An Implementation Study on the U.S.Department of Education Policy.

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This study explores the mandate issues in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act(ESEA,1965) Title I and its amendments, and the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA,1981) Chapter 1 and its 1988 amendement. Congress amended the original ESEA on four occasions-1968, 1970, 1974, and 1978. Each amendment resulted in new mandates that specified more clearly the congressional commitment to helping disadvantaged children from low-income families. In 1988, Congress reauthorized ECIA Chapter 1 with the mandate to the nation's schools to close the gap between low- and high-achieving students, stressing accountability for performance, program improvement, and flexibility to produce results. The program has moved from a focus on financial accountability and regulatory compliance to accountability based on results.On the basis of this analysis, we can find two quite opposite possibilities. One is centralized control. The board's discretion is squeezed from the top by increasing numbers of regulations from the federal and state governments. Another posibility is that citizen will make progress in local control of education by calling federal and state governments to account for equal educational opportunity. Meaningful local control is available only to those school districts with sufficient resources. Greater state and federal grants will be essential in meeting urban children's educational needs.The major point I clarified in the study is that the U.S.Department of Education has been reorganized as the policy making body for managing the national educational goals such as President Clinton's "Goals 2000."