The public school system in the United States is composed of m.docx

The public school system in the United States is composed of
more than 13,000 school districts, serving an
Issues & Controversies
Last Updated: July 13, 2017
National Debate Topic 2017–18: Education
Reform: Resolved: The United States federal
government should substantially increase its
funding and/or regulation of elementary
and/or secondary education in the United
States.
Introduction
SUPPORTERS ARGUE
Federal involvement in education is necessary to
ensure that all children receive the education they
deserve. The U.S. government should increase
education funding, shore up its support for public
schools, and impose regulations that protect the
right of all children to quality education.
OPPONENTS ARGUE
Federal involvement in education has stymied
innovation, burdened states with rules and
regulations, and deprived parents and local school
boards of authority over their children's schooling. It
is time to transfer power back to state and local
governments.

estimated 50 million students. The U.S. school system is, for
the most part, decentralized, with local and state
governments responsible for funding schools and making
educational decisions. Over the past half-century,
however, a series of laws and educational reforms have given
the federal government a greater role in education.
The federal education budget constitutes only a small portion of
education spending in the United States. In 2017,
the U.S. Department of Education had a budget of $69.4 billion,
while the education budget for the New York City
public school system alone—the nation's largest—was $29.2
billion. The United States does, however, spend more
money overall per student than most other developed countries.
In 2012, the United States spent 6.4 percent of
its Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the total output of goods
and services a nation produces during a given period
of time—on education, ranking it among the world’s highest
spenders by GDP percentage. Yet students in the
United States lag behind many of their global counterparts in
educational achievement. On the 2015 Programme
for International Student Assessment, a test given every three
years to 15-year-olds throughout the world to
measure reading, math, and science abilities, American students
ranked below average in math and about
average in reading and science.
Education policy debates over the last several decades have
focused largely on whether and how much the federal
government should be involved in making, enforcing, and
funding education policy across the country. Some argue
that state and local governments are best equipped to identify
and meet students' needs, and they insist that any
national one-size-fits-all approach to education policy is bound
to fail. Others argue that all levels of government

should roll back involvement in education, and that genuine
competition between private and public schools would
improve education in the United States.
Supporters of government involvement, however, maintain that
federal intervention helps ensure that children
from all backgrounds receive a good education. The quality of
education is unequal throughout the country, they
contend, and the federal government can help improve
educational achievement nationwide by providing financial
incentives and enforcing educational standards.
President Donald Trump (R) has painted a dire picture of U.S.
public schools, and he has argued that competition
between private and public schools is key to improving
education in the United States. In his inaugural address on
January 20, 2017, President Trump described the American
education system as one that is "flush with cash, but
which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of
knowledge." In March 2017, Trump proposed cutting
the U.S. Department of Education budget and redirecting
billions of federal dollars toward helping students from
low-income families afford tuition at private schools.
Supporters of his proposals applaud the move to downsize
the Education Department, but critics argue that federal
cessation of control over education would leave the most
disadvantaged students at risk of being overlooked.
Should the federal government substantially increase its funding
and regulation of elementary and secondary
education in the United States?
Supporters of federal involvement in education argue that, for
the past half-century, the U.S. government has
served as a crucial guardian of the rights of students from
disadvantaged backgrounds. Federal involvement, they

insist, is necessary to ensure that all students have equal
opportunities for a great education and that state and
local government policies meet the needs of the most vulnerable
children. In order to achieve these goals and
raise standards, they argue, the U.S. government must increase
education spending and regulation.
Opponents of federal involvement in education argue that the
drafters of the U.S. Constitution intended for
education policy to be left to local governments and parents.
The best education reform plans have been crafted
and implemented on the state and community levels, they claim,
while directives written by bureaucrats in
Washington, D.C., have only burdened schools with excessive
regulations and stifled innovation. Increasing the
federal education budget, they argue, will not improve
educational achievement in the United States.
The Rise of Public Education in the United States
Public schools in the United States are governed primarily on
the local and state levels—a contrast from most
other Western countries, in which schools are nationally
controlled. The roots of this system date back to the
colonial period, when communities were often too small and far
apart to make collaboration possible. Each town
thus tended to maintain its own school system.
In 1647, Massachusetts, then an English colony, passed the
School Act, which required every community with at
least 50 families to "appoint one within their town to teach all
such children…to write and read." Towns with 100
families or more were required to create a grammar school to

"instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the
university." These schools tended to emphasize the study of
classical languages, philosophy, and religion.
During the 18th century, many towns throughout the colonies
established academies—schools that tended to
stress vocational learning. In addition to acquiring basic skills
like reading, writing, and arithmetic, students could
take subjects tailored to specific jobs, such as accounting or
navigation. Academies and grammar schools were
more similar to today's private high schools than they were to
modern public schools. Students at most of these
institutions paid tuition fees to enroll, and educational
opportunities for children from poor families were therefore
limited after the elementary grades.
In 1783, the United States won its independence from Great
Britain. The U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788, made
no mention of education. The Tenth Amendment declared that
any powers not specifically delegated to the U.S.
government in the Constitution would be "reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people." By implication,
then, responsibility for schooling was left to state and local
governments.
In the early 1800s, schools continued to be governed by their
surrounding communities. Virtually all schools—
elementary and secondary alike—continued to charge tuition
fees, and parents could choose whether or not to
send their children to school.
In 1837, Massachusetts lawmaker Horace Mann became the
state’s education secretary, the first such position in
the country. Mann began to advocate for a system of free public
schools open to all children, regardless of
economic background. He believed that society would benefit if

every young person received a well-rounded
education. "If we do not prepare children to become good
citizens," Mann warned, "if we do not enrich their minds
with knowledge...then our republic must go down to
destruction."
As education secretary, Mann worked to develop a network of
“common schools,” or publicly funded schools open
to all children and staffed by professional teachers, across the
state. In 1852, Massachusetts passed a law
requiring all children between the ages of 8 and 14 to attend
school for at least 12 weeks every year. Over the
next several decades, more states would follow Massachusetts
in enacting compulsory attendance laws.
Additionally, state restrictions on child labor began to allow
more children to attend school.
The federal government introduced its first policies pertaining
to public education in the 1860s. As the Civil War
(1861–65) was coming to a close, Congress established the
Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency to assist freed
slaves. Prior to the war, no southern state had a public school
system open to all children, and one of the
Freedmen’s Bureau’s main goals was to build schools. The
philosophy behind the agency's education initiatives
would influence public policy long after the dissolution of the
Freedmen's Bureau in 1872. As education scholars
Adam Nelson and Elliot Weinbaum wrote in a report for the
New York State Archives in 2009:
The Freedmen's Bureau initiated three areas of federal aid to
education that would last into the
twentieth century: (1) offering federal aid to raise the

educational level of the most disadvantaged
members of society, (2) promoting economic (or "manpower")
development through the expansion
of access to learning, and (3) assimilating new citizens into
American society for purposes of
productive labor as well as social harmony.
In 1867, Congress created the U.S. Bureau of Education to
collect statistics about schools in order to help states
improve their education systems. Critics voiced concerns that
the new agency would usurp local control of schools,
and the following year Congress shrank the bureau and reduced
its power.
By 1890, school systems operated by local and state
governments—rather than those run by churches, charities,
or private institutions—enrolled the vast majority of students in
the United States. In the early 1900s, nearly all
children attended elementary school, though most dropped out
after eighth grade to work.
A massive wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries prompted a renewed focus on public
education as some reformers promoted increased vocational
training to prepare the children of immgrants for
specific jobs or professions. Partly in response to this push,
along with demands for greater industrial production
prompted by World War I (1914–18), Congress passed the
Smith-Hughes Act in 1917. The law directed federal
aid to agricultural and other vocational education. After the
war, the federal government allocated small grants for
educating and retraining disabled veterans.
Reformers also saw the need for secondary, or high school,
education to help students gain the knowledge and
skills necessary to find jobs in the evolving U.S. economy. In

1900, only 6 percent of Americans had graduated
from high school. By 1945, this figure had risen to more than 15
percent and would continue to rise throughout
the century. Today, almost 90 percent of Americans have high
school diplomas or high school equivalency
certificates.
After World War II (1939–45), the U.S. population surged and
millions of Americans moved to the suburbs,
straining the resources of local school districts. To help expand
schools or build new ones, many called for greater
federal funding for education. Others, however, warned that
such funding could lead to increased federal
involvement and the loss of local control. "Unless we are
careful," General Dwight Eisenhower said in 1949, four
years before he became president, "even the great and necessary
educational processes in our country will
become yet another vehicle by which the believers in
paternalism, if not outright socialism, will gain still additional
power for the central government."
Debates over educational policy grew in the postwar years,
when the world’s two superpowers—the capitalist and
democratic United States and the communist and authoritarian
Soviet Union—became embroiled in the Cold War,
a struggle for economic, military, and scientific supremacy that
would dominate geopolitics for the next half-
century. Cold War tensions fueled increased federal
involvement in education as many called for more rigorous
academic standards to help the country compete with the Soviet
Union. These criticisms grew in 1957, when the
Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to
orbit the Earth. Many viewed the failure of the
United States to reach outer space before its rival a national
embarrassment, and some blamed schools for not
adequately educating students. In 1958, Congress passed the

