Why do we have a Federal Department of Education? Why do $63.7 billion of our tax dollars support 4,200 federal employees every year? Does the U.S. Department of Education build schools? Hire teachers? Establish curricula? Publish text books? No. The U.S. Department of Education does exactly one thing: it launders money.
By far most of those 4,200 employees spend their working days doling out our tax dollars to school districts that will dance to their tune. They package money taken from the states and—after paying for buildings and bureaucrats—they turn around and give some of that money back to the states. With strings attached, of course.
The role of educating children is not among the enumerated powers delegated by the constitution to the central government. And all powers not specifically granted to the feds "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." So the States and the people are responsible for teaching our children.
The States and the people did a pretty good job for the first 203 years of our Republic before Jimmy Carter foisted the Education Department upon us in 1979. Ronald Reagan, who once said a government bureaucracy was the closest thing on earth to eternal life, actually pledged to shut it down. Reagan replaced Carter and could have done us that favor, but his prophecy was more powerful than his pledge...and the E.D. lives today.
Does anybody here believe that public education in America is improving? Not the producers of Waiting For Superman (available on DVD this Tuesday): "Among 30 developed countries, we rank 25th in math and 21st in science. In almost every category, we've fallen behind...except one: kids from the USA rank number one in confidence." Talk about cognitive dissonance. Is it any wonder that the politically-correct trait of "self esteem" is the greatest achievement of a government-dominated education system?
The Department's mission creeps and crawls deeper into every crevice of our society. Its tentacles grip ever tighter around the throats of our States and school boards. Its protector parasites grow fatter and fatter, feeding off their host's largesse and the union dues of many millions of teachers. And yet our children's test scores and competitiveness continue a long, slow decline.
A modest proposal: eliminate this wasteful, harmful agency and reduce the deficit by $63.7 billion.
An excellent post, Wayne. Put $64 billion in, and how many come back out (in the form of books, teachers, classrooms, even great ideas)? Not very many.
ReplyDeleteRight Phi, it's not a good ROI (as if any government expenditure is an "investment"). But even if we got $61 billion "back" from Washington...
ReplyDelete1) What good does that $2.7 "overhead" do us?
2) Why send it in the first place if they're just gonna send it back?