A Brief History of the Education Commission of the States

The Compact for Education

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 noted, for example, the difficult choices and challenges states were encountering as they grappled with the issue of how to expand public education facilities for grades 13 and 14. Should states follow the California pattern, with multiple two-year community colleges closely linked with four-year multipurpose state colleges and a state university? Or should they follow the lead of Indiana by establishing two-year branches of the state university throughout the state?

“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,” Conant wrote. “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.”

The new organization, he said, would be dynamic and nimble, highly attuned to the diverse and changing needs of its constituents, and capable of playing a variety of roles: convener, partner, guide, catalyst for action and interaction, a rich and reliable source of information and assistance – and, above all, a mechanism for enabling states “to do together what they could not do near so well alone.”

ECS' First Decade and a Half

It is generally agreed that the watershed event in ECS' history was the loss, in 1983, of a large federal grant – worth roughly $10 million a year in today's dollars – that had sustained the organization almost since its inception.

In 1969, proponents hit upon a novel solution: putting the testing program in the hands of an entity that states would trust to protect their interests and prerogatives – the newly created operating arm of the Compact for Education.

ECS – which was at that point barely up and running, a shoestring operation funded entirely by membership fees – accepted the invitation to sponsor and manage the program. The NAEP grant transformed ECS into a powerhouse, enlarging its visibility, capacity, versatility and ability to raise revenue and attract talented staff.

Within several years, ECS had established the clearinghouse envisioned by Conant to gather, analyze and serve as a repository of information on a wide range of education topics, and was churning out research, policy briefs, legislative updates and comparative data. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, ECS was the leading source of information, guidance and technical assistance to states on issues such as school finance, school law, assessment, collective bargaining and special education.

The federal government's decision, in early 1983, to shift management of the NAEP program to the Educational Testing Service was an enormous blow for ECS, shrinking its annual budget from $6.5 million to $3.5 million, forcing the layoff or early retirement of more than half of its 117 employees, and virtually shutting down the Information Clearinghouse.

Then-executive director Robert Andringa promised a thorough reassessment of ECS' role, structure and priorities. ECS would survive the crisis, he said, and emerge a stronger, more narrowly focused and more entrepreneurial organization.

But ECS' Executive Committee had decided it was time for a change in leadership, and the following year, Andringa resigned at the request of ECS' new chairman, Virginia Governor Charles Robb.

The Frank Newman Era: 1985 to 1999

Andringa's successor, University of Rhode Island President Frank Newman, was a nationally known higher education leader, reform advocate and policy expert.

Newman set out to reinvigorate and reposition ECS by establishing a more coherent and consistent organizational agenda, forging partnerships, and working more productively with ECS' diverse constituencies within and across states. He rebuilt and expanded the Information Clearinghouse, created a policy seminar for state leaders, and recruited a series of outstanding governors to chair ECS, including Bill Clinton, Thomas Kean, Roy Romer, Evan Bayh, Booth Gardner and Garrey Carruthers.

During Newman's 14 years as president, 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, postsecondary access and brain research.

Under Newman's leadership, ECS enjoyed sustained success in collecting membership fees from states and in attracting foundation grants, corporate support and contracts. In 1994, ECS was awarded a five-year, $15 million grant from philanthropist Walter J. Annenberg to spread the news of model programs developed by another Annenberg grantee, the New American Schools Development Corporation.

In 1997, two years before Newman's retirement, the ECS Executive Committee commissioned a review of ECS' finances and performance. The auditors found the organization to be financially sound and producing high-quality work that was valued by state policymakers. But the organization's success in raising revenue from grants, as well as problems tracking work on those projects, raised some concerns for the auditors.

ECS might be losing sight of its overall mission, the auditors suggested, by trying to do too much and by undertaking too many grant-financed projects. They asked ECS to consider "whether some grant-funded projects were really serving the needs of state education policymakers."

The auditors also urged ECS to find ways to increase the participation of its 371 commissioners, fewer than a third of whom regularly attended ECS' annual meeting. They suggested assigning more ECS staff members to work with states, and holding more in-state meetings. ECS should also step up efforts to make the Clearinghouse's extensive collection of material available online, they said.

ECS Post-2000

Ted Sanders, who assumed the ECS presidency in February 2000, was another well-known, well-connected education leader with an impressive resume – from classroom teaching to serving as superintendent of elementary and secondary education in three states, deputy U.S. secretary of education and, most recently, president of Southern Illinois University.

Sanders' mandate, like Newman's 16 years earlier, was to refocus and revitalize ECS – and, like Newman, he made substantial progress on a number of fronts. But Sanders had to contend with circumstances, trends and pressures that in many ways enlarged and deepened the organization's problems.

Sanders said his goal was to position ECS as an organization widely seen as “doing the right work, on the right issues – and getting steadily better at it.”

The first step was to commit ECS to developing greater depth and range in six pivotal policy areas – accountability, citizenship, finance, governance, leadership and teaching quality – and on cross-cutting issues such as P-16 restructuring, early childhood education and technology. These evolving “centers of expertise,” Sanders said, would help ECS focus its fundraising efforts, deploy its staff and other resources more efficiently, and bolster its ability to assist states in the areas of greatest interest and concern to them.

Sanders established a Distinguished Senior Fellows Program to provide intellectual leadership and strategic direction in selected policy areas, and created the CEO Forum to deepen ECS' engagement with corporate leaders. He persuaded commissioners to lengthen the ECS chairman's term to two years, and change the name of the organization's annual gathering of political and education leaders to The National Forum on Education Policy.

Sanders also created a corporate-sponsorship program that allowed ECS to continue expanding its Web site and move the National Forum closer to the break-even point. He secured a federal grant to track implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act and develop a package of products and services to assist states in grappling with the challenges and complexities of the new law.

But Sanders' efforts to strengthen and diversify ECS' financial base were stymied by the prolonged economic downturn that coincided with the first three years of his presidency. S tates were operating on austerity budgets, making it difficult for ECS to collect dues to finance its basic operations. At the same time, the stock market swoon constricted the philanthropic budgets of foundations and corporations, and ECS found itself competing for increasingly scarce grant money with a widening array of nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups.

In the last two years of Sanders' presidency, declining revenue from grants and contracts – coupled with shortfalls in state-fee collections – reduced ECS' operating budget from $13 million to $9.5 million. The trend continued following Sanders' departure in December 2004. While state-fee collections went up slightly in 2005, revenue from grants and contracts fell to $2.6 million – compared with $5 million the previous year.

By mid-2006, ECS was awash in difficulties and facing another leadership transition. Sanders' successor, former community college president Piedad F. Robertson, announced plans to step down at the end of the year. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who assumed the ECS chairmanship in July, said the search for a new president would be preceded by top-to-bottom rethinking of ECS' mission, priorities, structure and funding.

ECS Chairmen 1965-present

ECS Executive Directors/Presidents 1965-present 

Wendell H. Pierce (executive director) 1967-1976

Warren Hill (executive director) 1976-80

Robert Andringa (executive director) 1980-84

Frank Newman (president) 1985-99

Ted Sanders (president) 2000-05

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