadvantaged students, pressuring schools to focus on raising their achievement. Consequently, many CROSA leaders were pleased with these features of the law. In July 2002 testimony, Harvard Law Professor Christopher Edley averred that “for the first time the academic achievement of the major racial and ethnic groups, socio-economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, and children with disabilities, will be at the core of whether our schools are judged to be successful.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Frustrated that the law neglected school vouchers, limited grant consolidation, and expanded federal involvement in education, conservatives were much less enthusiastic about NCLB. “It's a modest improvement over current law … Nothing to celebrate,” groused the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's Chester Finn in December 2001.Footnote ¹²⁹ Krista Kafer of the conservative Heritage Foundation agreed, dubbing NCLB “a small but costly step toward reform.”Footnote ¹³⁰

However, if conservatives were disappointed by NCLB, teachers and school administrators were hardly enthusiastic. Realizing that many of the teacher and administrator groups opposed expansive federal standards, testing, and accountability initiatives—especially without a concomitant commitment to pressure states and localities to equalize education spending—the chief Democratic and Republican negotiators had worked with considerable success to shield the developing legislation from their purview.Footnote ¹³¹ Thus, in the end, the “Unions' Positions [were] Unheeded on [NCLB],” the journal Education Week reported.Footnote ¹³² This did not bode well for the relationship between the CROSAs and the educational community within the Democratic Party. Whereas the CROSAs hoped to strengthen and expand the law in the future, major teacher and school administrator organizations soon inaugurated a campaign to roll back many of its provisions. By 2003, in fact, the National Education Association initiated what NEA president Reg Weaver described as a “full-court, legislative press to fix and fund” the law in 2003. “I think any pretense of support [for No Child Left Behind] has been swept away,” declared NEA chief counsel Robert Chanin.Footnote ¹³³

CROSAs and Race to the Top

Implementation of NCLB produced widespread consternation. NCLB's standards and accountability provisions affected schools in communities throughout the nation, working to label a growing proportion of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to sanction under the law. Although high-poverty, high-minority, and large urban schools were most likely to be identified for improvement, 15 percent of all schools were so identified in 2006–2007; in some states, however, the proportion of identified schools reached 30, 40, and even 50 percent.Footnote ¹³⁴ While the Bush administration instituted a series of technical changes between 2003 and 2008 to give states and localities greater flexibility in implementing NCLB's provisions, frustration with the law grew, both among conservative activists and their representatives in Congress, and among teacher and administrator groups and their supporters in the Democratic Party. Contending that NCLB interfered with state and local decisions and encouraged them to “dumb down” their standards, many conservatives called for reforms that would loosen the law's mandates and devolve authority to the states.Footnote ¹³⁵ Teacher and administrator groups formed an umbrella coalition, the Forum on Educational Accountability, to promote major alterations to NCLB; their primary position was that “rather than making accountability the central component of ESEA, the law must make capacity-building central.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Advocating a sharp reduction in NCLB's legal requirements, the Forum also called for expanded federal funding to reduce class sizes, promote individualized instruction, and enhance teacher professional development and training.

Meanwhile, and in a parallel with the experience of the IASA, many states implemented NCLB's provisions in ways that were interpreted by CROSA activists as efforts to dilute the law's ability to help disadvantaged students. The Department of Education found that “states used the flexibility provided by NCLB to establish accountability systems that varied in terms of the rigor of their academic standards, the level at which they set proficiency, the type of assessments they use, and the manner in which they calculated AYP and set their annual proficiency targets.”Footnote ¹³⁷ States and districts also shied away from implementing the most intensive accountability measures.Footnote ¹³⁸ Equally worrisome to CROSA leaders, some state teacher quality policies lacked rigor, potentially undermining (in the CROSAs' view) their efforts to secure “highly qualified” teachers for disadvantaged students.Footnote ¹³⁹

Drawing on econometric studies, as well as their own analyses of accountability reforms, these CROSAs remained convinced that standards and accountability reforms worked for disadvantaged students. In their view, states' and localities' failure to adequately implement reforms explained NCLB's relatively modest impact.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ CROSAs' commitment to federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms was evident in their response to bipartisan efforts, inspired both by conservative activists and by teacher and administrator groups, to weaken the law. When conservative Republican Sam Graves of Missouri and liberal Democrat Tim Walz of Minnesota cosponsored a proposal that would suspend NCLB's accountability measures in 2008, CROSAs, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, lobbied successfully to have the measure withdrawn.Footnote ¹⁴¹