National Education Defense Act, directing federal
funding toward math, science, and foreign language programs in
higher education. The country’s "most
fundamental challenge lies in the field of education," Vice
President Richard Nixon (R) wrote in an essay that year.
"Our military and economic strength can be no greater than our
educational system."
Education Policy Shaped by Civil Rights Movement
As Cold War challenges spurred increased funding for
education, racial tensions also prompted greater federal
involvement. Throughout much of the nation’s early history,
schools in the South and many other parts of the
country were segregated by race (as were trains, restaurants,
bathrooms, and other public institutions). In the
1890s, a black man named Homer Plessy, who had been forced
to leave a "whites only" car on a train in New
Orleans, sued the state of Louisiana, arguing that segregation
violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which guarantees all people "equal protection of
the laws." In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected
this argument, ruling 7–1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation
was constitutional as long as facilities for each
race were equivalent. The case established a doctrine that came
to be known as "separate but equal."
In reality, however, these "separate" facilities were seldom
"equal." Black public schools during the era of
segregation rarely received the funding and resources that their
white counterparts did, and black children often
attended inferior and inadequate schools. Among the chief goals
of the burgeoning civil rights movement were to

end segregation and obtain equal rights for all Americans,
especially in the field of education.
The civil rights movement’s first major achievement came in
1954, when the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v.
Ferguson. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court ruled
unanimously that segregation in public schools
violated the Fourteenth Amendment. "We conclude that, in the
field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate
but equal' has no place," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the
Court's opinion. "Separate educational facilities
are inherently unequal."
Many political leaders in the South denounced the ruling,
framing their resistance to racial integration as a matter
of states' rights. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, for example,
declared in 1957 that he would not "force…people
to integrate against their will. I believe in the democratic
processes and principles of government wherein the
people determine the problems on a local level, which is their
right." In defiance of an order from a federal judge,
Governor Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to
block nine African-American students from enrolling
at an all-white high school in Little Rock. Later that month,
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R, 1953–61) sent
federal troops to enforce the judge’s order and protect the
students seeking to integrate the school.
Despite the Brown decision, students of minority descent
continued to struggle to obtain the same educational
opportunities as their white counterparts. In many parts of the
country, blacks and whites lived in separate
neighborhoods, and by the early 1960s, a decade after Brown,
the vast majority of black students still attended
all-black or nearly all-black schools. Discriminatory federal
housing policies had contributed to driving down

property values in neighborhoods where African Americans
lived and helped precipitate an exodus of white
families to the suburbs, where higher property values yielded
more revenue for schools. Some civil rights activists
called on the federal government to intervene to rectify
inequality in education, and efforts to increase federal
involvement in schools dovetailed with the struggle for racial
equality during the civil rights movement.
The federal government responded to these calls and expanded
its influence in public education during the
presidency of Lyndon Johnson (D, 1963–69). A former educator
who had taught at a segregated school for
Mexican Americans in the 1920s, President Johnson pushed for
greater educational opportunities for historically
marginalized students and used education reform as part of his
far-reaching "War on Poverty," a broad federal
initiative to improve American society and reduce income
inequality. Before Johnson's presidency, federal funding
constituted only a tiny percentage of local school budgets and
came mostly in the form of vocational education
grants, aid for school districts responsible for educating the
children of personnel on U.S. military bases, and other
small initiatives. Johnson promoted much more substantial
funding, frequently clashing in the process with
Republicans and southern Democrats who opposed federal
involvement in education.
In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a
landmark statute outlawing discrimination on the basis
of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, including in
schools. The following year, Congress passed the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the most

significant national education legislation in U.S.
history. The law, Johnson said during the signing ceremony,
represented "a major new commitment of the federal
government to quality and equality in the schooling that we
offer our young people."
Title I of the ESEA authorized the federal government to
provide grants to school districts to improve educational
opportunities for disadvantaged children. States were meant to
distribute the funding to schools and districts with
higher percentages of students from low-income families. The
funds, however, did not always reach the neediest
students. "State departments of education, notoriously weak and
often poorly staffed," historian William Reese
wrote in his 2005 book, America's Public Schools, "could not
easily monitor local spending."
Some argued that states should be able to decide on their own
how to allocate federal funds. In 1967,
Representative Albert Quie (R, Minnesota) proposed an
amendment to transform Title I funding into block
grants, which state authorities could allocate as they pleased.
Civil rights groups lobbied against the amendment,
warning that it would not guarantee that federal funding went to
the students most in need of it. Congress
rejected the amendment, though in ensuing decades
conservatives would increasingly promote block grants as a
way to transfer more power back to the states.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many continued to advocate
reforms that would create equal educational
opportunities for all. In 1966, African-American students in
Detroit went on strike to protest the city's inadequate
schools. Two years later, Mexican-American students in Texas
went on strike to demand bilingual education.
Congress responded to such demands in 1968 with the Bilingual

Education Act, which amended the ESEA to
allocate federal funds to educate students for whom English was
a second language. Calls for equal educational
opportunities for women, meanwhile, led to the passage of Title
IX in 1972, which forbade the federal government
from awarding federal grants to programs that discriminated on
the basis of gender.
The federal government used the Civil Rights Act and Title I
funds to pressure schools to integrate and improve.
By the 1970s, almost all schools in the United States had
officially been desegregated. De facto segregation
persisted, however, perpetuated by years of racial separation in
residential areas, living patterns that affected
school funding. As more affluent whites left urban areas, for
example, many inner cities lost business and
revenue, thus reducing money for schools. To keep whites from
moving out, some cities re-zoned school districts
to keep certain schools predominantly white. Such practices
prompted legal challenges, and a series of court
rulings required cities to adopt methods to integrate public
schools. One of the most controversial methods
became known as "busing"—assigning and transporting children
by bus to schools that might not be the closest to
them in the interest of promoting integration.
In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Swann v.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
that federal judges had the authority to impose remedies,
including busing, to overcome segregation. This ruling
led to a proliferation of busing orders. Controversies over
busing policies garnered national attention, with many
conservatives criticizing them for forcing students to travel long
distances simply to integrate schools. In 1972,
President Richard Nixon (R, 1969–74) referred to busing as "a
classic case of the remedy for one evil creating

another evil."
The practice of busing proved particularly controversial in
Detroit, Michigan, where the exodus of white and
middle-class residents to the suburbs had left mostly-black
schools struggling to function on a depleted tax base.
In 1972, in response to a lawsuit filed by the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), a federal judge ordered that busing be employed not
just within city limits, but between the city and
the suburbs. The order sparked a fierce backlash from suburban
parents, and challenges to the policy reached the
Supreme Court in 1974. In a 5–4 decision in Milliken v.
Bradley, the Court struck down Detroit's busing plan as
"wholly impermissible." State officials and suburban districts
were not responsible for segregation in the city,
Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, and desegregation under
Brown, he noted, did not require "any particular
racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'"
Critics of Milliken argued that state policies across the nation
had exacerbated the urban education crisis, and that
no meaningful desegregation could occur with policies that only
affected schools within city lines. "Our Nation, I
fear, will be ill-served by the Court's refusal to remedy separate
and unequal education," Justice Thurgood
Marshall wrote in a dissenting opinion, "for unless our children
begin to learn together, there is little hope that our
people will ever learn to live together."
Growing Federal Involvement Sparks Backlash, School Choice
Movement in Late 20th Century

Despite disputes over busing and desegregation, federal
education spending rose in the late 20th century. In
1974, Congress passed a series of amendments to the ESEA
increasing spending by 23 percent. The amendments
directed federal aid to "compensatory" initiatives for schools in
low-income areas, including funding for programs
to prevent students from dropping out of school, programs for
gifted children, and programs for non-English-
speaking students. The amendments also increased aid for
education for students with physical or mental
disabilities. In 1975, President Gerald Ford (R, 1974–77) signed
the Education for All Handicapped Children Act,
later known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
(IDEA). This law required public schools to ensure
that students with disabilities receive a "free and appropriate
education" and allocated federal assistance to help
schools cover special education costs.
While campaigning for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter (D,
1977–81) won the backing of various education
associations by promising to create a cabinet-level education
department. President Carter fulfilled this pledge in
1979 by signing the Department of Education Organization Act,
which established the U.S. Department of
Education. Previously, federal education officials had worked
under the auspices of the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare. "Instead of simulating needed debate of
educational issues, the Federal Government has
confused its role of junior partner in American education with
that of silent partner," President Carter said when
signing the law. "The time has passed when the Federal
Government can afford to give second-level, part-time
attention to its responsibilities in American education."
The flurry of legislation and initiatives designed to redress
inequality in education throughout the 1960s and

