Education Commission of the States
The Education Commission of the States (ECS) was created by an interstate compact in 1965 to strengthen the capacity of the states as a counterbalance to the rapidly expanding federal influence in education during President Johnson’s Great Society initiative. With start-up grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina cofounded the ECS and convened its first meeting in Chicago in 1966, when 36 states had formally ratified the compact and chose Denver as its headquarters. By 2004, 40 current and former governors served as the chair of the ECS. To ensure bipartisanship, the chair’s position alternates between Republicans and Democrats and the vice chair’s position is held by a state legislator.
Recognizing the states’ constitutional authority in education, the ECS serves as a strategic consortium of state policy stakeholders in education. It is neither a lobbying organization nor an entity that is narrowly defined in terms of a particular political or policy office (such as the U.S. Conference of the Mayors). It encompasses broad representation across a wide spectrum of educational interests at the state level. In 1995, for example, Republican Governor Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin) was elected to chair both the ECS and the National Governors’ Association, thereby strengthening the ties between the two organizations. In 2002, the ECS sided with the National Board for Professional Standards following the release of a critical study on the effectiveness of the national certification standards. In addition to the elected political representatives, the ECS addresses the needs of the K–12 community and the higher education, business, and civic sectors. The ECS’s clearinghouse and dissemination functions have provided technical assistance and facilitated interstate and intrastate exchanges of ideas on emerging reform issues.
This network of broad-based stakeholders has enabled the ECS to adapt to the changing policy environment over the last four decades. During the 1970s and the 1980s, when state governments faced numerous constitutional challenges on funding equity, the ECS conducted extensive studies on funding reform issues. With growing public demand for accountability and greater involvement by governors and mayors, the ECS is now actively embarking on research and development in governance reform, charter schools, service learning, and democracy and citizenship. Given the prominence of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the ECS has tracked progress made by every state in meeting the federal standards. In recent years, ECS’s task forces and reports challenge the educational establishment to reform the district and state bureaucracy, to rethink the functions and design of the school board, to create a system of chartering schools, and to reassess teacher certification standards. As education remains a top item on state and national agendas, the ECS will continue to evolve in its role as a partner in our “creative federalism.”
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Kenneth K. Wong
SEE ALSO: Education; Interstate Compacts