While they acknowledged that some technical changes were needed, CROSA leaders advocated reforms that would tighten NCLB's requirements to ensure that standards, testing, and accountability reforms benefited disadvantaged students. First, believing that some states lowered their academic standards in order to achieve proficiency, CROSA activists proposed requiring states to establish standards aligned with college and workplace expectations.Footnote ¹⁴² Second, because they believed that NCLB's “highly qualified teacher” provisions failed to motivate states to improve the quality of teachers serving disadvantaged students, CROSA leaders such as Kati Haycock of the Education Trust demanded that “teachers who cannot demonstrate that they can boost student learning should get assistance, but then should not continue teaching if they do not improve.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Third, to ensure that disadvantaged students were taught by effective teachers, the CROSAs recommended requiring states and localities to develop comprehensive information management systems capable of tracking students' achievement growth and linking it to the performance of school staff.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

To promote these goals with Congress and the public, the Education Trust, the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights; the National Council of La Raza, and the Links, Incorporated (a professional association for women of color) in 2005 once again teamed up with top business lobbies in a new organization, NCLB Works! Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The Education Equality Project, a like-minded organization headed by the Reverend Al Sharpton and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, engaged in similar lobbying and public relations efforts.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Attempts to reauthorize NCLB prior to the 2008 presidential election failed, however, because the deep-seated disagreements between CROSA leaders, teacher unions and school administrators, and conservative Republicans reviewed above could not be resolved.

Because Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama rarely spoke about education during the 2008 campaign, it was unclear how his administration would approach NCLB and other education issues. Since his election, however, Obama has embraced many elements of the post-NCLB CROSA agenda. Obama selected Arne Duncan, a strong advocate of standards and accountability, for Education Secretary over Stanford education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, who, while an advocate of civil rights, questioned the wisdom of standards and accountability reforms (Darling-Hammond was also the preferred candidate of the major teacher and school administrator groups).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Though Duncan is known for his ties to the business community, he also has a long personal and professional history of working on behalf of disadvantaged students.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Furthermore, during his tenure at the helm of the Chicago School District Duncan had advocated reforms—including basing teacher pay in part on performance, closing chronically struggling schools, and expanding charter schools—which had long been recommended by the CROSAs.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ When Duncan was nominated by Obama, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights wrote to “express our strong support for President-elect Obama's designee Arne Duncan for U.S. Secretary of Education,” and to admonish federal officials to stay the course on standards, testing, and accountability.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

It is thus no surprise that the Obama administration's ambitious Race to the Top initiative—which draws on a $4.35 billion discretionary fund from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the largest discretionary fund ever made available for education, and part of a much larger $100 billion grant for education that sought to compensate for state and local education budgets that were devastated by the recession)—embraces many of the proposals recommended by CROSAs during the 2007–2008 NCLB reauthorization debate. RTT encourages states to compete for federal education funds; to be eligible, states have to show that they are working to adopt the kinds of reforms CROSAs (and their business allies) had proposed, such as developing college and career ready standards and assessments; building data systems that link student achievement to teachers and administrators; rewarding effective school personnel; and turning around struggling schools.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The CROSAs cheered Obama's reforms; the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights declared that “we share President Obama and Secretary Duncan's commitment to ensuring that education funding … support real reforms that will actually reach every child in America and help provide them with a first-rate education.”Footnote ¹⁵²

If the CROSAs generally lauded Obama's approach, however, neither conservative Republicans nor the teacher and administrator groups (and their Democratic allies) were pleased. Predictably, conservative Republicans complained that Obama's approach was too centralizing, limiting states' and localities' flexibility to craft policies that conformed to local conditions. However, teacher and administrator groups were similarly outraged that the Obama administration persisted with the federally-led standards, testing, and accountability reforms that they believed interfered with teaching and put too much accountability pressure on schools and teachers. In the summer of 2010, in fact, the National Education Association voted to take a position of “no confidence” in the Race to the Top program.Footnote ¹⁵³