Abolishing the Department of Education is the Right Thing to Do
The Department of Education deserves to be on the chopping block. Our children’s education is too important to be left up to a federal centralized bureaucracy. Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education as a political payoff to the teachers’ unions for their 1976 endorsement. We should judge all governmental agencies by their results rather than their intentions. Like virtually every federal department, the Department of Education has only made things worse. Student educational outcomes have worsened since the creation of the Department of Education.
Federal agencies always cost more than initially predicted. The Department of Education’s 2011 budget is nearly six times greater than its original budget. It has increased from $13.1 billion (in 2007 dollars) in 1980 to $77.8 billion in 2011. The federal government throwing more money at education has done virtually nothing to improve educational outcomes. Student test scores in math, reading and science have remained flat or declined over the past four decades. The chart below from the Cato Institute shows how increased federal spending has not had a positive effect on educational achievement:
WHEN LOOKIN AT THESE GRAPHS BELOW KEEP IN MIND THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION WAS STARTED IN 1979. SEE IF YOU CAN SPOT THE TREND.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States had the best-educated young people in the world, or pretty close to it. But a disturbing new report from the Council on Foreign Relations says that the generations who've followed the boomers haven't been able to maintain that global edge - and that, as a result, America's ability to compete economically is suffering as well.
It's not that 25-to-34-year-olds are less educated than boomers: 88 percent of them earned high school diplomas, compared with 90 percent of boomers, and they actually managed a tiny edge - 42 percent to 41 percent - in post-secondary degrees. The real problem is that they're slipping in relation to their global counterparts.
The department of education was created in for President Carter to secure the votes of the teacher’s union. In 1979 the Department of Education was formed.
Look at a graph of spending per student from 1979 to current. It sky-rockets in both college and grade school. What did we get for that spending? More teachers? More successful schools? NO. Administrative costs went up, we got more paper pushers. We got teachers being forced to teach for a standardized test instead of a successful life and career. We went from the best education system in the world to the bottom of the industrialized world.
The price of college has gone up over 3,000 %, why? Well, it’s not a mystery. What happens when you give millions of college students 10’s of thousands of dollars in loans with no collateral, all the sudden the price of education isn’t as important. All the sudden they want to pay a little more to go to the college with a day spa. College’s can increase the cost with out the normal regulator of a consumer in a free market restricting them. The price sensitivity of the students is greatly diminished while the colleges grow to resemble vacation retreats. These costs are baked into the cost of tuition and subsidized by the government guaranteed loan. Compounded by a huge increase in administrative costs college becomes almost impossible to afford without government aide. When the government distorts the market very few gains and most lose out.
Not to mention that almost anything you want to learn is available for free on the internet. While there is obviously a place for onsite learning, most of the education could be accomplished for free on your computer. You have access to the entirety of human knowledge and an infinite choice of teachers and study partners. Its Ironic that now that education is essentially free, our politicians want to spend trillions of dollars putting students in buildings to get an education they can get for free online. This is the opposite of logical.
Studies show that vouchers have a neutral or positive impact on student outcomes later in life, like attending college or graduating high school.
A study of Milwaukee’s long-running voucher program found that participants were more likely to graduate high school and attend four-year colleges. A recent follow-up study confirmed these results, but found that vouchers had no statistically significant effect on students’ likelihood of actually completing college.
Some shorter term studies found decreases in test scores for student enrolled in voucher programs. These instance should be taken with a grain of salt as these are new programs and short term studies and only studied the students ability to score high on a mandated test. Much of the problem with public schools is the emphasis on standardized test scores to get more funding. A voucher system that does not emphasis standardized test but gets better results in success in life should be seen as a benefit not a cost.
A private school scholarship program in New York did not lead to improvements in college enrollment on average, but did seem to have a positive effect for black and Hispanic students specifically. In Florida, a 2017 study and 2019 follow-up found that its tax credit program, the largest private school choice initiative in the country, led to increases in college enrollment and degree completion. Specifically, 12 percent of students who went to a private high school using a tax credit earned a bachelor’s degree; that compares to 10 percent among demographically similar students in public schools.