1970s prompted a conservative political backlash.
"Conservatives maintain that the harm to public education has
been so great that the attempt to integrate the nation's schools
has been a tragic failure," education scholar James
Anderson wrote in School: The Story of American Public
Education, in 2001. "From this viewpoint, the crusade
for equal educational opportunity is defined as a burden, a
social policy to force into schools preconceived notions
about racial and general equality at the expense of academic
excellence."
In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran against Carter for president,
denouncing excessive government intervention and
calling for the abolition of the recently created Education
Department. Reagan won easily, and although he never
eliminated the department, he did sign the Educational
Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) in 1981,
which significantly cut educational funding and reduced federal
oversight. "After decades of steadily expanding
federal aid to schools, the ECIA marked a sudden federal
retreat," Nelson and Weinbaum wrote in their 2009
report. "Unlike the original ESEA [passed in 1965], which
federal officials had used, in part, to promote civil rights
and desegregation, the ECIA pulled back from these priorities
and insisted that local officials were best suited to
solve 'local' problems."
Chapter 2 of the ECIA transformed some educational grants into
block grants, giving states more flexibility over
how they spent federal education funds. To determine how much
each state would receive under Chapter 2, the
law created a formula based on how many students were "high-
cost"—those needing English as a Second

Language courses, disability programs, or other initiatives.
States would then distribute the funds to whichever
districts they deemed appropriate. While supporters argued that
the new system gave state and local
governments more freedom in allocating federal money, critics
contended that states sometimes shortchanged
high-cost students and directed much of the money toward
wealthier, suburban school districts that had greater
political influence.
Other developments during the Reagan administration, however,
laid the groundwork for increased federal
involvement in education over the next several decades. In
1983, a presidential commission consisting of
educators, corporate leaders, and civil servants released "A
Nation at Risk," a report on the state of education in
the United States. American students, the report found, were
falling behind their international counterparts.
Citing declines in academic achievement and test scores, "A
Nation at Risk" stated that "more and more young
people emerge from high school ready neither for college nor
for work." As a consequence, the report concluded,
"The educational foundations of our society are presently being
eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that
threatens our very future as a Nation and a people."
The commission that published "A Nation at Risk"
recommended longer school days and academic years, higher
standards for graduation, and greater emphasis on computer
science. The report also called for increased testing
of students to measure skills and learning. "Standardized tests
of achievement should be administered at major
transition points from one level of schooling to another, and
particularly from high school to college," the report
suggested. "These tests should be administered as part of a
nationwide (but not federal) system of state and local

standardized tests."
Acknowledging the concerns raised by the report, President
Reagan urged reducing the federal role in education
and increasing the role of parents and communities. "[O]ur
educational system is in the grip of a crisis caused by
low standards, lack of purpose, ineffective use of resources, and
a failure to…strive for excellence," he said
following the report's release. "Our agenda is to restore quality
to education by increasing competition and by
strengthening parental choice and local control." In a speech
given two months after the report was published,
Reagan cited a litany of criticisms voiced by conservatives on
federal education policy over the past few decades:
[W]ith Federal aid came Federal control, the growing demand
for reports and detailed applications
for all the various categories of aid the Federal Government
eventually offered. Over the same
period, the schools were charged by the Federal courts with
leading in the correcting of long-
standing injustices in our society—racial segregation, sex
discrimination, lack of opportunity for the
handicapped. Perhaps there was simply too much to do in too
little time, even for the most
dedicated teachers and administrators. But there's no question
that somewhere along the line many
schools lost sight of their main purpose. Giving our students the
quality teaching they need and
deserve took a back seat to other objectives.
Despite the dire warnings given in “A Nation at Risk,”
President Reagan continued to emphasize a hands-off
approach to federal education policy. His vice president and
eventual successor, George H. W. Bush (R, 1989–93),
however, supported solutions that were more national in scope.

In 1989, President Bush, who vowed to be
remembered as the "education president," convened all 50
governors nationwide to discuss the state of education
in the United States. "There are real problems right now in our
educational system, but there is no one Federal
solution," he said at the conference. "The Federal Government,
of course, has a very important role to play."
Conference attendees set six goals for education in the United
States. These goals, laid out by President Bush
during his State of the Union address in January 1990, were that
every child be prepared to start school with the
basic skills they need to learn; that the high school graduation
rate reach 90 percent by 2000 (about 79 percent of
Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had graduated high
school at the time); that student performance be
assessed during the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades; that U.S.
students rank first internationally in math and
science by 2000; that every adult eventually be a "skilled,
literate worker and citizen"; and that every school be
drug-free and "offer the kind of disciplined environment that
makes it possible for our kids to learn."
To fulfill these goals, President Bush proposed America 2000, a
plan to create national guidelines for education
standards and institute voluntary national standardized testing
in English, math, science, history, and geography
for students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. America
2000 would also have required districts to submit
report cards for how schools were performing, as well as
provided federal grants for the creation of hundreds of
"New American Schools" to encourage them to experiment with
innovative ideas. Critics of America 2000,

however, argued that Bush's vision was vague, and claimed that
the president had not proposed increasing the
nation's education budget enough to adequately pursue it. In
1992, Democrats in the Senate defeated a bill that
would have enacted America 2000. "If President Bush wants to
be the education President, he has to do more
than talk about it," Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D,
Massachusetts) said of the bill. "We cannot expect to
compete in tomorrow's global economy when today's students
are already far behind those of other nations."
Many conservatives, meanwhile, had begun to endorse voucher
programs, an idea first advanced by economist
Milton Friedman in his 1955 essay, "The Role of Government in
Education." Allowing—and encouraging—parents
to choose which school to send their children to, Friedman
claimed, would force schools to improve as they
competed with each other for students. The government should
help fund schools, he wrote, but not run them. It
should do this by giving parents tuition vouchers to enable them
to enroll their children in any school, private or
public, sectarian or nonsectarian, that they pleased, as long as
the schools "met certain minimum standards." This
"free market" approach appealed to many conservatives and
would become a central issue in the education
reform debate in the late 20th and 21st centuries.
Supporters of the voucher system, often part of a broader
movement espousing "school choice," argue that
providing parents greater options benefits children from less
wealthy families. For most of American history, they
note, only families that could afford private schools were able
to choose which schools their children would attend.
Opponents, however, argue that voucher systems reduce money
for public schools, making it harder for them to
meet the needs of students and improve education.

The voucher argument has found supporters and opponents
across the political spectrum, including on both sides
of the debate over the U.S. government's role in education.
Some supporters of federal involvement, for example,
support the idea of federally instituted school choice programs,
while other supporters of federal involvement
argue that all public education funds should go to public
schools. Similarly, some skeptics of federal involvement
nevertheless call for creating federal incentives for states to
adopt school choice programs, while other critics
oppose the exertion of federal influence to affect states'
education policy.
In the 1990s, the voucher system began garnering greater
support from various constituencies, including some
African-American groups frustrated with the declining quality
of many urban public schools. In 1990, Wisconsin
became the first state to implement such a system, granting
hundreds of students from low-income families in
Milwaukee vouchers to attend private schools, as long as those
schools had no religious affiliation.
President Bush supported vouchers. In 1992, he proposed a
$500 million federal program to give tuition vouchers
worth $1,000 to low- and middle-income families to use at
private schools, including those with religious
affiliations. "For too long, we've shielded schools from
competition, [and] allowed our schools a damaging
monopoly power over our children," he said. "It is time we
began thinking of a system of public education in which
many providers offer a marketplace of opportunities…. A
revolution is under way in Milwaukee and across this
country, a revolution to make American schools the best in the
world." Supporters of Bush's proposal argued that

competition from private schools would force public schools to
improve.
Critics, however, argued that under the proposal private schools
would be able to accept public funds but, unlike
public schools, would not have to accept all students. This
would leave public schools with more challenging
student populations, they argued, and fewer funds with which to
educate them.
Opponents also argued that families should not be able to use
public funds to pay for religious schools. Directing
public education funds toward schools operated by religious
institutions, they maintained, violated the First
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that Congress
can "make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Others,
however, claimed that, because it is parents—not the
government—that would be making the decision to send their
children to attend religious schools, using vouchers
to fund such institutions is constitutional.
President Bush lost his 1992 reelection bid to Bill Clinton (D,
1993–2001), who as governor of Arkansas had
participated in Bush's national education conference in 1990. As
a candidate for president, Clinton had proposed
increasing federal education spending and establishing national
exam standards, and he had opposed Bush's
voucher plan. Allowing taxpayer money to be directed toward
private schools, Clinton argued, would deprive
public institutions of badly needed funding. "Now is not the
time to further diminish the financial resources of
schools when budgets are being slashed by states all across
America," Clinton said in 1992, and "when the federal

government has restricted its commitment to education."
After becoming president in 1993, Clinton promoted policies
that would increase federal funding to public schools.
In 1994, for example, he signed the Improving America's
Schools Act, which included federal support for a variety
of education-related initiatives, such as the Century Community
Learning Center Program, which provided
funding for after-school programs.
President Clinton also, however, endorsed some of his
predecessor's proposals. The Goals 2000: Educate America
Act, signed by Clinton in 1994, embraced the six education
goals laid out by President Bush, along with two more:
that teachers "have access to programs for the continued
improvement of their professional skills and the
opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to
instruct and prepare all American students for the next
century," and that all schools "promote partnerships that will
increase parental involvement and participation in
promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of
children."
Goals 2000 allocated $400 million to be awarded to states that
created initiatives to fulfill the plan's aims. "The
core of Goals 2000 was a grant program" that "recognized, and
supported, the systemic reform efforts that many
states had under way," Nelson and Weinbaum wrote. "Any state
that was basically adhering to the idea of
standards-based, systemic reform and had a planning process to
support that effort could get funding under Goals
2000."
To provide states a model for developing their own standards
under Goals 2000, the Clinton administration
appointed a council to develop national curriculum guidelines.

