TC Today - Teachers College Columbia University

Inside the Beltway
A unique, five-day experience immerses TC students in the world of education policy
by Patricia Lamiell
Will the No Child Left Behind Act get renewed?
Is the country moving toward national education
standards?
And what about that funding cliff that’s looming in 2012?
Each of those questions reflects one of the emerging political
dramas of our era: the mounting tension between the federal
and state government over control of education policy.
It’s a battle most of us have watched play out in the media
or at our local schools—but this past January, 27 students in
TC’s annual Federal Policy Institute got the chance to observe
it at ringside in Washington, D.C.
On one side of the fight are those who believe the federal
government has a “moral calling to take on the country’s lowest
performing schools, which are really doing a disservice to
their country,” Judy Wurtzel, Deputy Assistant Secretary in
the Office of Planning Evaluation and Policy Development at
the U.S. Department of Education, told the students. On the
other are those who argue that control over education policy
should remain where it has been throughout most of the
nation’s history: with state and local governments.
The Federal Education Policy Institute is an intensive
five-day boot camp developed and run annually during winter
break by Sharon Lynn Kagan, Marx Professor of Early
Childhood and Family Policy, and Co-Director of TC’s
National Center for Children and Families. An internationally
recognized expert on early childhood education who has
advised the White House, states and governments around the
world, Kagan provides her students—an eclectic mix representing
nearly every department in the College—with a series
of lectures, panel discussions and briefings by an A-list of
Washington players. There are also visits with Congressional
staffers and the U.S. Department of Education.
The Washington visit is part of the popular Federal
Policy Institute, a three-credit course first offered in late
’90s and then dramatically re-tooled by Kagan in 2001. The
Washington part of the course is organized and co-taught
by TC alumnus Michael D. Usdan, Senior Fellow at The
Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington.
Like civil rights in the ’60s and Wall Street takeovers in
the ’80s, education policy has been a big issue since Congress
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Illustration by Dan Krovatin