Research On American Federal Government’s Role Shifting In Education

Since the foundation of the United States of America, according to the Constitution, education has been allocated to the state governments and local governments, which can also explain that why state governments and local authorities are responsible for90percent of educational budgets. Thus, the federal government took the policy of not interfering education until World War Ⅱ, which made it the "outsider" of education.However, after World War Soviet Union launched Sputnik and made marvelous progress in space technology, which caused the Americans panic. Americans began to realize that they were behind the Soviet Union and many people blamed it on the bad quality of education. There were many scholars, policy makers and other relevant organization and associations looking for federal attention and fund in education field. The federal government was also aware that they had to improve education quality in order to enhance its comprehensive strength and to keep its leading position in the world. So, Congress issued the National Defense Education Act, and federal government began to make a large scale intervention in education.Thus, after World War Ⅱ the federal government was no longer an "outsider", but turned out to be the resource-provider and standard-setter. This paper discusses why the federal government started to intervene education and how the federal government’s role in education has changed. This paper is divided into four chapters.Chapter one is a historical review on federal government’s educational role at different periods, which provides the readers some background knowledge. It tells that the federal government did nothing a long time after the independence and it began to fund education after World War Ⅱ. Chapter two explains the reason that the federal government started to put much more efforts on education. In the paper, the author raises four points:national defense, enhancing democracy, education equity and improving national productivity, based on which the federal government’s educational role shifted from the "outsider" to the "resource-provider and standard-setter".Chapter three illustrates the ways by which the federal government made contributions to improving the quality of education and promoting education equity. The author summarizes four main means:building federal Department of Education that leads and co-ordinates educational business in a federal scale; launching educational programs at the federal level that always come with plenty of federal funding; improving education legislation in order to provide constitutional authorization for federal intervention; and increasing education funding and budget.Chapter four comes to the conclusion that federal government now plays a significant role in education enterprise and federal influence on education will be strengthened in the future. However, there will still be great challenges that may hold back federal government’s effort of coordinating education as a whole.