The guidelines created for math and science drew
support, but those proposed for history and social studies
proved controversial. In an effort to be more inclusive,
the guidelines recommended greater study of long-marginalized
groups and individuals. "We want [students] to
exercise their own judgment in reading conflicting views of any
piece of history and understand that there are
multiple perspectives on any particular historical era,
movement, event, for that matter," Gary Nash, a historian
who helped write the guidelines, stated during an appearance on
Good Morning America in 1994. "We want this
to be a democratic history, where it is a history for the people,
of the people, and by the people."
Critics, however, charged that the guidelines went overboard
and neglected to cover important figures and major
historical events. "Imagine an outline for the teaching of
American history in which George Washington makes
only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first
president," Lynne Cheney, former chairperson of
the National Endowment for the Humanities, wrote in the Wall
Street Journal in 1994. "Or in which the foundings
of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are
considered noteworthy events, but the first
gathering of the U.S. Congress is not." The guidelines, Cheney
concluded, painted a "grim and gloomy" portrait of
American history. Such criticisms reverberated across the
political spectrum. In 1995, the Senate voted 99–1 in
favor of a nonbinding resolution condemning the standards. The
council in charge of writing the standards
eventually revised the guidelines.
Despite the controversy, President Clinton continued to push

Goals 2000 and the use of standardized tests to
evaluate student performance. "Every state should adopt high
national standards," he said in his State of the
Union address in 1997. "Every state should test every fourth-
grader in reading and every eighth-grader in math
to make sure these standards are met." Later that year, President
Clinton urged Congress to pass legislation
establishing voluntary national tests in reading and mathematics
for fourth- and eighth-grade students. Fearing
that such tests would pave the way for federal involvement in
shaping school curricula, however, Republicans in
Congress defeated the proposal.
Despite President Clinton's opposition to vouchers, meanwhile,
experiments in school choice continued on the
state and local levels. In 1996, Cleveland, Ohio, became the
first city to allow parents to use vouchers to pay
tuition at religious schools. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled 5–4 in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that
Cleveland's plan was valid and did not violate the Constitution.
"The Ohio program is entirely neutral with respect
to religion," Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the
Court's majority opinion. "It provides benefits directly to
a wide spectrum of individuals, defined only by financial need
and residence in a particular school district. It
permits such individuals to exercise genuine choice among
options public and private, secular and religious."
As support for voucher programs was gaining momentum, some
began to advocate a new type of alternative
school—the charter school. In 1988, education professor Ray
Budde and American Federation of Teachers
president Albert Shanker separately proposed a plan in which a
group of educators and others could apply to their
local or state governments for charters to establish autonomous
schools that would experiment with new teaching

ideas. In exchange for meeting certain minimum standards,
these charter schools, if approved, would receive
public funds.
In 1991, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law allowing
charter schools. Over the next decade, more than
1,500 charter schools were founded nationwide. These schools
were run by various entities, including community
organizations and private businesses. Some were also run by
local jurisdictions themselves. Rather than be
assigned charter schools, students have to choose to attend
them, and many charters compete for students by
offering specialized programs in arts, science, or other areas.
Some emphasize certain subjects, like theater, while
others, founded by immigrant or ethnic groups, focus on
curricula geared to certain cultures, such as Greek or
Native American.
Charter schools gained broad support across the political
spectrum, and by 2010, about 1.5 million students were
enrolled in them nationwide. But they also came under
criticism. Some educators, including Shanker himself,
feared that private corporations would begin running them as
for-profit enterprises. This, they believed, could
lead companies to prioritize profits over providing a proper
education. Teachers' unions also opposed charter
schools because they tended to offer teachers fewer protections
and benefits. "Charter operators wanted to be
able to hire and fire teachers at will," historian Diane Ravitch
explained in School: The Story of American Public
Education in 2001, "to set their own salary schedule, to reward
teachers according to their performance, to
control working conditions, and to require long working hours."

As states were experimenting with vouchers and charter
schools, some reformers urged creating a national set of
educational standards—benchmarks, such as being able to pass
basic tests, that students must meet before
advancing to the next grade. While most schools have
educational standards of some kind, the development and
breadth of these standards have proven controversial. Some
argue that the standards should be under local or
state control, with each district in charge of its own methods of
testing students and measuring their achievement.
Others believe that uniform national standards are necessary to
prevent particular regions or districts from
developing inadequate standards and having students graduate
unprepared for college or a career. Whether the
standards are local or national in origin, many believe that
teachers and schools should be held accountable for
test results. If students perform poorly, they suggest, teachers
should be demoted or fired and schools closed or
taken over by the state. If they perform well, teachers should be
rewarded with higher pay. Critics point out,
however, that many factors contribute to student performance,
and to punish or reward teachers on such criteria,
they argue, is misguided and unfair.
No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top Reshape Federal
Involvement in
Education
In a departure from the conservative ethos that generally
favored local control in education, President George W.
Bush (R, 2001–09) made education reform one of his major
goals and embraced standardized testing as critical to
measuring and improving achievement. "Educational excellence
for all is a national issue and at this moment is a
presidential priority," he said during a press conference three
days after his inauguration in January 2001.

"Children must be tested every year in reading and math—every
single year. Not just in the third grade or the
eighth grade, but in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh
and eighth grade."
In January 2002, a year into his presidency, Bush signed the No
Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), marking a
significant expansion of federal influence in schools. Many at
the time heralded the law as a step forward for
education in the United States. "NCLB introduced a new
definition of school reform that was applauded by
Democrats and Republicans alike," Ravitch, who served as an
adviser to President Bush in drafting the law but
later opposed it, wrote in her 2010 book, The Death and Life of
the Great American School System. "In this new
era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-
stakes testing, data-driven decision making, choice,
charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and
competition among schools."
To ensure that no student was "left behind," or shuttled through
grades without learning what they should, NCLB
required each state to write its own education standards, but
refrained from offering national guidelines. The law
also mandated that states test all students in math and reading
from third to eighth grades and high school
students at least once. States were required to make the results
of these tests public and ensure that all students
were proficient in their standards by the 2013-14 school year. In
addition to this aim, states were to set adequate
annual progress goals for both schools and "disaggregated"
groups of students who had historically faced
challenges reaching proficiency, including low-income,
minority, and ESL students.
Under NCLB, schools faced penalties for failing to meet these

goals. A school that missed its annual target two
years in a row had to allow students to transfer to other schools
in the same district that were performing better,
and schools that missed targets three straight times would have
to offer free tutoring. Schools that continued to
miss their goals were subject to shutdown, state intervention,
transformation into charter schools, staff turnover,
and other penalties. States that did not comply with NCLB's
requirements also risked losing federal money under
Title I.
The effectiveness of NCLB's various enforcement measures
proved controversial. "[I]t's unclear that the…main
remedies for low-performing schools did much to improve
student achievement," Education Week reporter
Alyson Klein wrote in 2015. "In many cases, students did not
take advantage of the opportunity to transfer to
another school, or get free tutoring.… States also generally
shied away from employing dramatic school
turnaround strategies for perennially failing schools." Others
argued that NCLB was underfunded, leaving schools
without the necessary resources to meet the law's demands. By
2006, nearly 30 percent of schools were failing to
meet their annual progress goals, and the Education Department
was allowing some states to experiment with
alternatives that emphasized students' individual growth over
proficiency on standardized tests.
The most common criticisms of NCLB, however, targeted the
law’s reliance on standardized testing. Critics
argued that teachers ended up spending a disproportionate
amount of their time "teaching to the test," forcing
them to marginalize subjects like science, history, and the arts.