There is a large body of evidence suggesting that public schools get slightly better in response to competition from school voucher programs, at least as measured by test scores.
This has been seen in studies of Florida, Louisiana, Milwaukee, Ohio, San Antonio, and even Canada. As one research overview put it, “Evidence on both small-scale and large-scale programs suggests that competition induced by vouchers leads public schools to improve.”
Fact: There’s a strong link between school vouchers and gains in student achievement, attainment and civic participation, especially in the long term. People who say, “There’s no conclusive evidence that vouchers improve the achievement of students,” are either behind on the latest research, or they’re just plain lying. The vast majority of rigorous research—we’re talking more than 60 studies—finds test scores, long-term attainment and civic participation improve for students who use school vouchers and for students who choose to stay in their public schools. That includes things like math and reading proficiency, graduating high school, going to and persisting in college, being less likely to commit crimes and being more likely to volunteer and vote.
In fact, the only meta-analysis ever conducted on the issue found students who won voucher lotteries and used their vouchers saw large positive gains on test scores that equate roughly to 49 more days of learning in math and 28 more days of learning in reading and English.
“But what about the studies I’ve heard show kids’ test scores go down when they use vouchers?” Here’s what you need to know: Most of those studies report changes in students’ test scores after only one year. Longer-term studies of those same programs show English, reading and math scores increase beyond their non-voucher-using peers the longer a student uses a voucher.
This data isn’t just theoretical. Researchers from reputable institutions across the globe have studied school vouchers in practice, and the outlook is good. And the studies proving it just keep coming.
Fact: Voucher-accepting private schools are regulated and held accountable. Though most people don’t know it, private schools adhere to a number of regulations and have done so for decades. Private schools that accept vouchers take on even more accountability measures than private schools that don’t. There’s actually a study that found that, on average, 38 percent of regulations private schools face were created after the enactment of a school voucher program. Those added regulations were primarily related to transparency and reporting.
Opponents of school choice will say private voucher schools aren’t accountable. The facts show they face much of the red tape that public schools do. The real question we should be asking: Is that a good thing? The same people advocating for more regulations in private schools are the same people advocating for fewer regulations in public schools—fighting against high-stakes testing and heavy-handed rules that educators must follow. There’s a cognitive dissonance going on in that argument. If the goal is more autonomy and professional respect for teachers’ expertise, then shouldn’t we all agree that the autonomy private schools have is good and, in fact, public school regulations should look more like private schools’?
At the end of the day, we all want schools—public or private—to educate kids well and in a fiscally responsible way. What’s a more effective form of accountability than the reality that any poorly served student could choose to leave and take their funds with them?
Fact: Vouchers reduce public education costs. Researchers have conducted 52 analyses on the fiscal effects of private school choice programs, including school vouchers; 51 found these programs save taxpayers money or are revenue-neutral. That means it generally costs less or the same amount of money to educate the same number of students in a public education system that embraces school choice programs.
Fact: Vouchers open the door to more educational opportunities for students. Families who can afford it often choose their neighborhood public schools by moving to a residence within their desired school’s assigned district. For many parents, that option is enough. For many others, it isn’t. School vouchers in their many forms give families the means to access the right educational setting for their children, whether that’s another public school, a charter school, a private school, home school or some other innovative solution.
Fact: People like vouchers. Year after year, the public is forced to take a stand for improving their public schools OR for expanding school choice programs like vouchers. It’s time we start allowing the public to say yes to BOTH. Most of the American public supports school choice, according to several different surveys conducted in recent years by Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center (AP-NORC), Education Next (EdNext), Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) and EdChoice. Public opposition to school choice is weak and continues to decrease, especially as more people learn about how school choice works.
How Government Ruined Your Kids' Textbooks
Common Core education standards have attracted criticism from across the political spectrum due to lack of choice and competition inherent in a top-down, federal mandate. Students succeed when parents and teachers have flexibility to tailor their education programs to individual children, celebrating rather than ignoring their differences.
But the lack of choice in America’s education system is not unique to one policy. It’s an institutional problem that requires broader reforms than the repeal of a single law. Across the board, choice is sacrificed for uniformity thanks to misguided government policy. One of the areas that receives too little attention is the textbook monopoly by publishing giant Pearson.
