Implementing a 50 Year Old Education "Reform" Plan

The current Education "reform" agenda is nothing new, common core, high stakes testing, data collection has been all part of the agenda for 50 years.

A brief history of the Education Commission of the States

The idea of an interstate compact on education was put forth in the mid-1960s by James Bryant Conant, an educator, scientist and diplomat who had served as the president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953.

Writing at a time when the GI Bill, the National Defense Education Act, Great Society legislation and other initiatives had greatly enlarged the federal role in education, Conant, in his 1964 book Shaping Education Policy, called for a kind of counterbalance — a mechanism for improving and strengthening education policy and policymaking at the state level. Such a mechanism, he said, would:

• Give voice to the diverse interests, needs, and traditions of states.
• Enable them to cooperate and communicate with one another.
• Promote their working together to focus national attention on the pressing education issues of the day.

Conant explained that, "there is no study in depth of the experience of the different states in this matter. There is no way in which a state now considering the subject can obtain reliable and complete information from other states that have had many years of experience. We ought to have a mechanism by which each state knows exactly what the other states have done in each education area, and the arguments pro and con. We ought to have a way by which the states could rapidly exchange information and plans in all education matters from kindergarten to the university graduate schools."

In early 1965, John W. Gardner, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, teamed up with Terry Sanford, who had recently left the governorship of North Carolina, to transform Conant's idea into reality. Over the next two years, under Sanford's leadership, the Compact for Education was drafted, endorsed by representatives of all 50 states and approved by Congress.

The operating arm of the compact – christened the Education Commission of the States (ECS) — opened its headquarters in Denver in 1967, with former Cincinnati school superintendent Wendell H. Pierce serving as its first executive director. Sanford hailed ECS as “the most exciting educational experiment on the American scene — a working partnership for the good of the nation.”

ECS played a pivotal role in the transition to a standards-based education system, and in enlarging policymakers' recognition and understanding of emerging issues, trends and challenges: the needs of at-risk children, minority teacher quality and recruitment, system restructuring, service-learning, school choice, post secondary access and brain research.

http://www.ecs.org/html/aboutECS/ECShistory.htm