Some schools were so desperate to improve test
scores that teachers even falsified the results.
Many criticized the state-written education standards under
NCLB as too vague or unchallenging, and urged
replacing them with national ones. In 2008, the National
Governors Association and the Council of Chief State
School Officers, a group consisting of officials from each state's
education department, began developing a set of
standards that became known as Common Core.
As a candidate for president in 2008, Barack Obama (D, 2009–
17) called for increasing federal education
spending, arguing that standardized tests needed to be better
designed. "Let's finally help our teachers and
principals develop a curriculum and assessments that teach our
kids to become more than just good test-takers,"
he said in September 2008. "We need assessments that can
improve achievement by including the kinds of
research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our
children will need to compete in a 21st-century
knowledge economy." Shortly after Obama became president in
January 2009, Congress passed the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a huge stimulus package
intended to reinvigorate the economy. The law
provided some $90 billion for school districts to make repairs
and prevent teacher layoffs.
In July 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced
the launch of Race to the Top, a new educational
initiative. Under the plan, states would compete for a total of
$4.4 billion in federal aid by implementing school
reform plans within parameters set by the Education
Department. According to the Department's website, Race
to the Top promoted:

Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to
succeed in college and the workplace
and to compete in the global economy; Building data systems
that measure student growth and
success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can
improve instruction; Recruiting,
developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and
principals, especially where they are
needed most; and Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.
Race to the Top also encouraged states to allow charter schools.
"States that do not have public charter laws or
put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools will
jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top
Fund," Secretary Duncan said during a press conference. "To be
clear, this administration is not looking to open
unregulated and unaccountable schools. We want real autonomy
for charters combined with a rigorous
authorization process and high performance standards."
In 2010, the group of state officials that had been working to
develop education standards released Common
Core. Common core consisted of two sets of standards—one
covering mathematics and one establishing guidelines
for English language arts. Each set of standards contained
subsets designed for different age groups, increasing in
complexity and rigorousness for students in later grades. The
math standards, for example, attempted to instill in
students a deeper understanding of how numbers and equations
work by emphasizing the use of diagrams and
pictures to perform simple additions, subtractions,
multiplications, and divisions. The English standards
emphasized "informational" texts, requiring high school
students to be able to read and understand critical

documents in U.S. history, such as the Declaration of
Independence. While the standards were not mandatory,
many states adopted them because they met the Education
Department's requirements for funding under Race to
the Top.
The Common Core standards drew criticism across the political
spectrum. The math standards, for example,
introduced new, conceptual approaches to problem-solving
unfamiliar to many parents and teachers, provoking
widespread frustration. The standards were so detailed and in-
depth, some argued, that they constituted a
nationally imposed curriculum that deprived local school boards
and teachers of control over what to teach in the
classroom. Others argued that the standards had been developed
without enough consultation with parents and
educators. Several Republican-controlled states abandoned
Common Core in favor of their own standards, and in
2013 the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution
denouncing Common Core.
In 2011, as NCLB's goal of ensuring student proficiency by
2013–14 was nearing, Secretary Duncan warned that
the vast majority of schools would fail to meet the benchmark,
and he urged legislators to reform the law.
Congress could not agree on a new education bill, however, and
the Obama administration offered to waive the
2014 deadline for states that adopted certain policies advocated
by the Education Department. To obtain these
waivers, states were required to emphasize college and career
readiness in their standards, create processes for
evaluating teachers and holding them accountable for student
performance, and develop turnaround plans for the
bottom 15 percent of schools.

In December 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds
Act (ESSA), replacing NCLB and granting more
authority to states to devise their own plans for identifying and
fixing failing schools. Like NCLB, the ESSA
required states to develop standards and test students on them.
The ESSA, however, discarded NCLB's
proficiency targets, allowing states to set their own goals and
decide when and how to intervene in failing schools—
a significant departure from NCLB's punitive requirements for
schools that failed to meet adequate annual
progress goals. The ESSA maintained NCLB's testing
requirements but allowed schools to include non-academic
measures, like student engagement, in performance statistics
and deemphasize reading and math test scores. The
law also prohibited the education secretary from placing
requirements on states' academic standards, a move
seen as a rebuke to the Obama administration's use of Race to
the Top to pressure states to adopt Common Core.
The ESSA gained support from Republicans who wanted to roll
back federal involvement in state educational
policy. "It did not abolish the Department of Education (a long-
time Republican goal that went into hiding in the
1990s), but it did severely curtail its leverage with states and
districts," Arnold Shober, a professor of
government, wrote for the Brookings Institution in December
2015. "It did not create vouchers…but it allowed
states to experiment with alternate funding systems that might
look like public-school choice." Because it did not
eliminate federal influence over education, the law was seen as
a compromise, and won support from the Obama
administration, Democratic legislators, and several teachers'
union and education groups.
In November 2016, the Education Department finalized rules for
the enforcement of the ESSA. The measures

provided a regulatory framework for states to follow as they
developed and implemented their own standards.
"These regulations give states the opportunity to work with all
of their stakeholders, including parents and
educators, to protect all students' right to a high-quality
education that prepares them for college and careers,
including the most vulnerable students," Secretary of Education
John B. King Jr., Duncan’s successor, said when
the regulations were released. Republicans in Congress,
however, argued that the regulations violated the spirit
of the ESSA and flouted the law’s intended limits on federal
power. “Here we have a federal agency inserting
itself, making law,” Representative Todd Rokita (R, Indiana)
claimed in February 2017, “not just interpreting it,
but making law.”
President Trump Backs School Choice
During the presidential campaign in 2016, Republican candidate
Donald Trump emphasized school choice. "There
is no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our
government-run education monopoly," he said in a
speech in September 2016. "The Democratic Party has trapped
millions of African-American and Hispanic youth
in failing government schools that deny them the opportunity to
join the ladder of American success." He added:
I want every single inner city child in America who is today
trapped in a failing school to have the
freedom—the civil right—to attend the school of their choice.
This includes private schools,
traditional public schools, and charter schools which must be
included in any definition of school
choice.

A proposal on Trump's campaign website called for redirecting
$20 billion in federal education funds to "follow"
children from low-income families wherever they chose to
enroll, whether in public, private, or charter schools.
This $20 billion, some speculated, would consist of money cut
from Title I grants meant to go to schools with high
proportions of disadvantaged students. "Republicans have long
wanted to turn this program into a voucher,"
journalist Libby Nelson wrote in Vox in December 2016.
"Instead of money going to schools based on the
composition of their student body, Title I would 'follow the
child.' Every disadvantaged student a school enrolled
would come with a small pile of federal cash to help pay for his
or her education." Trump's proposal echoed those
of other advocates of free market competition among schools,
including President Reagan and 2012 Republican
presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and was sometimes referred
to as "Title I portability" or "follow the child"
education funding.
Supporters of portability programs argued that wealthy families
could already afford to enroll children in private
school when local public schools failed to meet their standards
and that providing choice to all families would allow
low-income families similar options. Critics of Trump's plan,
however, argued that it would deprive public schools
of much-needed funding while directing public funds to
religious private schools.
Many also pointed out that the plan relied on each state
allocating its own resources to "follow the child" funding
to complement federal grants. "Trump's plan calls for turning
education spending into a grant to states," Nelson
wrote, "and then using that money to encourage states to pass
voucher-friendly laws and kick in money of their

own." Critics of the proposal voiced skepticism that states
would allocate sufficient funding. Currently, only 13
states have voucher programs. Thirty-eight states, meanwhile,
have constitutional amendments prohibiting
public funding from going to religious schools, which could
complicate the implementation of a nationwide voucher
program. Some conservative critics of Trump's proposal, though
also advocates of school choice, objected in
principle to the strategy of using federal funding as an incentive
for states to change their education policies.
NCLB and Race to the Top, they argued, had demonstrated the
pitfalls of such federal pressure.
Trump has also expressed support for tax credit scholarship
programs. First implemented in Arizona in 1997 and
adopted by 16 other states over the next two decades, tax credit
scholarship programs allow individuals or
businesses to recieve tax breaks when they donate to funds that
award scholarships for students attending
private schools. Unlike voucher programs, which have faced
constitutional challenges for directing state funds to
religious schools, tax credit scholarship programs skirt such
problems. "In a scholarship tax credit program…the
money bypasses state coffers altogether," NPR journalist Anya
Kamenetz explained in March 2017. "In Florida,
corporations or individuals can get a generous, dollar-for-dollar
tax break by donating to a private, nonprofit
scholarship organization. The money from this fund is in turn
awarded to families to pay for tuition at private
schools."
In November 2016, shortly after winning the presidential
election, Trump released a plan for his first 100 days in

office. The plan included the School Choice and Education
Opportunity Act, which, the president-elect said, would
redirect "education dollars to give parents the right to send their
kid to the public, private, charter…religious or
home school of their choice." In addition, Trump asserted, the
plan would bring "education supervision to local
communities" and put an end to Common Core, which he had
frequently decried during the campaign. Because
Common Core was implemented on a state-by-state basis, the
standards would have to be repealed on the state-
level. The Trump administration could, however, potentially
apply federal pressure on states to discard the
standards the same way the Obama administration applied
pressure for their adoption.
In January 2017, President Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to be
secretary of education. Celebrated by some
conservatives as an outsider who would scale back federal
education policy, DeVos became the most controversial
nominee in the department's history. She had never directly
worked in or with public schools, but had served on
the boards of education reform groups that advocated school
choice. In her home state of Michigan, DeVos had
pushed for the expansion of charter schools in Detroit and
opposed regulations of charter schools. "President-elect
Trump and I know it won't be Washington, D.C., that unlocks
our nation's potential," she said during her Senate
confirmation hearings in January 2017. "The answer is local
control and listening to parents, students, and
teachers."
DeVos's unorthodox answers to some of the questions posed
during confirmation hearings drew considerable
media attention. In one contentious exchange, Senator Al
Franken (D, Minnesota) asked her for her position on
whether student success should be measured by proficiency

