Campaign 2000: What the Candidates Should Be Talking About

By Tom Loveless and Diane Ravitch

Education has emerged as one of the major issues in the 2000 presidential campaign. Surely many educators are gratified to see so much attention paid to their work, but there are dangers, too, as candidates compete to offer expansive new programs that may appeal to voters.

In recent years, both political parties have supported programs dramatically extending the federal reach into schools. Placing more technology in classrooms, establishing school disciplinary codes, deciding how reading will be taught, recruiting new teachers and determining their qualifications, selecting exemplary math textbooks—these are just a few areas that were once the sole responsibility of state and local school officials but are now viewed as the proper subject of federal action.

This concentration of power has not been accompanied by the federal government's assuming greater responsibility for the costs of public schools. State and local governments furnish 93 percent of the revenue for elementary and secondary education. The expansion of the federal role is also occurring in the absence of compelling evidence that existing federal educational programs have accomplished their goals. Indeed, most evaluations suggest that the major federal programs are failing to make a significant dent in the problems they...