The Original Inhabitants of Crazy Town
It’s with some amusement that I read the overheated debate about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. For one thing, there is a vast difference between those who want to eliminate the federal role in education, and those who want to return ED to its former home in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But since neither of those things is going to happen, I guess it doesn’t matter if they are lumped together.
On the other hand, there are those who think getting rid of ED would “destroy public education as we know it,” and that those abolitionists are “strange bedfellows in Crazy Town.” This attitude only demonstrates the hopelessness of the task. If talk of eliminating or downgrading a Cabinet department is beyond the pale, maybe the Postmaster General should be returned to his spot.
Since the argument is academic, I thought I would engage in some academics. I dug up Public Law 96-88, the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979. This is the federal statute that created the U.S. Department of Education, and it makes for some fascinating reading. I particularly like this section on federal-state relationships:
(a) It is the intention of the Congress in the establishment of the Department to protect the rights of State and local governments and public and private educational institutions in the areas of educational policies and administration of programs and to strengthen and improve the control of such governments and institutions over their own educational programs and policies. The establishment of the Department of Education shall not increase the authority of the Federal Government over education or diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the States and the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States.
(b) No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.
If you are a masochist, you can even delve into the 1,866-page legislative history of the department’s establishment, beginning with a speech by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) on February 21, 1977, in which he explained why a separate Department of Education was necessary:
Education is not given the priority attention it needs. We cannot help but become more aware that problems with our education system are worsening. In March of 1976, the Office of Education released a study showing a 10-year decline in reading skills among American students. In November 1975, the college entrance examination board reported that 1975 scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test showed the biggest drop in 20 years. College educators are more and more concerned about the low reading and writing ability of high school graduates. In one of our major universities, nearly half of the freshman class was required to take remedial courses in English. Surely we must make education a long-overdue national priority.
The U.S. Department of Education was needed, Sen. Ribicoff said, because “If there is one point on which most Americans will agree, it is that the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is too large and too bureaucratic to effectively or efficiently manage the numerous programs under its jurisdiction.”
That’s fine, except the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare was created in 1953 in order to correct the shortcomings of its predecessor – the Office of Education under the Federal Security Agency. President Eisenhower said:
Although the effecting of the reorganizations provided for in the reorganization plan will not in itself result in immediate savings, the improvement achieved in administration will in the future allow the performance of necessary services at greater savings than present operations would permit. An itemization of these savings in advance of actual experience is not practicable.
This also was fine, except the Office of Education was placed under the Federal Security Agency because of problems related to its previous association with the Department of the Interior. In establishing the Federal Security Agency in 1939, President Roosevelt said:
Because of the relationship of the educational opportunities of the country to the security of its individual citizens, the Office of Education with all of its functions, including, of course, its administration of Federal-State programs of vocational education, is transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Federal Security Agency. This transfer does not increase or extend the activities of the Federal Government in respect to education, but does move the existing activities into a grouping where the work may be carried on more efficiently and expeditiously, and where coordination and the elimination of overlapping may be better accomplished. The Office of Education has no relationship to the other functions of the Department of the Interior.
Well, there had been a reason to assign the Office of Education to the Department of the Interior. You see, when it was first established, in 1867, its sole purpose was to collect and disseminate education statistics. Oddly enough, there were a few people who questioned whether that limited mission might be expanded at a later date. They included Rep. Andrew Jackson Rogers (D-NJ), who on June 5, 1866, had this to say (page 2969):
Sir, it is hardly necessary for me to stand here and show what are the constitutional objections to this bill. No man can find anywhere in the letter or spirit of the Constitution one word that will authorize the Congress of the United States to establish an Educational Bureau. If Congress has the right to establish an Educational Bureau here in this city for the purpose of collecting statistics and controlling the schools of the country, then, by the same parity of reason, a fortiori, Congress has the right to establish a bureau to supervise the education of all the children that are to be found in the thirty millions of the population of this country. You will not stop at simply establishing a bureau for the purpose of paying officers to collect and diffuse statistics in reference to education.
Rogers, it should be noted, had been a teacher.
November 23rd, 2010 at 19:04
It is one thing to say that local control is a priority. This is preserved in the organizing statute of DoEd which prevents DoEd from exerting any control over curriculum or any management over school districts, principals or superintendents. It is quite another thing to fail to acknowledge that there is a steep cost to local control. It is difficult to see how the USA will ever be competitive internationally in education with thousands of local education standards. Even many conservatives concede that a national board of education would be required in order for the USA to become number one. There is certainly nothing wrong with being number 20 or number 30 if other priorities are preferred by the populace.
A national education standard would not be unprecedented. For 150 years the McGuffey Reader was the de facto national curriculum. Coincidence or not, this was the same period when the USA rose to the top of world educational dominance.
http://www.mcguffeyreaders.com/history.htm
DoEd is not only largely powerless (aside from “the bully pulpit”) but also is actually a pro-conservative force in that, as GOP Congressmen have acknowledged during appropriations hearings, its primary role is to redistribute federal tax dollars from the higher-income (blue) states to the lower-income (red) states. Whether using earmarks or Census-driven formula grantmaking, this is how the money flows — not that this is any different from other agencies’ blue-to-red grantmaking redistribution pattern. You would think, however, that Dems would eventually be smart enough to figure this out and trim back all federal programs! Apparently, for them, hope springs eternal that funding “equity” will be implemented “some day.” The federal highway program is perhaps the only federal program that builds in a requirement that states receive back almost 100 percent of pro rata federal (gasoline) tax revenues.