(mandating standards that all students must reach
before advancing through each grade, as NCLB did) or growth
(an educational philosophy in which each student is
measured on his or her own educational growth, based on
certain benchmarks, for each school year). "Around
proficiency," DeVos replied, "I would…correlate it to
competency and mastery, so that each student is measured
according to the advancement that they're making in each
subject area." "Well that's growth," Franken corrected.
"That's not proficiency." DeVos requested further clarification
of the question. "I'm talking about the debate
between proficiency and growth," Franken said. "This is a
subject that has been debated in the education
community for years…. It surprises me that you don't know this
issue."
DeVos was also asked about her views on federal enforcement
of rules intended to help children with disabilities.
Senator Tim Kaine (D, Virginia) asked her whether all schools
that receive taxpayer funding—which, as a result of
vouchers, includes some private schools—should be required to
follow the mandates of the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act. DeVos replied that it was "an issue
best left to the states," implying that state
governments could ignore federal law. When Senator Maggie
Hassan (D, New Hampshire) asked her a similar
question, DeVos stated that she "will be very sensitive to the
needs of special needs students and the policies
surrounding that."
In February 2017, the Senate confirmed DeVos by a 51–50 vote
after Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-
breaking vote in her favor. It marked the first time a vice
president had to do so to confirm a cabinet nominee. A
few weeks later, Congress passed a bill preventing the federal
government from, according to US News & World

Report, "dictating prescriptive requirements for how states and
school districts measure achievement." The law,
signed by President Trump in March, effectively nullified the
Obama administration's regulations for
implementing the ESSA. On March 12, the Education
Department issued shorter, less stringent requirements for
states' implementation of the ESSA. "My philosophy is simple,"
DeVos said in a statement accompanying the
release of the rules. "I trust parents, I trust teachers, and I trust
local school leaders to do what's right for the
children they serve."
President Trump's proposal for the federal budget, meanwhile,
also released in March, called for cutting
Education Department spending by 13.6 percent, or about $9
billion, while allocating $20 billion to "investments
in public and private school choice." The budget proposal also
called for reducing professional development
programs for teachers, eliminating the Century Community
Learning Center Program, which directed $1 billion to
after-school initiatives, and cutting $193 million from various
programs seeking to prepare students from low-
income families, first-generation immigrant families, and those
with disabilities for college.
Supporters Argue: Federal Involvement in Education Helps
Students
Supporters of greater federal involvement in education argue
that the United States should increase education
funding. Such funding, they assert, is crucial to providing a
quality education for all children. "[W]e only
spend around 2 percent of our federal budget on education each

year," Tim King, founder of the charter school
chain Urban Prep Academies, wrote in the New York Times in
November 2015. "When we invest in education,
and do so in an equal way, we are investing in something
greater than one subdivision or our side of town; we're
investing in a fairer, freer and more functional future."
When states are left to distribute education funding themselves
without proper federal regulations, supporters
contend, poorer communities tend to receive less money.
"[M]any states spend less in school districts that serve
low-income students…who need more support to succeed,"
Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at
Stanford University, wrote in the New York Times in November
2015. "While some students attend spacious,
well-outfitted schools with extensive libraries, science labs,
computers and small classes, others attend crumbling,
overcrowded buildings where they lack access to basic
textbooks and trained teachers."
Too often, proponents of federal involvement insist, advocates
of local control over education are merely trying to
protect richer school districts from having to share resources
that could help poorer districts. "Over the years, in
many communities, wealthier citizens and government policies
have managed to consign low-income students to
something akin to a lower caste," educational psychologist
David Berliner wrote on the blog Equality Alliance in
March 2017. "The wealthy have cordoned off their wealth. They
hide behind school district boundaries that they
often draw themselves, and when they do so, they proudly use a
phrase we all applaud, 'local control!'"
The de-emphasis on federal involvement in the Every Student
Succeeds Act (ESSA), supporters maintain,
jeopardizes students living in disadvantaged and under-

resourced areas. "The lesson of the civil rights
movement…is that the federal government is the defender of
vulnerable children," Liz King, director of education
policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human
Rights, told the New York Times in December 2015,
"and we are worried that with new state and local authority,
vulnerable children are going to be at risk."
Federal involvement, proponents contend, is the only way to
ensure that all students across the United States
receive adequate education. "The real question is what authority
is left to the federal government to intervene
should the states in one way or another fall short of what the
hopes are?" David Steiner, executive director of the
Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, asked the New
York Times in December 2015 after the passage of
the ESSA. "We all are concerned that we not go to a place
where based on where you happen to be born or which
state you're in, you face very, very increasingly different
opportunities."
It is foolish and unwise, supporters of federal involvement
argue, to shape education policy on the belief that
schools can be operated like private companies and forced to
improve through free market competition. Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos's "characterization of public education
as an 'industry' is a core tenet of corporate school
reformers," Valerie Strauss wrote in the Washington Post in
January 2017. "Public school advocates see
America's public education system as a civic institution—the
country's most important—that can't be run like a
business without ensuring that some children will be winners
and others will be losers, just like in business."
Redirecting federal money from public to non-public schools
through portability programs, proponents charge,

will only weaken the public school system and impede it from
fulfilling its mission to give students a quality
education. "[T]he Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos scheme to
take taxpayer dollars from public schools to fund
private school vouchers is misguided and would harm our
students," Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the
teachers' union the National Education Association, wrote in
March 2017. "Vouchers do not work, they undermine
accountability to parents and taxpayers, and they have failed to
provide opportunity to all of our students."
Supporters insist that the U.S. government must ensure that all
students receive an equal education. The
promotion of voucher programs, they argue, has caused some
students to lose federal protections that often do
not cover private schools. Students with disabilities, supporters
contend, often attend private schools without
realizing that such schools are exempt from the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act, which requires public
schools to accommodate their needs. "[D]istricts are not
obligated to provide [children with disabilities] with the
same services they would receive in a public setting—even if a
child’s private school tuition is taxpayer funded
through a voucher," New York Times contributor Dana
Goldstein wrote in April 2017. "[T]here is no guarantee
that students will receive the same level of disability services in
private schools that they were entitled to in
public school, a limitation that parents may not fully
understand."
The education budget proposed by President Trump and
endorsed by Secretary DeVos, supporters of greater
federal involvement argue, would gut the public school system

and deprive children of vital services. "[T]he
Trump-DeVos budget would take an ax to important education
programs for students, including eliminating after
-school programs, and other student enrichment programs,"
Garcia explained. "In real life, these cuts mean
students are robbed of the tools and supports they need to get
ahead."
President Trump’s plan to slash spending for education,
advocates of greater federal involvement contend, will
primarily affect students in poor communities—those who need
assistance most. "[A]bandoning teacher support
and development programs, and an ill-advised…scheme to
divert resources from our highest need schools would
move our country backward," John King, CEO of the nonprofit
Education Trust, wrote in March 2017. "They
would hurt…the very schools responsible for educating our
nation's most vulnerable students. If this proposal
were enacted, all students, particularly students of color and
low-income students, throughout the entire
continuum of our education system would suffer."
Opponents Argue: Federal Involvement in Education Hurts
Students
Opponents of greater federal involvement in education argue
that it hurts students and that the United States
should not increase its funding and regulation of public schools.
Spending taxpayer dollars on public schools, they
contend, is unlikely to improve educational achievement in the
United States. "Real per pupil spending has more
than doubled in the past 40 years, but the mathematics and
reading scores of 17-year-olds have barely budged,"
Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank
the Hoover Institution, wrote in the New York
Times in March 2015. "We must recognize that more of the

same is unlikely to yield better results—and by
implication reform through spending is not the way to
improvement."
The delegates who drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1787, critics
of federal intervention argue, did not intend for
the federal government to play a role in schooling. "[I]t is a
very significant fact that you can read the Constitution
all day long and not find the word 'education' in there," Larry
Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, which does not
accept federal funding, told Breitbart News in December 2016.
"[T]hey did not include it in the Constitution. And
that's the reason the federal government doesn't have direct
power to just pass a law and tell everybody the
things they have to study."
The federal government has long burdened schools with
unnecessary regulations, opponents assert, and the time
has come to decrease its involvement in the nation’s education
system. "The Trump Administration has the
opportunity to…dramatically reduce the intervention of the
federal Department of Education into local schools,"
Lindsey Burke of the conservative think tank the Heritage
Foundation wrote in December 2016. "The
Department has been wholly ineffective at improving
educational outcomes for students, loading states and local
school leaders with a bureaucratic burden that saps time and
financial resources."
The failure of the No Child Left Behind Act, critics argue,
demonstrated the pitfalls of the federal government
setting policy for local schools. "The old approach to education
where classrooms are micromanaged by the U.S.

