News Release

April 26, 2001

Bush education standards won't fix U.S. schools, study says
Parents, not government, are the key to true accountability

WASHINGTON-As the Senate begins debate this week on President Bush's education plan, a new Cato Institute study charges that the plan "is merely another in a long line of government promises to fix the education system-promises that have never been kept despite all good intentions."

"Increasing the Department of Education's budget and using federal money to force states to come up with yet another set of standards and tests are not going to improve the schools," says Sheldon Richman in "Parent Power: Why National Standards Won't Improve Education." "In the end," Richman says, "Bush's plan would impose another layer of bureaucracy on an already overbureaucratized system."/

Richman says President Bush has "unveiled a plan for federal activism in education that rivals anything proposed by his Democratic predecessors." The president's rhetoric emphasizing local control and flexibility is contradicted by his insistence that the Department of Education look over the state's shoulders to guard against tests that are too easy. The end result: a de facto federal curriculum.

Not that this is anything new, says Richman, author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families. "Whether it was called 'back to basics' or 'outcome-based education,' for roughly 150 years government has delivered a school system with a de facto national curriculum," he says. The difference is that the Bush plan constitutes a "more deliberate step" toward central education planning.

And to what end? After all, Richman says, research by Richard M. Wolf of Columbia University has found that many countries finishing ahead of the United States on international math and science exams lack national standards. "Accountability is indeed important," Richman says. "But accountability to whom? Bush says the state should be accountable to the federal government. But that is just the sort of artificial accountability that has brought education to its current unsatisfactory condition."

Real education accountability will only occur when parents are put in charge, says Richman. Under what he calls the "debureaucratization" of education, parents and entrepreneurs would work together in a competitive marketplace to provide the best education for children. "Only that system would free the entrepreneurship necessary for discovering the best ways to educate," he says. "Only that system would free parents to act in the best interest of their children."

"Parent Power: Why National Standards Won't Improve Education"

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