Do We Need the Dept. of Education?

Charles Murray, one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries asks the question: Do we Need the Department of Education?

It stands, he says on three legs: 1) Is the Department of Education constitutional? "Article I, section 8 enumerates the things over which Congress has the power to legislate. Not only does the list not include education, there is no plausible rationale for squeezing education in under the commerce clause." "I do not think," he says, "D.O.E. is constitutionally legitimate, let alone appropriate."

Secondly: Are there serious problems in education that can only be solved at the federal level? Maybe there once were... It may, says Murray, have been necessary to implement Brown v. Board of Education under the power of the federal government.

Finally, and most importantly: So what is the federal government's track record in education? Abysmal failure.

Think of the good things that have happened to education in the last 30 years - the growth of homeschooling and the invention and spread of charter schools. The D.O.E. had nothing to do with either development. Both happened because of the initiatives taken by parents who were disgusted with standard public education and took matters into their own hands. To watch the process by which charter schools are created, against the resistance of school boards and administrators, is to watch the best of American traditions in operation. Government has had nothing to do with it...

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

Imprimis is published monthly by Hillsdale College and is mailed at no cost to subscribers.

Well, the federal government's involvement in public education is one of the reasons that I homeschool, so I suppose they've helped with homeschooling more than we may imagine.

I read also from this that our test scores are like the ones in the 1960s. If we just stopped spending the money on the US Dept of Education would we be even, but a bit richer?

Yes, the gist of the study is that the D.O.E. (all things being equal) has set back education in the U.S. since its inception. Education is most effective when it is locally controlled and when parents are involved.

I think the issue is that what leads to student success includes involved and caring parents, and no government program can accomplish this, and when it pretends to, it even discourages it by pretending that the government can fill a role it is not meant to.

Let's agree that the existence of the D.O.E. is a sop to the NEA. No more. No less. It has nothing to do with the students. It has everything to do with a cash stream to the democrats.

But it is more. Over time, this country has gone from responsibility to entitlement, and parents are not exempt. Whenever anyone says that "the government needs to do more for education," implicit in this is that this is the government's responsibility in the first place.

Sure the DOE spends money unconstitutionally, and sure the NEA is a money laundering service for Democratic interests, but it is the cultural consequence of this and like institutions that worries me more than any of that.