This is an important issue for parents concerned specifically with the content and curriculum of their children’s educations, since the textbooks schools purchase will largely determine what is taught. For those worried about the kinds of values children are being exposed to, confronting a lack of choice in textbooks should be a top priority.
Politico recently published an expose on Pearson, revealing the numerous ways that government conspires to limit competition in the textbook market. To begin with, state education departments frequently purchase their materials from Pearson without allowing competitors the opportunity to underbid them. Since public schools are funded by taxation, not happy customers, there is no incentive to purchase cheaper books or ones that would please the students more, so familiarity wins out.
This would be bad enough were it not also for the fact that the education standards necessary for states to receive federal funding. The Common Core standards were developed in alignment with the curricula used by Pearson. This means that school administrators wishing to comply with the standards have few options other than Pearson’s products to ensure that they will maintain their federal funding or waivers from the unpopular No Child Left Behind policy.
Pearson’s business practices have been marked by political corruption as well, with lobbyists from the company spending lavishly (and illegally) on school officials until the practice was reined in in 2013.
The unholy alliance between business and government is at the heart of a great many of our nation’s problems, not least the inflexibility of our education system. Federal funding mandates, Common Core standards at the state level, a lack of competitive bidding for materials, and few mechanisms for students to escape from failing schools all work together to damage educational outcomes and our children’s opportunities for the future.
We need to sever the ties between federal funding and state education policy, as well as promote more school choice at the local level. Only this will help break up the textbook monopoly and give parents more control over what their children are learning.
Don’t Confuse the Cost of College with the Cost of an Education
For years, those who face the costs of educating themselves or their children hear a nearly incessant drum beat of how expensive a college education is, and how much debt they'll likely be taking on. On the other hand, we're told repeatedly that a college education is absolutely essential because people with a college degree allegedly make a million dollars over a lifetime more than those who do not attend college.
Most everyone agrees that tuition and fees are certainly increasing in terms of the price tag. There is far less agreement, however, on why the price of a college education is going up so quickly.
Government Subsidies Enable Price Increases
The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.
In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.
The data can only show a correlation, but basic economic theory shows us the causation. The government subsidies to students have lowered the perceived cost of attending college. This, in turn, allows a larger number of students to pay the ever-increasing tuition bills. Put another way, the inelasticity of demand for a college education has increased significantly thanks to the fact that students can now just go get a low-interest unsecured student loan rather than have to save the money to use a high-interest private-sector loan.
Without these loans, students would be far more sensitive to increases in the cost of education, and colleges would have to find ways to cut costs in order to remain competitive in terms of pricing. With a nearly endless stream of government loans, however, colleges need never have to worry about cutting costs. Government subsidies will simply make up the difference, and price-sensitive students will go to college anyway. The downside comes later when students must then pay off large loans.
Increases in Cost Don't Go to Classroom Instruction
a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.
What a Free Market in Colleges Might Look Like
Student loan subsidies have so distorted the market for higher education that we can't even tell the difference anymore. In a world of more market-oriented colleges, we'd be seeing colleges that work strenuously to reduce costs while increasing the quality of faculty instruction. Instead, what we find is a race to produce ever more luxurious amenities or funnel more and more money to six-figure-salaried administrators and staff to run a high-end rec center for students.
Colleges would focus on providing easy-to-attend classes for part-time workers (many of whom are low-income) who must attend college at the lowest cost possible. Students would focus on fulfilling basic requirements at lower cost schools and community colleges while waiting to access more costly lab facilities and other resources in the junior and senior years. (Many low-income students already do these things, but in the absence of subsidized loans, the total numbers using these strategies would be far greater.)
Certainly, those with the means would still attend costly luxurious schools, but most would recognize that those students are paying for something other than education. Far larger numbers of students, though, would attend colleges that specialize in delivering an education in a timely and cost-effective manner with few frills. The number of students attending amenity-laden schools would fall considerably, and many small liberal arts colleges would go out of business. Urban and suburban campuses, while less "sexy," would benefit instead as students turned toward more economical easy-to-access colleges that are more focused on job skills and integrating students into the larger community that includes employers and industries that need employees.