Department of Education in Washington is going to be replaced
with a new approach that will help ensure every
child in every school receives an excellent education,"
Representative John Kline (R, Minnesota) wrote in 2015
following the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act
(ESSA). "No Child Left Behind was based on good
intentions, but it was also based on the flawed premise that
Washington knows best what students need to excel
in school."
New educational approaches and effective reforms, opponents
insist, work best when conceived and implemented
locally. The ESSA provides "a real opportunity to make sure
we're capturing the things that are important,
whether it's grit and persistence or school culture or parent
engagement, and the only way to do that is to give
power back to the states," Andy Smarick, a partner at the
nonprofit education consulting group Bellwether
Education Partners, told the New York Times in December
2015. "You cannot centrally manage an innovative,
creative accountability system from Washington, D.C."
The federal government, critics maintain, should allow
education reforms to continue on the local level without
interference. "While activists and lobbyists in Washington,
D.C., wrangle over the federal education bureaucracy,
much of the important action on school choice has been taking
place in state capitals," Jonathan Butcher,
education policy director of the states’ rights organization the
Goldwater Institute, and the Heritage Foundation’s
Lindsey Burke wrote in National Review in March 2017. "[A]ny
new federal program…would run the risk of
regulating private schools and complicating existing state-based
learning options. The proper role for federal
policymakers is to empower states to lead."

President Trump should downscale the Department of
Education, opponents contend, and get the federal
government to relax its control of the nation’s schools. As
Burke and Anne Ryland, a research assistant for
education at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in February 2017:
The new Administration, along with Congress, should…advance
policies…that would move the
decision-making needle back toward the state and local levels
and to those closest to the students—
their parents—while easing the regulatory burdens currently
hampering school systems, freeing
schools and teachers to return their focus to educating children.
Opponents of federal regulations argue that current protections
for students with disabilities, which exempt
private schools, are adequate. Students who use vouchers to
attend private schools, National Review contributor
Marcus Winters wrote in April 2017, "don't give up their rights
under [the Individuals with Disabilities Education
Act] in perpetuity. They can always go back into the public
school system and have those rights reinstated. Those
who stay in private schools do so presumably because they
prefer the services those schools offer."
Regulations on education infringe on people’s rights, some
libertarian critics contend, and give government
officials excessive power over school policy. Such regulations
"restrict the freedom of parents to make judgments
about the best educational programs for their children," former
representative Ron Paul (R, Texas) wrote in his
book The School Revolution.
Bureaucrats make the rules, and force them on children under
the jurisdiction of their parents. This
assumes that bureaucrats, who seek to feather their own nests,

possess wisdom regarding the
education of children whom they have never seen. More than
this, politicians assume that these
bureaucrats have better insight into what is good for children in
general than parents have for their
particular children.
Federal Government Takes Step Back on Education
Despite the uproar over Betsy DeVos's confirmation as
secretary of education in early 2017, the policies she
implements may receive less attention than other issues. "[T]he
changes DeVos will have power to make
immediately as education secretary are likely to fly under the
radar," journalist Libby Nelson wrote in Vox in
February 2017. "Once the spotlight moves…she can change
education in America merely by doing less than her
predecessors."
President Trump's proposed $9 billion cut to the federal
education budget will probably face a fight in Congress,
and budgets proposed by presidents rarely pass as suggested.
Nevertheless, few experts predict that federal
involvement in education will expand under the Trump
administration. "With this Republican-led trend in rolling
back federal education authority not likely to reverse any time
soon," Molly Reynolds and Elizabeth Mann, fellows
at the Brookings Institution, wrote in February 2017, "it seems
unlikely that either chamber [of Congress] will
embrace a sweeping federal law that mandates state-level policy
change." How the federal government might
promote school choice or other education reform initiatives
remains to be seen.

Bibliography
Bauer, Lauren, and Elizabeth Mann. "Repealing ESSA Rule
Raises Implementation, Transparency Concerns."
Brookings Institution, February 16, 2017, www.brookings.edu.
Bedrick, Jason. "What Trump's First 100 Days Might Mean for
Education Policy." CATO Institute, November 10,
2016, www.cato.org.
Burke, Lindsey. "Reducing Federal Intervention in Education
and Moving Toward Student-Centered Policies: 10
Steps for the Incoming Administration." Heritage Foundation,
December 19, 2016, www.heritage.org.
Carey, Kevin. "Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as
DeVos Era Begins." New York Times, February
23, 2017, www.nytimes.com.
Deruy, Emily. "Donald Trump and the Future of Education."
Atlantic, November 9, 2016, www.theatlantic.com.
Hanushek, Eric. "Not Enough Value to Justify More of the
Same." New York Times, March 26, 2015,
www.nytimes.com.
Huetteman, Emmarie, and Motoko Rich. "House Restores Local
Education Control in Revising No Child Left
Behind." New York Times, December 2, 2015,
www.nytimes.com.
Jefferson-Jenkins, Carolyn, and Margaret Hawkins Hill. "Role
of Federal Government in Public Education:
Historical Perspectives." League of Women Voters, 2011,
lwv.org.

Kamenetz, Anya. "Betsy DeVos Confirmed as Education
Secretary." National Public Radio, February 7, 2017,
www.npr.org.
———. "'Tax Credit Scholarships,' Praised by Trump, Turn
Profits for Some Donors." National Public Radio,
March 7, 2017, www.npr.org.
King, Tim. "To Improve Education, Fund Each Student
Equally." New York Times, November 6, 2015,
www.nytimes.com.
Klein, Alyson. "No Child Left Behind: An Overview."
Education Week, April 10, 2015, www.edweek.org.
———, and Andrew Ujifusa. "Trump Budget Would Make
Massive Cuts to Ed. Dept., but Boost School Choice."
Education Week, March 16, 2017, www.edweek.org.
Nelson, Adam, and Elliot Weinbaum. "Federal Education Policy
and the States, 1945–2009: A Brief Synopsis."
States' Impact on Federal Education Policy Project, November
2009, www.nysed.gov.
Nelson, Libby. "Betsy DeVos Can Change Education in America
Without Doing a Thing." Vox, February 7, 2017,
www.vox.com.
———. "Donald Trump's Huge, Ambitious School Voucher
Plan, Explained." Vox, December 2, 2016,
www.vox.com.
Peterson, Paul. "Trump's Education Pick: A Win for Public-

School Parents." Wall Street Journal, December 12,
2016, www.wsj.com.
Reynolds, Molly, and Elizabeth Mann. "Rifts Among
Congressional, State Republicans Over School Choice."
Brookings Institution, February 21, 2017, www.brookings.edu.
Ryland, Anne, and Lindsey Burke. "School Rules: Lessons from
the ESSA Regulatory Process." Heritage
Foundation, February 1, 2017, www.heritage.org.
Severns, Maggie. "House Passes No Child Left Behind
Rewrite." Politico, December 2, 2015, www.politico.com.
Shober, Arnold. "ESEA Reauthorization Continues a Long
Federal Retreat from American Classrooms." Brookings
Institution, December 8, 2015, www.brookings.edu.
Strauss, Valerie. "Trump Opposes Federal Involvement in
Education. But Do His Plans Ensure a 'Race to the
Bank'?" Washington Post, November 20, 2016,
www.washingtonpost.com.
———. "What the Numbers Really Tell Us About America's
Public Schools." Washington Post, March 6, 2017,
www.washingtonpost.com.
Winters, Marcus. "In Florida, School Performance Has Risen
with Vouchers for Disabled Students." National
Review, April 24, 2017, www.nationalreview.com.
Zelizer, Julian. "How Education Policy Went Astray." Atlantic,
April 10, 2015, www.theatlantic.com.
Additional Sources

Additional information about federal education policy can be
found in the following sources:
Mondale, Sarah, and Sarah Patton, eds. School: The Story of
American Public Education. Boston, Mass.: Beacon
Press, 2001.
Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American
School System: How Testing and Choice Are
Undermining Education, 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Reese, William. America's Public Schools: From the Common
School to “No Child Left Behind.” Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. Creative Schools: The
Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education.
New York: Penguin Books, 2016.
Russakoff, Dale. The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's
Schools? Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2015.
Contact Information
Information on how to contact organizations that are either
mentioned in the discussion of federal education
policy or can provide additional information on the subject is
listed below:
CATO Institute
1000 Massachusetts Ave. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001-5403
Telephone: (202) 842-0200

Internet: www.cato.org
Center for Education Policy
The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002
Telephone: (202) 546-4400
Internet: www.heritage.org
Florida Education Association
213 South Adams St.
Tallahassee, Fla. 32301
Telephone: (850) 201-2800
Internet: feaweb.org
Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy
2800 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, Md. 21218
Internet: edpolicy.education.jhu.edu
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
1620 L Street N.W.
Suite 1100
Telephone: (202) 466-3311
Internet: www.civilrights.org
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Ave. S.W.
Telephone: (800) 872-5327
Internet: www.ed.gov

