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Presidents and Educational Reform

The principal domestic task of the president of the United States is stated in Article II, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which calls on him or her to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. In other words, the Constitution provides almost no explicit role for the president in the policymaking process. The president's job, as stated, is to carry out the will of the legislature and enforce the decisions of the courts.

Over the course of 2 centuries, the role of the president has gradually changed. Today, the American people expect their chief executive to come into office with a full-blown set of policy objectives and positions regarding virtually every major facet of American life. Despite a complicated history, education policy is no different. For better or worse, educational reform has become a national priority and, as such, a serious presidential concern. This entry explores the history and nature of the relationship between the American presidency, the presidents themselves, and educational policy and reform.

Education and the U.S. Constitution

The U.S. Constitution is federal by design. What this means in practice is that we have a complicated political system of separate and yet overlapping and competing sovereign political entities in the form of the federal government and the governments of particular states and locales. Questions of jurisdiction, competency, and prerogative among the various governmental levels have been painstakingly worked out in the courts and even on the battlefield over the course of the nation's more than 220-year history. In the area of education, the long-standing consensus was that states and local governments were the appropriate and prevailing authorities. This view was buttressed constitutionally by the Tenth Amendment, which says that all powers not delegated to the national government nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states or the American people themselves. Because the Constitution is silent on the question of education, control over it defaults automatically to the states. Many states, in turn, delegated by law or neglect much of their authority regarding education to either local governments or even families themselves in the early years of the republic.

As part of their traditional police powers to regulate for the health, safety, and moral well-being of their citizenry, states approached education in widely varying ways, based on their particular political culture, history, level of resources, and stage of economic development. This devotion to states' rights and localism was sustained by both practical reasoning and a set of ideological commitments that, when coupled with the fact of pluralism and the existence of the Tenth Amendment, made national intervention in the area of education policy extremely problematic. Indeed, despite the national government's enlarged role in this domain today, these factors and others continue to frustrate those who would like to treat educational reform as a national question or issue.

Early Presidents

American statesmen in the early republic understood that a functional democratic regime required a certain degree of virtue and self-control on the part of the citizenry. As intellectual children of the Enlightenment, presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison believed that virtue and self-control were the by-products of reason and learning. Education for them and other leading figures of the day was the key to good republican citizenship. Such education, however, was primarily seen as moral or character education designed to produce certain habits, dispositions, and virtues in the citizenry. Though Jefferson advocated for a constitutional amendment to establish a federal role for education and even went so far as to push for the creation of coeducational elementary schools in his home state of Virginia, there was in the end little real achievement in this area.

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