As long as government student loans remain a dominant factor in the pricing of higher education, though, we'll continue to see more and more growth in the cost of higher education which will continue to be a boon for the colleges themselves, while placing a heavy burden on students who don't understand how little of what they pay actually goes to education.
HISTORY
EDUCATION WAS CENTRAL to the American story from the start. For the most part, the Founders were pro-education. “[N]othing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue,” said Benjamin Franklin.
But that didn’t mean the founders were pro-federal education. Churches and towns had been running schools since the earliest European settlers landed in North America. At a time in world history when public education was a rarity, some American settlements actually required it. Massachusetts’ Old Deluder Satan Act of 1642, for example, directed “every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to 50 households, shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general.”
Though American leaders wanted a nation of virtuous, informed citizens, almost nobody saw educating them as the federal government’s job. The Constitution didn’t authorize the federal government to make schools policy. It is not among the enumerated powers in Article I section 8, and the 10th Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution to the states and the people. For most of the nation’s history, Congress intervened in education only in specific, narrow ways justified by an explicit constitutional provision. The various acts to settle the West almost inevitably required land to be set aside for public schools; Congress had also authorized schools when it chartered the District of Columbia’s government in 1804. (While U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson also was the president of the D.C. school board). The federal government later funded and set up schools on American Indian reservations.
President Andrew Johnson signed the Department of Education Act in 1867 reluctantly, after he had been assured it was harmless. It was a meek agency. Congress authorized it to have just four employees – besides Commissioner Barnard, there werethree clerks – and limited its powers to “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the United States.” The DOE also was to publish useful information on the “organization and operation” of school systems and “promote the case of education throughout the country.”
UNTIL THE 1960S, Congress tended to stay within its old constitutional bounds on education issues, jumping them only when the nation imagined it was facing a crisis. The 1917 Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act was passed due to anxieties over widespread illiteracy, especially among the waves of immigrants who might otherwise be susceptible to the incipient anarchist and communist movements. After the next world war, “as a matter of national security,” Congress passed the 1946 School Lunch Act “to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children.” The national panic over the Soviet launch of Sputnik, putting the Russians ahead in the space race, inspired Congress to hustle the 1958 National Defense Education Act to the desk of an ambivalent President Dwight Eisenhower. It bolstered high school scientific and foreign-language curricula to build more brainpower to fight the Cold War.
But in the 1960s, the federal role in schooling expanded dramatically. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed to ameliorate poverty and the destructive effects of segregation. It was the largest education law to date, and its Title I spread federal dollars to nearly every school district in America with low-income students. The ESEA was omnibus legislation. It paid for projectors and technology for classrooms, training and new administrative systems for state education agencies. It even authorized the commissioner to build education-research centers, a power Barnard would have loved to have. Section 604 of the law, of course, forbade “federal control of education.”
Why Do We Have a Department of Education? Jimmy Carter's Debt to a Teachers Union.
Public education existed well before 1980, but an unpopular President Carter wanted the nation's largest union on his side before an election.
Upon signing the Department of Education Organization Act Statement in October 1979, Carter said:
Primary responsibility for education should rest with those States, localities, and private institutions that have made our Nation's educational system the best in the world, but the Federal Government has for too long failed to play its own supporting role in education as effectively as it could. Instead of assisting school officials at the local level, it has too often added to their burden. Instead of setting a strong administrative model, the Federal structure has contributed to bureaucratic buck passing. Instead of simulating needed debate of educational issues, the Federal Government has confused its role of junior partner in American education with that of silent partner.
Creating the DoED was Carter's fulfillment of a 1976 presidential campaign promise, when he earned the endorsement of the largest labor union in the United States—the National Education Association (NEA). As the Washington Post reported in 1980:
The NEA gave its first presidential endorsement ever in 1976, when Walter Mondale promised them, at an NEA annual meeting, that the Carter administration would form an education department. At the 1976 Democratic National Convention, more delegates — 180 — belonged to the NEA than any other group of any kind. They've endorsed Carter for 1980, and were a major force in getting delegates to the Iowa caucuses…
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