For further information about the ongoing debate over federal
education policy, search for the following words
and terms in electronic databases and other publications:
Betsy DeVos
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
Race to the Top
School choice
School vouchers
Standardized testing
Tax credit scholarships
Title I funding
Citation Information
" N a t i o n a l D e b a t e T o p i c : E d u c a t i o n : R e s o
l v e d : T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s f e d e r a l g o v e r n m
e n t s h o u l d s u b s t a n t i a l l y i n c r e a s e i t s f u n
d i n g a n d / o r
r e g u l a t i o n o f e l e m e n t a r y a n d / o r s e c o n d a
r y e d u c a t i o n i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s . " Issues &
Controversies, I n f o b a s e L e a r n i n g , 1 3 J u l y 2 0 1
7 ,
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d u r l . a s p x ? I D = 1 6 6 2 1 . A c c e s s e d 2 1 J u l y 2
0 1 7 .
Copyright © 2017 Infobase Learning. All Rights Reserved.
This Is Not America. Why Wal-Mart left Germany in 2006?
Walmart can boast that it has more than 8,500 stores in 15
countries, under 55 different names, that it's the largest private
employer in the United States, the largest in Mexico (as
Walmex), and the third largest in Canada. In fact, it's the

biggest private employer in the whole world. It has 108 stores
in China alone, and operates another 100 Chinese outlets under
the name of Trust-Mart.
Still, for all of Walmart's conspicuous success, the retailing
giant, after having set up shop in Germany in 1997, was forced
to withdraw from the country in 2006, abandoning Germany's
lucrative $370 billion retail market. Even though this happened
five years ago, the German debacle still reverberates. It's still
being discussed. After all, as anyone who's been paying
attention can tell you, Walmart rarely fails in these endeavors.
Because America and Europe share similar cultural and political
antecedents, one might naturally assume that an American
enterprise would have a better chance of succeeding in Europe
than in Asia. But the German smackdown proved that's not
always the case. Indeed, while the nominal Communist regime
of the People's Republic of China embraced Walmart's corporate
philosophy, the Germans rejected it.
After nine years of trying to make a go of it, Wal-Mart sold its
85 stores to German rival Metro in 2006. Wal-Mart paid dearly
for its about-face. The company took a $1 billion hit to quit the
market, while Metro paid as much as $100 million less for the
Wal-Mart stores than the value of the real estate, unsold
merchandise, and other physical assets.
When Wal-Mart decided to expand in 1996, its managers saw
Germany as a promising market. Europe's largest market is
home to 82 million - far more than in England, France and Italy
which each have a population of 60 million. Germany enjoys a
healthy pro capita income, so consumer spending is robust. The
country has good transport infrastructure, which is good when
stocks need to be replenished. Given these excellent conditions,
Wal-Mart must have thought success was guaranteed.
It wasn't to be. Its German venture ended disastrously, with the
retreat costing the company $1 billion.
Just why did Wal-Mart Germany end so badly in Germany? The
answer is simple but banal, and can be encapsulated by a line
once sung by David Bowie: "This is not America."

Management's mistake was to implement a successful U.S.
business formula in Germany without paying any attention to
local idiosyncrasies.
"The problem was the company's business philosophy, which
had always worked so well," wrote Frankfurt's Börsenzeitung in
what pretty much amounted to an obituary. "It's people-centered
- but that doesn't actually work when the people aren't
American."
The problems added up. The company gave the job of
masterminding Wal-Mart Germany to an American who didn't
speak a word of German. This should surely have been
indispensable to finding out what the German salespersons
would need to know about local shopping habits.
Another problem was that Wal-Mart initially bought up a chain
of 21 stores, then another 74, which included sites previous
owners had failed to make profitable.
The authorities also kept a close eye on Wal-Mart. Anti-trust
lawyers banned its practice of luring consumers with price-
dumping, while Germany's stringent laws governing opening
hours meant stores couldn't stay open too long. German labor
law prevented the easy-come, easy-go hiring and firing common
in the U.S., and the unions and the public alike were outraged
by what Germans saw as an absurd ban on flirting in the
workplace. All in all, Wal-Mart operated what the newspaper
Handelsblatt described as a "bizarre company culture."
The retreat was hardly surprising given Wal-Mart's numerous
missteps in Germany. Perhaps its most glaring was misjudging
the German consumer and business culture. For instance,
German Wal-Marts adopted the U.S. custom of bagging
groceries, which many German consumers find distasteful
because they tend not to like strangers handling their food.
Germans also feared they would have to pay extra for the
service, forcing Wal-Mart to re-assign its bag-packers.
Though no one can say precisely why the venture failed, there's
been no shortage of explanations. One is that Germany was too
"green" for a slash-and-burn outfit like Walmart, with its plastic

bags and plastic junk. Another is that Walmart couldn't hack the
pro-labor union culture of Germany. The company encountered
difficulties in dealing with the union leadership at its German
stores. Another is that Germany is anti-American when it
comes to name-brand retailers (even though Dunkin' Donuts and
Starbucks are popular there). Another is that German consumers
prefer small neighborhood stores rather than impersonal chain
(even though Aldi, a discount supermarket chain, is successful).
Another fatal flaw was that Germany's retail market is already
saturated with discounters such as Aldi and Lidl, meaning that
any new arrival inevitably finds itself in the midst of a cutthroat
price war. Germany has the cheapest groceries in Europe.
Moreover, real incomes have barely grown in recent years,
which has dampened consumer spending. Retailers are vying for
customers by cutting back profit margins. In the foods sector,
the yield returns in Germany are less than 2 percent, often even
only at 1.5 percent. Against this backdrop, presenting German
consumers with unfamiliar U.S. brands was doomed to failure.
With just 95 outlets, Wal-Mart also remained too small.
Originally, it had wanted to build 50 superstores as quickly as
possible, but while Germany has one-third of the population of
the U.S., it doesn't have one-third of its surface area. It is only
about as big as Oregon - and consequently, every square foot is
either developed, or about to be. German planning law therefore
has a lot of obstacles when someone wants to construct stores
on the Wal-Mart scale. So instead of increasing its number of
stores, Wal-Mart actually had to close a few down - some of
which were taken over by Wal-Mart's rivals once its leases ran
out.
But the full extent of Germany's strategic retaliation against
Wal-Mart only became clear when the local competition -
primarily the Metro Group - snatched a number of chains up for
sale from under Wal-Mart's nose. The bottom line: the American
company had to abandon its expansion plans.
Paradoxically, the U.S. giant ended up terminally dwarfed in

Germany. Experts estimated that a turnover of ?8 billion ($10
billion) would have been needed to reduce each store's logistics
costs to a sensible size, but Wal-Mart barely managed to scrape
together a turnover of ?2 billion ($2.5 billion), a result expected
to get even worse. One consequence was less competitive prices
than those of their rivals.
These weren't management's only mistakes. Germany is a
country that loves stability, even on the executive floor. Chaotic
leadership and frequent personnel changes make a frivolous
impression and suggest company problems. "American
management methods are often primitive," said Aldi's former
CEO Dieter Brandes in the weekly magazine Stern. "It's all
about budgets, not customers. When the figures look bad, no
one looks for the roots of the problem; they just replace the
CEO."
And soon enough, Wal-Mart did indeed replace its CEO in
Germany - with a Brit. Unfortunately, cultural differences
between Britain and Germany are even greater than those
between the U.S. and Germany. Based as he was in England, he
too failed to grasp what makes German consumers tick, and
after a few months at the helm, he too had to go. The German
who took over had plenty of experience with kiosks and gas
stations, but not with superstores.
Wal-Mart's German failure could be summed up by a German
proverb - translated, it means: "A nightmarish end is better than
a nightmare that doesn't end."
OUTNUMBERED. It also imported its U.S.-style company
ethic, which includes strongly discouraging interoffice
romances. Many employees found the code intrusive. The
company also had repeated clashes with unions. "Wal-Mart was
not very humble when they went in," says Bryan Roberts, an
analyst at Planet Retail, an industry research firm. "They
wanted to impose their own culture."
Just as important was Wal-Mart's apparent underestimation of
the competition and its miscalculation of the market. Wal-Mart
may be the king of low prices in the U.S., but it was often

undercut in Germany by local rivals such as Aldi and Lidl. One
reason for that may have been that Wal-Mart never had enough
stores in Germany to effectively compete. Aldi has some 4,000
stores, giving it a big advantage in logistics and advertising.
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Wal-Mart tried to respond with low prices coupled with more
US-style customer service. Used to the most basic of shops,
German shoppers shied away, fearing the US company would
have to cover extra personnel costs by charging higher prices.
At least six other chains were driven out of Germany by slow
sales and low margins in early 2000s. Gap Inc., Laura Ashley
Holdings Plc, Marks & Spencer Group Plc, HMV Group Plc,
Kingfisher Plc and Gruppo Coin SpA all had to fled.
The foreign companies found growth elusive in an economy that
barely expanded during the 2000s. Growth of the retail market,
worth about 390 billion euros ($496 billion), was no more than
1 percent, held back by near-record unemployment and stagnant
wages. One analyst stated, ``German consumers are really
watching their money…The market is all about hard
discounters.''
As well as facing stiff competition from Metro and another
German rival, Aldi, Wal-Mart has been challenged by weak
consumer spending and a rigid labor market.
“Continental European systems are the polar opposite to those
Wal-Mart is used to,” said Maurizio Zollo, an M&A specialist at
French-based business school Insead. “The company’s strategic
formula is based on a very powerful logistics machine, but also
on huge intention to cut workforce and employment costs. The
problem is that the formula works very well in certain contexts,
but it needs to be adapted very strongly in places like Germany
and France.”

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